Drupal 10 At A Glance
The release of Drupal 10 is scheduled for 14th December and continues to keep an easy upgrade path at its core, supported by new features and updates to a wide array of dependencies as well as the removal of deprecated code. The open-source content management system will see a modernised backend coupled with improvements to the content editing experience.
Ensuring Readiness
Ensuring readiness is essential and a significant driver behind the development of Drupal 10.
The need for the upgrade is primarily driven by third-party dependencies reaching their end-of-life. In the case of Drupal 9, it was based upon Symfony 4 and CKEditor 4, and both dependencies reach end-of-life at the end of 2023. Introducing Drupal 10 this year is to allow people enough time to move over to the new upgrade sooner rather than later.
The upgrade to CKEditor 5 means better content authoring, as well as a more modern editing experience.
Drupal 10 will be based upon Symfony 6, and that has an effect on the PHP versions required for the future. From Drupal 10 onwards, PHP 8.1 will be a minimum requirement to ensure a responsible approach to future-proofing your website.
Here is a quick overview of all the system requirements for Drupal 10:
- No support for Internet Explorer
- MySQL 5.7.8 (same) / MariaDB 10.3.7 (same)
- SQLite 3.2.6 (same) +json1
- PostgreSQL 12 (up from 10) + pg_trgm
- PHP 8.1
- Composer 2
What Is New?
Out with the old and in with the new! Many core modules and core themes have been moved to contributed projects. As of Drupal 9.4, Claro administration theme remains the default admin theme, but Drupal 10 sees the removal of Bartik.
Similarly, the Olivero front-end theme is stable, and we see the removal of Seven from the core. The new theme has a modern feel and includes functionality that supports new features for modern browsers.
Here is a quick overview of the themes and modules moving to Contributed Projects and are still supported, but no longer part of Drupal core:
Modules
- Quickedit
- Aggregator
- HAL
- RDF
- Color
- CKEditor 4
Themes
- Bartik
- Seven
- Classy
- Stable
The Starterkit theme becomes a stable feature of Drupal 10, allowing for a more versatile approach to theming. Building custom themes is made even more user-friendly, which is great news for all Drupal developers.
We will also see an improved decoupled Drupal and site builder experience, particularly in terms of menu/URL handling. To continue to phase out Drupal’s reliance on jQuery, new JavaScript components will be added.
How To Prepare For The Upgrade
As we discussed earlier, the aim of Drupal 10 is to ensure readiness and there are various tools available to provide support during the upgrade process.
If you are already on Drupal 9, ensure that you use the Upgrade Status module on your current site. This will provide you with a clearer picture of the work that needs to be done to upgrade to Drupal 10.
Finally, why not celebrate with the whole open-source community on 14th December? The online launch party is open to everyone and free to join, the event will also feature a selection of speakers who will present different aspects of Drupal 10. Find out more at the Drupal 10 party website.
If you have any questions regarding the impact of Drupal 10 on your site or have other topics you would like to discuss, why not get in touch? We are always happy to hear from you.