Software update: Drupal 7.83

Drupal has released a so-called maintenace release of version 7 of Drupal. Drupal is a PHP-written, user-friendly and powerful content management platform, with which, for example, websites can be created. It’s simple enough for a novice user, but powerful enough to build a more complex website as well. Drupal includes a content management platform and a development framework. The release notes for this release can be found below.

release notes

Maintenance release of the Drupal 7 series. Includes bug fixes and small API/feature improvements only (no major, non-backwards-compatible new functionality). No security fixes are included in this release.

This release is the first where D7 core’s test suite passes tests in PHP 8.1† However, there may be remaining problems with PHP 8 in core, and it’s very likely that there are problems in contrib. Please test, and report any problems in the appropriate issue queue.

No changes have been made to the .htaccess, web.config or robots.txt files in this release, so upgrading custom versions of those files is not necessary.

There are multiple changes in default.settings.php

There is at least one change to the database schema, so database updates need to be run either via update.php or eg drush updb.

Major changes in Drupal 7.83:

• Drupal 7 now has a “changed” property on the user entity – database schema update required
• Drupal 7 now has a date-based default for the directory that file uploads are saved to
• Drupal 7 now has a skip_permissions_hardening setting
• The has_js cookie has been removed from Drupal 7
• Drupal 7 no longer strips leading www. from cookie domain by default because that leaks session cookies to subdomains – sites may want to set $cookie_domain in settings.php to opt out of this change
• Changes to password reset process in Drupal 7 to prevent email or username enumeration
• Link tags with duplicate rel=”external” href attributes and different rel=”external” hreflang attributes are now supported in Drupal 7