Official Sources and Dates for Magento 1 End of Life [Archive]

This article summarises sources related to the Magento Enterprise Edition 1.x End-of-Life dates. The Magento community is generally well aware that Magento 1.14 will reach end-of-life (EOL) on November 18, 2018. But the search results for “Magento 1 end of life” are all vague forum posts, tweets, and blog articles — none of them are official announcements. More importantly, none of the articles reference official sources, making it hard to convince merchants that they should update. This article is intended to fill that gap.

UPDATE September 17th, 2018: Magento finally announced that Magento 1 will be supported until June 2020: here’s a link to the official document explaining EOL’s for several Magento versions.

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Enterprise Edition Agreement

The most important official source is Magento’s Enterprise Edition Agreement (EEA).

(NOTE: the link above will be the right one in most cases, but merchants should check that the agreement version is appropriate.)

Under the “Support Services Terms and Conditions” heading, Section 1.1 reads:

Magento will support Releases and Minor Releases of the Software for two (2) years from the availability date of each applicable Release and Minor Release. In addition, in the event of a Version update (e.g. from Version 1.X to Version 2.x), Magento will support: the last two Releases of the prior Version of the Software (and all Minor Releases within the last Release) (e.g. 1.14 and 1.13), for three (3) years from the general availability announcement date of the new Version except that during the third year of support for 1.13, Magento will only support P1 problems, facilities for bug tracking and security patches for the Software.

This source will be the framework for the rest of this article.

Official Magento 2 General Availability Announcement

According to the EEA terms above, end-of-life for Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.13 and EE 1.14 will occur 3 years after the general availability (GA) announcement of the next major version. Magento 2 GA was announced on November 17, 2015, as indicated in this article on the official Magento blog.

Other Sources and Notes

Tweets

Paul Boisvert, the current Head of Product Management at Magento, tweeted the November 18, 2016 EOL date early this year. Ben Marks (evangelist at Magento) referenced that tweet in one of his answers, confirming it. Although both of them represent Magento in the community, the EEA is ultimately the main source for the end-of-life dates.

Zend Framework 1.x End of Life

Zend announced that end-of-life for Zend Framework 1 (ZF1) would be September 28, 2016. However, several enterprise frameworks that are built on ZF1 are still actively maintained. This may come as a surprise, but Magento 2 is one of them.

Therefore, Magento has decided to fork and maintain ZF1 for as long as necessary. You can find their fork on GitHub at magento/zf1.

This is not a problem for Magento users for several reasons:

• ZF1 is a very stable framework.
• Magento’s support is limited to to security issues.
• In areas where ZF1 falls short, Magento borrows from other frameworks and libraries, such as ZF2 and Symfony.
• Magento developers interact with the Magento Framework only; they should not use any of the ZF1 components directly. This keeps their code forward-compatible with decisions Magento may make about ZF1 in the near future.

Community Edition 1.x

Merchants running Community Edition (CE) 1.x should be extra careful because it’s not covered by the Enterprise Edition Agreement. I could find no official sources that guarantee security updates for Magento Community Edition up until November 2018, even though that’s the case for Enterprise Edition. Assuming that those security fixes will eventually “trickle down” from EE to CE might be tempting, but Magento doesn’t seem to guarantee that.

Conclusion

Any merchants interested in the security of their stores and the confidentiality of their clients’ sensitive information should upgrade and release their Magento 2 stores before November 18, 2018.

If you know merchants that may not be aware of this information, please share this article with them or point them to the sources.

Need help Migrating?

If you need help migrating to Magento 2, feel free to contact my company, Strategery. We’ve been working with Magento 2 since its first release and have experience both migrating stores to Magento 2 and building new ones from scratch.