As of September 2026

Official support for Drupal 10 ends on 9 December 2026. For organisations running a community based on Open Social, this is an important deadline, as Open Social is built on Drupal. Those who plan now still have time to carry out an orderly update. Those who wait risk their community running without security updates from December onwards.

What will happen on 9 December 2026?

From this date onwards, the Drupal Security Team will no longer release security updates for Drupal 10. Newly discovered security vulnerabilities will no longer be patched for this version, neither in the core of the system nor in the extensions.

Many installations will actually be affected even sooner. Older sub-versions of Drupal 10 are already no longer receiving security updates. If your community has not been updated for some time, it may already be unprotected.

What does this mean for your community?

A community is not just an ordinary website. It manages user accounts, personal profiles, private messages and often confidential content. A platform without security updates is therefore not just a technical risk:

• Data protection: The GDPR requires appropriate technical safeguards. Software without security updates is unlikely to meet this requirement.
• Compliance and audits: IT security audits and procurement departments regularly classify unsupported software as a deficiency.
• Trust: A security incident within a community directly affects your members and, consequently, your organisation’s reputation.
  Why waiting is risky

The vendor has not yet published an official timetable indicating when Open Social will support Drupal 11. Many site operators will therefore wait and see, and a large proportion of the updates will be due simultaneously shortly before or after the deadline.

Furthermore, the older the version of Open Social being used, the greater the effort required to bring it up to date. Communities still running on older versions face a more extensive migration process before switching to Drupal 11.

What you should do now

1. Carry out an assessment. Determine which version your community is running on and what customisations have been made.
2. Update to the latest version. Update your community to the latest Open Social version. This completes the bulk of the groundwork for Drupal 11.
3. Check for customisations. You can already check your own extensions and design customisations for future compatibility and prepare them accordingly.
4. Set a timetable and a Plan B. Decide when the update should take place and how you will manage the risk should the official release be delayed. This includes, for example, increased monitoring and clear coordination with your IT security team.

For your IT team: the technical details

• Drupal 10 will reach its end of life on 9 December 2026. Older subversions such as 10.4.x and 10.5.x are already no longer receiving security updates.
• The upgrade from Open Social 12 to 13 involves migrating the Group module to version 2.x. The existing group types will be converted to Flexible Groups.
• You can check your own modules and themes for Drupal 11 compatibility using the ‘Upgrade Status’ module.
• The migration should be run through in full on a test environment using a copy of the production data before it goes live.

How crowd-creation supports you

crowd-creation has been developing and operating community platforms based on Drupal and Open Social for many years, including for large enterprises with high security and availability requirements. We have already successfully carried out the migration from Open Social 12 to 13 in live communities.

Open source, hosting in Germany or the EU, and no vendor lock-in: your community remains under your control, digitally sovereign and independent of US services.

Our introductory service for you: the Open Social Check – from €750 net.
For a fixed price, we analyse your community and provide you with a clear report:

• current version status and security situation
• Steps required to upgrade to Drupal 11
• Assessment of your customisations
• Detailed roadmap with cost estimate

On request, we can subsequently handle the update as well as ongoing maintenance and hosting, either on Hetzner, Upsun Professional or Upsun Enterprise with triple redundancy, in Germany or the EU.

Ensure your community continues to run securely even after 9 December.