During 2025 we will start migrating all Impact Stack installations into the next generation of the software, which does not use the Drupal CMS. In the meantime, we’ll be working to ensure that installations still using Drupal 7 remain secure.

The first generation of the Impact Stack software uses Drupal 7 as its content management system (CMS). As we have been gradually upgrading the platform, we’re working on different components. During 2025, we’ll migrate clients over to the new content management system, which is a customised version of Wagtail.

Drupal 7 End of Life

You may have read about the ‘end of life’ for the Drupal 7 CMS. This has been extended multiple times, and is now fixed for January 2025. This isn’t as alarming as it sounds - ‘end of life’ in this context means that the Drupal Foundation - the organisation behind drupal.org - will discontinue their support. However, almost half of the Drupal sites that are currently online are still on Drupal 7 (something over 280,000 websites, as at December 2024), and there are plans in place to provide extended support for those sites.

The Drupal Foundation has said that their plan is to not allow Drupal 7 modules that become unmaintained to be adopted by new maintainers. So the move to Drupal 7 being unmaintained will be slow. Many of the modules we use in Impact Stack are our own, for example.

Drupal 7 extended support

At the moment there is one open source initiative with several active core developers, as well as 3 different companies offering extended support for Drupal 7. They’ll be providing security updates and so on for all the Drupal sites that are still on Drupal 7. We’ll be using a mix of these sources to apply security updates to the current generation of Impact Stack.

Please be assured that we’ll be working to make sure that Impact Stack installations using Drupal 7 remain secure, and to support our clients to migrate to the new version of the software. Any questions, don’t hesitate to contact support@more-onion.com.