The Evolution of Drupal: Discover the Features D7 Users Are Missing Out On
At DrupalCon North America in June 2023, the Drupal Association announced that support for Drupal 7 has been extended for an additional 15 months from November 2023 to January 2025. However, if your website and digital experience platform is important to your company’s objectives to compete and win digitally, do not wait to migrate.
Drupal 7 will be 14 years old when it is finally retired in January 2025. Over the past 14 years, web trends have changed dramatically. Drupal 7 did receive some small enhancements over time, but no major core features were released in Drupal 7’s lifetime. This means that Drupal 7 has been a functional relic since Drupal 8’s release in November 2015! If your organization is using Drupal 7, you are missing out on many innovations that have been added into Drupal since that time. Here, we outline some of the features that modern Drupal has to offer.
Flexible and Modular Architecture Approach
Drupal is now highly flexible and can be customized to meet the specific needs of an enterprise. It offers a modular architecture approach that allows for the integration of external systems as well as adding new features specific to the business’s needs. Drupal can scale to handle high traffic volumes and large amounts of content, making it suitable for enterprise-level projects.
Effortless Integration
Most people see Drupal as simply a content management system (CMS), but in fact, it also offers powerful marketing capabilities. Drupal 10 integrates effortlessly with services to provide functionality like segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, marketing automation, and analytics. When functioning as a core component of your digital experience platform, Drupal can easily tailor marketing campaigns, deliver targeted content, and measure the metrics that matter to engage the audiences you are seeking.
Multichannel Capabilities
Drupal 10 enables marketing departments to deliver consistent and engaging digital experiences across multiple channels, not just web. Drupal’s multi-channel capabilities allow businesses to seamlessly deliver content to websites, mobile apps, social platforms, IoT devices, and more. This empowers them to reach audiences with the right message at the right moment. While all of this is possible with Drupal 7, it is cumbersome to implement and maintain.
Strong Search Engine Optimization
Drupal 10 has features that contribute to strong search engine optimization (SEO). It provides clean HTML 5, semantic markup, and URL structures that can positively impact search rankings. Drupal also offers essential SEO modules such as XML sitemap generation, meta tag management, and redirects, which elevates site visibility in search engines.
Efficiently Manage Complex Content Ecosystems
Drupal excels as a CMS, providing powerful tools for creating, organizing, and publishing content. It offers a user-friendly interface, advanced workflow management, version control, and multilingual capabilities. These features enable enterprises to efficiently manage complex content ecosystems across multiple channels and touchpoints.
With Drupal 10, web teams can create and deliver custom content quicker and easier than ever. Current versions of Drupal embrace new technologies and trends in the digital space. It evolves with the industry, regularly releasing updates and new versions that incorporate the latest innovations. This ensures that enterprises using Drupal can stay ahead and take advantage of emerging technologies and best practices.
Easy Security Updates
Rather than jumping through hoops to implement security updates in Drupal 7, developers can run a single command to implement security updates for your site. This reduces the effort to update the site to keep bad actors at bay.
The ease of updates with Drupal 10 even goes beyond security updates. When Drupal core and contributed modules are updated with new features or bug fixes, they are available to your site using the same command. Starting with Drupal 8 and continuing into Drupal 10, the system uses Composer to manage package and library dependencies. This takes the guesswork out of knowing what underlying code is needed to make your site operate. Learn more about how Composer makes your site more secure and your developers’ lives easier.
Upgrade to Drupal 10 Today
Organizations still using Drupal 7 are missing out on the flexibility, customization options, scalability, and marketing capabilities available in the newer versions. Drupal 10 allows for the management of consistent and engaging digital experiences across various channels, enhances search engine optimization, and enables web teams to deliver content more efficiently. Interested in learning more about the features and benefits of Drupal 10? Check out this article.
