Drupal 10 Features: What to expect in Drupal 10?
As per a recent survey, 80% of enterprise content is unstructured. 1 It challenges the corporate world to deal with a massive repository of unstructured content and convert it into a meaningful resource.
As marketers, we understand the importance of having a system that promotes ease and efficiency in implementing marketing processes. You want to create content once and use it repeatedly in different ways to create contextual user experiences.
A robust, efficient, and scalable Enterprise Content Management System can be of great help here.2 But the ECM Market is flooded with CMS solutions, so it can be daunting and tricky sometimes for businesses to choose the right one based on the various features and potential CMS offers. Among so many options, several companies continue to prefer Drupal.
Why Drupal?
Drupal is the go-to web content management platform for enterprises worldwide. It has proven to be the best answer to support the speed, agility, security and flexibility that leading enterprises need to grow revenue, acquire more customers and extend their brand value. The main question is - why should global enterprises use Drupal CMS?3
The answer is simple - Drupal provides you with a variety of powerful, integrated tools to help you understand your visitors and what they want to accomplish and dig deeper into their interactions, engagements, and habits with your site.
Drupal Features
- Intuitive and user-friendly user interfaces
- Great content management tools
- Multi-language support
- Workflows and publishing control
- SEO support baked in
- Security and support
As per Built With, over 2.3% of all sites choose Drupal as the trusted CMS to run their website on.4 Drupal’s popularity rises among the top sites that generate high traffic and work with sensitive data.5
With a choice of multiple open-source content management systems, each with its strengths and benefits, top organizations, enterprises, and businesses often prefer Drupal. There is sound reasoning for that.
Drupal Versions - So Far
Drupal development cycles are speeding up. Since new features are being added to the many upcoming releases, there are opportunities to grow and extend your site next year. If you maintain a Drupal site, understanding the upcoming release cycles will give you the knowledge to plan the time and budget for keeping your site up to date and secure.
Drupal 9.x is the latest major version of Drupal which is first released in June 2020, The next major version Drupal 10 is scheduled to be released in 2022, December. With that said, let’s have a look at popular Drupal versions.Also check the Drupal 10 Features.
Drupal 6
Drupal 6 reached the end of life many years back and is no longer in use. There was an LTS programme offered by commercial vendors to those who want to support their Drupal 6 websites.
Drupal 6 was one of the milestone release for Drupal where many government organizations started adopting it. In 2009, the White House’s official website adopted Drupal 6 as its CMS, considered one of Drupal’s most outstanding achievements. (During the presidency of Donald Trump, they moved it to WordPress) Drupal 6 was released on 2008 February 13. Soon after, more government agencies migrated to Drupal.6
If you are still using Drupal 6 you should look for alternative options to keep your website stable and secure. Our Drupal Migration services is a good place to start if you wish to move from your Drupal 6 website.
Drupal 7
Drupal 7 was released on 2011 January 05 and is still supported with a few modifications and update releases each year. The latest in this series is Drupal 7.92 which is released on September, 2022. This version is supported until November of 2023, which is fast approaching. There is a well-defined process for migrating your site to Drupal 9 (and Drupal 10 once that’s released).7 But it’s not a small effort.
If you are using Drupal 7, we strongly recommend you to migrate it to Drupal 9 or Drupal 10. No major features are getting added to Drupal 7. If you have larger plans like decommisioning your current website and create something from scratch,. we recommend to wait till Drupal 10 get released and you can create your new website in Drupal 10. You can start working on the user experience, content architecture etc so that when Drupal 10 get released on 2022, December the development work can start immediatly.
Drupal 8
Drupal 8 release transformed Drupal from a content management system to a digital experience platform. It was a major breakthrough in the Drupal roadmap. New release cycle, backwards compatibility, views in core, layout builder and many more usability features got added to Drupal in this version. Currently Drupal 8 reached its end of life.
If you are using Drupal 8, we suggest you to migrate to Drupal 9 or Drupal 10. No security updates or feature additions will get added to Drupal 8. You can contact our migration assistance service if you want our help to migrate from Drupal 8.
Drupal 9
June 2020 marked the onset of the long-awaited version 9 of the Drupal CMS. Unlike previous major versions, Drupal 9 is not a reinvention of Drupal. Drupal 9 mainly was built on top of Drupal 8 using deprecations and optional updated dependency support. There are only two critical differences in Drupal 9:
- Updates of dependencies to versions that stay supported.
- Removal of obsolete/deprecated code.
Other than these two things, Drupal 9.0 is the same as Drupal 8.9, the last Drupal 8 minor release.
Even though Drupal 10 will be released in 2022, the Drupal 9 lifecycle will overlap, so you’ll have plenty of time to review the new updates and plan. The features added in the Drupal 9 lifecycle focus on making it even easier to migrate to Drupal 10, so you’re in a great position this year!
When will Drupal 10 be released?
The tenth version of the CMS is targeted for release at the end of 2022. The exact dates are unknown, but the timeline was agreed upon long ago. In 2020, Gábor Hojtsy, the Drupal 10 Readiness Strategic Initiative coordinator, announced in his virtual DrupalCon speech that we can expect D10 to be out in June 2022. But in the recently concluded DrupalCon Portland, Dries announced that, since the core maintainers are working on migrating from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5, working closely with CKSource, they are forced to postpone the release to December 2022.8 ,9
Gábor Hojtsy confirmed that D9 should have the shortest major release lifetime in recent history.
Drupal 10 will be the third major release since implementing a new development cycle for Drupal 8. However, it will also be the first major release where the development has started with that cycle fully in place. Whereas Drupal 9.0 was released four and a half years and nine minor releases after Drupal 8, Drupal 10 will be released two years after Drupal 9 and just four minor releases.
Many aspects that allowed us to release Drupal 9, such as the deprecation policy, were developed while we were still building up to it, but Drupal 10 has all this infrastructure in place, and with few minor releases in between, the total change between Drupal 9 and 10 will be smaller. However, there are pressing reasons to release a new major version sooner than later.
Drupal 10 Features: What's new in Drupal 10?
When Drupal 10 goes live, it will be like the latest version of Drupal 9. But it will come with the updated dependencies and removal of the deprecations. So let us go through some of the upcoming Drupal 10 features as per the Drupal 10 readiness initiative.
- Updated third-party components
- the update of CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5
- the update of Symfony 4 to Symfony 5 or 6
- the update of Composer 1 to Composer 2
- the update of PHP 7 to PHP 8
- the final replacement of jQuery UI with modern JavaScript components
- the drop of support for Internet Explorer 11
- Even easier website upgrades
- Project Browser
- Automatic Updates
- Decoupled Menus
- New Default Front-end Theme
- New Starter Kit Theme Tool
And many more!
Final Say
Drupal is not tied to a proprietary vendor’s roadmap; it’s advancing based on the work of thousands of developers around the world. Drupal organically evolves at the speed of the web, offers the cost savings and agility of the free and open-source model, and gives you the ability to integrate content across a range of channels and campaigns.
Learn what it will take to ensure your site remains secure and up to date. Contact us today so we can help you start planning for your changing needs in the months ahead.10
