If you were at DrupalCon Portland 2022 or watched the recording of DriesNote, you’re probably aware that the release date of Drupal 10 has been moved back by a few months. Drupal 10 is now expected to release in December 2022 (which was a plan-B scheduled release date anyway). We’ll touch on the reason the dates were pushed from June 2022 to December 2022 first. But read on for all the things to look forward to in Drupal 10.
If you’re still on Drupal 7 (or 6), the time is right to migrate to Drupal 9 now. Upgrades to Drupal 10 and all the following versions are going to be easy forever!
Why not June 2022 for Drupal 10
A flexible content editor is a fundamental part of any content management system. CKEditor has been a part of Drupal’s family of modules since Drupal 6 and has become a favorite editing tool amongst users. CKEditor 4.5 is the default WYSIWYG rich text editor for Drupal 8/9.
The big news here is that Drupal 10 will have the all-new features of CKEditor 5. It’s going to be more powerful, easily customizable, perfect UX and will come with a modular architecture. With CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10, we foresee a bigger adoption of Drupal as a blogging platform.
However, CKEditor 5 is a complete rewrite of CKEditor with no backwards compatibility or upgrade path. Almost like a Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 rebuild. The Drupal community has been working closely with the CKEditor team at CKSource on this and has spent thousands of hours creating an upgrade path from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5 for Drupal 10. But there still is a lot of work to be done to push it to the finish line and to make sure it is easy for site builders to upgrade from CKEditor 4 to 5.
With that and CKEditor 5 being an integral part of Drupal 10, the scheduled release date had to be pushed to December 2022.
What’s New with Drupal 10
Drupal 10 is going to be the more updated and polished version of Drupal 9. It comes with some updated additions of new features and removal of some deprecations.
Updated Third-Party Software
Drupal now works on different third-party components. It’s essential to work with the updated versions of these modern libraries and features. These components perform better and are more user-friendly. Drupal 10 websites will be able to leverage the innovations of these components.
Symfony 6.2
Drupal relies heavily on the Symfony framework. It is the foremost driver of Drupal since version 8. Drupal 9 uses Symfony version 4, which is reaching end of life and support by November 2022. So apparently, the Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 upgrade will be skipping a version of Symfony (Symfony 4 to 6). Symfony 6.2 will be released just in time for Drupal 10’s release and will have many modern features that developers are going to love.
CKEditor 5
As already discussed earlier in this post, Drupal 10 will ship with the awesome CKEditor 5, replacing CKEditor 4 for good. CKEditor 5 is supported in Drupal 9.3 as an experimental module but is not stable. CKEditors is not only great for site builders because of its user-friendliness and great UX, it is also a great framework for developers to customize and build upon. It will look a lot like MS Word or Google documents and will have a ton of integrations to make it richer and more efficient.
PHP 8.1
The Drupal project team has decided to increase the requirement of PHP to PHP 8.1 in Drupal 10. Symfony 6.2 will require PHP 8.1 version and hence the dependency. Since version Drupal 9.1, PHP 8.0 has been supported. PHP 7.4 will reach end of life by November 2022, so if you are using PHP 7.4, it is time to upgrade!
JQuery
There may be a final replacement of the jQuery UI with modern JavaScript components. Drupal 10 will now no longer support Internet Explorer 11.
Auto-Updating Features
How awesome would it be if your website could update itself?!
With Drupal 10, developers and site builders can automatically enable secure and easy updates. The automatic updates feature will be introduced to Drupal 10 core and is present for completely composer based sites. The Automatic Updates Initiative has done some significant work in areas such as UX enhancements, package deal signing for progressed security and trying out with various host providers.
Decoupled Menus
Drupal is now moving closer to being a headless CMS. The Decoupled Menus Initiative is a huge step in this direction. It can assist to build a number of ways for JavaScript front-ends to apply Drupal website menus. It is a contributed module presently but will be included in core later. Content creators and marketing teams also can replace the menu via the Drupal UI without a developer’s involvement. The changes will be reflected in the JavaScript front-end automatically.
Olivero - New Default Front-End Theme
A new and modern Olivero theme is taking accessibility to a whole new level. Olivero will replace Bartik as the default front-end theme for websites in Drupal 10. It is designed to be extremely user-friendly especially for people with vision disabilities. The content material is simple to navigate and the forms have been properly designed too. No issues are found while focusing, contrasting or scaling. Olivero is already stable in Drupal 9.3.
New Started Kit Theme
There might be a brand new starter kit theme in Drupal 10, providing a new way for theming in Drupal. Developers were using the Classy theme for sub-theming requirements. Front-end developers could have a starting point for themes. It is important to understand that the starter kit changes will not have an effect on the production themes now. It will be easier to maintain. The introduction of the new tool will remove support for Classy as it will be deprecated. It is currently in alpha and is on track to be released by Drupal 10.
Are you as excited as we are about Drupal 10? You can try out the Alpha release of Drupal 10 right away to play around with it just like we did. All of these new features we discussed will take Drupal’s usability and adoption to a whole new level. In Dries’ words, Drupal has made the web better and it is much bigger than just a CMS. It is used by 1 out of 30 websites in the world and without a doubt has a huge influence on the future of the web. As a Drupal development company, we contribute to the Drupal project so we can make an impact for a better web. If you’re looking to make an impact too, consider joining the Drupal community to contribute and make a difference.