At D7 EOL, Rename Drupal 7 to Drupal Classic

Starting the discussion here in an attempt to bring it into one place, instead of across various forms, threads, blogs & social media platforms.

With a huge majority of Drupal users still on Drupal 7 - and such a radical change to Drupal 8/9, there will undoubtedly be a huge number of users left on Drupal 7, never being able to upgrade to Drupal 8+ due to time/cost restraints.

A number of users have suggested renaming Drupal 7 to Drupal Classic, and maintaining it as its own product on Drupal.org rather than seeing it get forked like Backdrop, and watching the community split.

I maintain a huge Drupal Multisite, with 40+ custom modules, and the prospect of having to update all of that, as well as adopt new processes, replace deprecated functions across thousands of lines of code, and rebuild huge portions of or system from scratch honestly makes me feel sick. I am prepared to pay for LTS until 2024, and hopefully 2027 - but my hope is that rather than leave Drupal entirely, people who don't want to upgrade to Drupal 8 can stay in the community for Drupal Classic, and continue to contribute.

As of April 19th, there are still 682,586 websites using Drupal 7.

Some of the discussion can be found here...
https://groups.drupal.org/node/534727
https://www.drupal.org/project/d7lts/issues/2999153

Some great points made....

Also, by rebranding D7 as Drupal Classic, will remove the stigma of a number somehow determining value.

The community will come together and make this happen. Any attempts to thrwart this effort will result in forking. We're better off keeping our efforts as a community. Thousands of very large institutions are heavily invested in Drupal 7 and will want to keep it going for a very long time much like Cobol is still used in Banks, Drupal Classic will be in use for decades to come.

I would call it 'Drupal Classic' , Drupal Classic would be Drupal 7 without the constraints of the D8/D9 backport policies. Since D8/D9 is such a radical departure I think it no longer makes sense to constrain Drupal Classic to D8/D9 backporting policies.

I've been using D7 for years now (as well as D5 and D6 previously), and have many sites on the platform. Several on a multisite installation, that are all working just fine, as well as a very large and complex mission-critical site that has been on D7 for five years now, and again: working just fine.

Upgrading all of these sites to D8/9 would likely take me years of individual work (something > 12 months for sure), or cost > $100k to have others handle. I've always attempted to follow best practices, but still have many custom modules in use, and many of the contrib modules I rely on still haven't made it to D8.

D7 has been an absolutely fantastic platform and it makes no sense for it to be left to die

They are accustomed to very long software life cycles. Web technology and development has matured enough that I think Drupal Classic must live on for decades to come.

Dries should send out an email to all Drupal.org members asking to contribute 5$ to fund a "Drupal Classic" initiative. Divert the funds to the Drupal Association and some for hacker challenges. Optionally allow members to donate more money to this initiative.

Perhaps an option here is to allow the LTS Vendors to become the co-maintainers of Drupal Classic, and for the bigger users to conribute financially to make this happen. I know I certainly would.