Read the Agile Guide to Getting out of Drupal 7
As of the time of this writing, the scheduled end-of-life (EOL) for Drupal 7 is November of 2022. That’s a year and a half from now. Seems like a lot of time, right? This is precisely the problem. Few organizations have a sense of urgency to migrate now when they can migrate later. After all, they have one and a half years, right?
Here is the problem. Most organizations, when they realize how much it costs to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, figure they don’t have it in their budget this year to start a migration (for Drupal 8, the EOL date is November 2021 and Drupal 7 sites will need to skip 8 and go straight to 9). So, more than half of all organizations running D7 will wait before they even start this migration process. This will result in a rush, or perhaps stampede, to find Drupal shops and developers available for these projects.
As of the time of this writing, there are around 600,000 websites powered by Drupal 7 and all need to be migrated to Drupal 9 by November 2022. In fact, they need to be migrated well before November 2022 because you simply cannot wait until the last minute, especially if your website is mission critical.
But the problems are:
- There are only about 250,000 Drupal developers in the world
- Most of them are busy simply maintaining their existing sites
- There are only about 10,000 Drupal shops around the world
- There are only about 350 Acquia Certified Drupal 8 grand masters and 20 or so Drupal 9 grand masters
- There simply isn’t enough Drupal capacity to migrate all these sites
The longer organizations wait, the closer it gets to the end-of-life (EOL) termination, expiration, doomsday for Drupal 7, the more of a scramble there will be to find qualified Drupal developer teams with the experience and capacity to do the job.
In order to do this right, especially for mission critical websites with a significant amount of content, functionality, custom modules, and users; the Drupal migration team will need to consist of approximately 5 people:
- Project management professional (PMP) certified scrum master (CSM)
- Acquia certified front-end developer for Drupal 8
- Acquia certified back-end developer for Drupal 8
- Acquia certified front-end grand master for Drupal 8
- Quality assurance professional
If you want to take this opportunity to redesign the site, then you need at least one, if not two more people on the team:
- Interactive UX designer
- Business analyst and content manager
There is going to be a severe shortage of qualified teams available to migrate Drupal 7 websites to D8, WordPress, or some other alternative. Proactive organizations should plan and act now before time runs out.
