Drupal 7 was officially released in 2011, making it quite old in web years, though it still powers hundreds of thousands of websites worldwide.

Drupal 8 was released in 2015, but the path to upgrading has never been an easy one for Drupal websites (prior to 8). So our recommendation for most Drupal 7 site owners has been to wait– wait until you have the time, budget and other resources needed to do a full redesign and migration to Drupal 8.

But Drupal 7 isn’t going to last forever.

It’s official end of life has already been decided–November, 2021. A full ten years after its original release, Drupal 7 will no longer be officially supported. What this means is no more security patches or bug fixes.

It won’t just stop working, but without official support, Drupal 7 sites will become vulnerable to crashes, hacks and other vulnerabilities. There are private companies who will continue to support Drupal 7 sites after 2021 in exchange for a support contract. But officially, it will be unsupported and after 10 years of service, most sites could benefit greatly from a more modern CMS.

But when is the best time to upgrade? What will it take? What are potential problems, or gains? And why should you continue using Drupal in the future? Let’s break down these questions one by one.

For many of us in the U.S., the GDPR is still a mystery. Although it had been in the works for a long while, it seemed to appear out of nowhere, cause a sudden rush of panic as the deadline to comply arrived, and then disappear without a trace.

At first blush, it seems like the kind of thing we could ignore. That’s Europe’s law, and not America’s. But a closer look suggested it would apply to any site doing business with Europeans, even if it was simply receiving site visitors from Europe. Here at Electric Citizen, that seemed to be a fairly small part of our client base, but something we took seriously nevertheless.

Electric Citizen is heading to DrupalCon Seattle next week! We're pleased to sponsor again this year, and send several members of the team to represent.

Look for us in the exhibit hall in booth #209, where we'll be sharing some cool EC swag, and looking to make new friends and connections in the Drupal community. This year we'll have some awesome knit hats, handmade in Minnesota, as well as some other goodies.

Keep an eye out for Citizen Dan, Citizen Tim, Citizen Aundrea (DrupalCon newbie!) and Citizen Adam, as we make our way through another DrupalCon.

The 2019 edition of MidCamp is over, but our team left Chicago with a lot of great advice, fresh perspectives, new connections and good vibes.

In what is now the 6th year of its existence, this annual spring conference heralds the coming of spring and the national DrupalCon in April.

We're in the deep of winter in Minneapolis, but thinking about spring and the upcoming conferences we'll be attending. Or at least later this winter.

Here's a short list of what we've got scheduled so far, and where we could meet up. Hope to see you out there!

Twin Cities Drupal Camp 2018 just happened and Electric Citizen were able to present no less than four sessions on subjects ranging from Drupal search, configuration management, local development environments and dealing with emerging tech.

DrupalCon Nashville is in the history books and it was a doozy. The whole team was able to attend a stellar week of learning, sharing our hard-earned knowledge, and networking–interspersed with plenty of fun social events.

Seasoned Drupalers know that DrupalCon is a lot more than a tech conference. It is the community event of the year; a place to meet old friends and new, a celebration, and a barometer of the health of the Drupal platform itself–something we are collectively invested in. Attendees converged from far and wide to be part of it, to contribute, to engage, to learn and share, and to support our chosen technology.

As attendees, sponsors and presenters, Electric Citizen was fully in the mix this year. Read more in this blog post, or on our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook channels.

If you have never been to a DrupalCon, make this year the one! This is a year of firsts for Electric Citizen.

• First year as a Supporting Partner of the Drupal Association
• First year as a sponsor and exhibitor at DrupalCon North America
• First year to be featuring 2 speakers at DrupalCon!

DrupalCon is the premier Drupal conference of the year in North America and the most widely attended Drupal event in the world. Six of our Citizens will be there, and we encourage you, colleagues, friends and client partners to join us. Look for us in our green EC workshirts!

Drupal 8 is the latest and greatest version of the popular content management system (CMS), powering everything from hobbyist websites of every stripe to Fashion, Finance, Sports and University sites like ralphlauren.com, mint.com, donor site for the University of Colorado and Sevilla Football Club

There are many reasons to upgrade to Drupal 8, both from earlier versions and sometimes from different content management systems altogether. The upgrade offers lots of benefits across the stakeholder universe. It’s quicker to set up for developers and site builders, vastly better for content editors for authoring, editing and management, and all improvements ultimately benefit site visitors who get a better user experience. 

Here is a short list of improvements and reasons why you might consider using Drupal 8 for your next web project, and you will discover many more as you delve deeper into this significant update:

Setting up a robust Drupal internal site search that searches all of the content that you add to a complex site can be a bit like finding your way through a maze. 

Drupal 8 core Search has been revamped and is much more powerful and accurate than in D7, but it still concentrates on text in nodes and not other entities those nodes might contain—like Paragraphs, Views, or custom blocks. Core Search also does not allow you to choose which fields you want to index, how important those fields are, or use any preprocessors to tailor your search. Search API gives you all this and more.

Search API is a Drupal contributed module that allows you create searches on any entity known to Drupal. You can use Views to create a custom search results page with specific filters. You can create different indexes tied to specific sections or content on your site. You can do just about anything to architect your search experience other than use the core Search block—which is really the only thing that makes core Search worth using. This post however, will show you how to take advantage of the power of Search API, and keep your site search box.