Drupal 10 New Features and How to Prepare Your Migration

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system that allows you to create websites with a simple interface, but it has many powerful features for more advanced users. Drupal is being used by millions of people worldwide and many businesses and institutions like Harvard, Twitter, or Whole Foods. 

The first version of Drupal was released on January 15, 2001, more than twenty years ago.  Drupal 10 is expected to be released in December 2022. It will be a refined version of Drupal 9 and it will include many new features, including:

• Symfony 6 compatibility. Site owners and module developers will benefit from as much Symfony 6 compatibility as possible and Symfony 4 deprecations in Drupal 9 for Symfony 5 will be resolved.
• Supported solutions for rebuilding jQuery UI functionality by using either vanilla JavaScript or frameworks like React. jQuery UI components used by Drupal core will be removed.
• Best practices for deprecating modules. Users will be able to use a proper mechanism for naming, versioning, deprecating wrappers, etc. A 'lifecycle' - property can be used in info.yml files for themes and modules.
• Better decoupled developer and site builder experiences, especially for menu and URL handling.
• Introduction of CKEditor 5 with better authoring experience and more modern editing (replacing CKEditor 4).
• PHP 8.1 compatibility for Drupal 9 and Drupal 10. 
• Theme Starterkit tools for bespoke theme creation.    

How to prepare for Drupal 10

The following are steps that you should take before upgrading your existing sites to Drupal 10.

• Upgrade all modules on your current site to their latest versions. If you have not already done so, upgrade core to its latest release. You can do this by running drush up --all from within your Drupal root directory.
• Perform a full backup of your site. This includes database backups as well as files and folders outside of the Drupal installation directory.
• Update your site's configuration file. The easiest way to do this is to download the Configuration Upgrade Module module and run it against your site. To do this, go toUpdate your themes and modules to the most recent versions available. In particular, update any custom modules or themes you use to their latest releases.

Will the upgrade to Drupal 10 be easy?

New functionality for Drupal 10 is added to Drupal 9 releases, meaning module developers can start adopting new APIs right away. Old functionality is removed, but backward compatibility is kept. Once we are ready for Drupal 10, we remove deprecated code, breaking backward compatibility, but because developers had a chance to update their modules, the upgrade to Drupal 10 should be easy.

More exactly, Drupal 10 is identical with Drupal 9, except for its deprecation list. There shouldn't be any big or unexpected changes.

What are the Drupal 10 platform requirements so far?

PHP requirements:

• At least PHP 8.0.2 and PHP 8.1 is recommended. 

PHP 8.0 is being dropped after November 2023, but security patches for PHP 8 will continue to be provided by other organizations. Some of Drupal's Composer dependency packages might start dropping support for PHP 8 after November 2023.

Database server requirements:

• Check out the Database server requirements documentation. 

Web server requirements: 

They are the same as for Drupal 9. If you need additional support for preparing your migration to Drupal 10, our experienced team of Drupal experts can provide step-by-step assistance. Learn more about our Drupal services today! 

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