Developer Briefing — September 16, 2024

Executive briefing: Drupal 7 leaves community security support on 5 January 2025 after its final extension. Organisations that still rely on Drupal 7 must now freeze feature work, complete upgrade assessments, or contract an Extended Support partner. Zeph Tech packages the runbook—covering module inventories, PHP compatibility, and stakeholder readiness—so teams land on Drupal 10 or managed alternatives before the window closes.

Key industry signals

Final deadline. The Drupal Security Team confirmed that Drupal 7 receives its last community patches on 5 January 2025, ending core and contributed module advisories.
Extended Support. Drupal’s official vendor program lists a limited set of partners who can provide paid security fixes after EoL; organisations must sign contracts before January to avoid coverage gaps.
Platform prerequisites. Drupal Association guidance highlights that supported migrations require PHP 8.1+, Composer-based workflows, and updated hosting stacks to meet Drupal 10 requirements.

Control alignment

SOC 2 CC8.1 / ISO/IEC 27001 Annex A.5.36. Demonstrate lifecycle plans that retire unsupported software and document compensating controls where timelines extend past January 2025.
NIST SP 800-218 (SSDF) PO.4 / RV.1. Maintain software bills of materials for Drupal installations and ensure vulnerability remediation processes cover contributed modules.
OWASP SAMM Operations & Deployment. Capture release, rollback, and monitoring plans for the upgraded CMS platform.

Detection and response priorities

Correlate Drupal core and module inventory data with the Drupal PSA-2024- security advisories feed and trigger emergency patch workflows for any vulnerabilities disclosed before January.
Instrument WAF signatures and anomaly detection for known Drupal 7 exploit chains (e.g., Drupalgeddon) during migration freezes.
Log administrative actions and configuration changes in SIEM pipelines so incident responders can validate malicious activity against change windows.

Enablement moves

Publish stakeholder updates quantifying upgrade scope—module counts, theme rewrites, integration impacts—and map them to migration sprints.
Run joint workshops with marketing, editorial, and security teams to align on content freezes, QA sign-off, and redirect testing.
Budget for post-migration pen tests and accessibility audits to certify the new platform meets compliance and usability commitments.

Sources

Zeph Tech coaches platform engineering teams through legacy CMS retirement so regulated sites maintain uptime, accessibility, and secure delivery pipelines.