Drupal 9 Vs Drupal 10: Things You Should Know

Being the backbone of millions of websites worldwide and a free open source content management system, Drupal is leading a digital transformation across industries from one hub to many, simple to complex, with a quick package loading and ease of content editing, multilingual capabilities and rigorous security.1

Drupal became a modern object-oriented enterprise-level content management framework that can help business organisations in their digital transformation initiatives with the release of Drupal 8 in 2015.2

Drupal 9, released on 2020 June 03, was mostly built in Drupal 8 using deprecations and optional updated dependency support. Drupal 9 is not a reinvention of Drupal, unlike previous new major versions.3 It is the easiest upgrade of this decade. 4

The release of Drupal 10, which was originally scheduled to release in June this year was further pushed back to December, and Dries announced the decision in DrupalCon Portland 2022.

Are you excited about Drupal 10? Let's take a look at how Drupal 10 differs from its previous version, i.e., Drupal 9.5

Update: Drupal 10.1 was released on June 2023. We have published a content with the top 3 features of Drupal 10.1 that makes it the digital experience platform of choice for any website owner.

Drupal 9 Vs Drupal 10: Comparison of the key features

1. Symfony 4  to Symfony 6.2

One of the biggest dependencies of Drupal 9 is Symfony 4, which has an end-of-life date of November 2023. It means that security bugs in Symfony 4 will not get fixed after November 2023. So, there is an urgent need for Drupal to adopt Symfony 5 (or later). Drupal 10 will update Symfony from version 4 to 6.2. 6

2. CKEditor4 to CKEditor5

Drupal 10 will have the upcoming CKEditor5, with its vastly improved authoring experience and an array of plug-ins. The delay has been caused because more work is needed to integrate it with the Drupal 10.

CKEditor5 makes Drupal content creation future-ready. It will look a lot more like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. One of the major improvements in CKEditor5 is a new contextual balloon. This allows editing content inline in the editor without having to enter a model dialogue that would interrupt the content creation flow of content creators.7

3. Classy base theme to Starterkit theme

The Starterkit theme can achieve a new way of theming for Drupal. It is a new custom theme creation process and base theme to replace Classy in Drupal 10. Currently, it’s in alpha but is actually on track to be stable for Drupal 10. 7

4. Updating Drupal core via Composer to Automatic updates

Updating Drupal core through the years has been a nightmare for beginners and site builders. With Drupal 9, it’s a lot easier to update Drupal core via composer. It’s going to be automatic with Drupal 10. 7

Automatic but safe update of the core and the contributed modules is the ultimate goal of this initiative. It is to make the upgrade process much easier. Automatic updates were one of the requested features from site builders by Driesnote on the last Drupal product survey. 

5. Advanced JS components replacing the jQuery interface

jQuery UI has been unmaintained since 2017 and listed as an Emeritus project though it was added to Drupal core in 2009. 

Emeritus projects are those that the maintainers feel have reached or are nearing end-of-life. jQuery UI will be deprecated in Drupal core and removed by Drupal 9. It is still used in several places in Drupal 9.

Work is in progress to replace the jQuery UI components we use in core with supported solutions. Since writing vanilla JavaScript is a lot cleaner than over a decade ago, there’s also work to reduce the dependencies on jQuery itself. 6

Bottom Line

With over 1 million websites around the world running on Drupal, Drupal is the platform that performs. 70 per cent of universities use Drupal. Media rely on Drupal for extensive delivery of content. Governments count on Drupal. Finance and commerce sites need Drupal for security. Tourism destinations bring their clear waters and mountains to life on screens using Drupal. The prospects of Drupal as a web CMS will go further with the new features added in Drupal 10. If you are marketing for the future, Drupal is the building block. 1