Drupal development cycles are speeding up. A year has gone by after the Drupal 9 release, and an upgrade to Drupal 9 is still on the to-do list of many businesses. However, the next major release has already emerged as an exciting topic for discussion — the web is buzzing with talks about Drupal 10 readiness. Let’s take a look at the upcoming Drupal 10 to see when to expect it, what will happen to other versions, what new features will be included, and what is needed to prepare for Drupal 10.

When will Drupal 10 be released?

The tenth version of the CMS is targeted for release in the middle of 2022. The exact dates are yet unknown but the timeline has been agreed upon long ago. Back in 2020, Gábor Hojtsy, the Drupal 10 Readiness Strategic Initiative coordinator, announced in his DrupalCon speech that we can expect D10 to be out in June 2022.

If something does not go quite as planned, the fallback dates will be in August 2022 and the final fallback in December 2022. Gábor Hojtsy confirmed that D9 should have the shortest major release lifetime in all the recent history.

What will happen to Drupal 9, 8, and 7?

All previous versions will be end-of-life, which means stop of official support for them. They will no longer receive updates meant to provide the stability, security, performance, and new functionality for websites. That’s why you will need to plan your upgrade and we will discuss later in this post what you need to do to provide D10 readiness for your website. Let’s now see in more detail what’s the timeline for each version.

D9 is planned for end-of-life by the end of 2023. This is influenced by the end-of-life of a major dependency — Symfony 4 — that comes by the end of 2023 as well. In addition, PHP 7 will only be supported by the end of 2021 and jQuery UI is already unsupported.

D8 will only be supported by the end of 2021. Similarly, a major reason is end-of-life for Symfony 3 coming in November 2021.

D7 will be supported by the end of 2022. Yes, its support is longer than for D8, which is surprising to many people. This decision was made because too many websites are still on D7 and they need more time to upgrade.

D10 readiness and more: what to expect in Drupal 10?

Major releases are no longer the overhauls of the previous version’s codebase. Just like D9 is built on D8, D10 will be built on D9, will all dependencies updated and deprecated code removed. So we shouldn’t expect revolutionary changes like those that we saw in version 8 compared to version 7.

Still, great features are coming! To begin with, there are currently 5 major initiatives being worked on in the preparation for D10 — the Decoupled menus, the Easy out of the box, the Automated updates, the Drupal 10 readiness, and the New front-end theme initiatives. The Drupal creator and project lead Dries Buytaert said at his DrupalCon North America 2021’s keynote that each of the initiatives was chosen for a good reason. This choice was based on surveys, feedback, and things the team just know they have to do.

One of these 5 initiatives, the Drupal 10 readiness initiative, is meant to identify the required tasks for the release, with a big focus on updating dependencies and removing the deprecated APIs. The ambassadors of the Drupal 10 readiness initiative — Gábor Hojtsy, Lauri Escola, and Kristen Pol — gave a keynote speech at DrupalCon North America 2021 discussing the future release.

“Drupal 10 will be a refined version of Drupal 9 including all the goodies from all initiatives. It will include Olivero, Claro, all the work from the Automated Updates Initiative, Bug Smash, Easy Out-of-the-box, Decoupled Menus, and the Project Browser if we have one in time. So it will include all of the results of all the work that the community put in.”

Gábor Hojtsy

So here is a brief summary of the key features expected in Drupal 10:

Updated dependencies

All third-party dependencies will be updated so the core relies on the latest and greatest components for more stability, performance, and security of the system. Among them:

• CKEditor 5 to replace CKEditor 4 for better content editing experiences
• Modern JavaScript components to be used instead of jQuery UI
• Symfony 5 or Symfony 6 to come in place of Symfony 4
• PHP 8.0 to be required instead of PHP 7.3
• Internet Explorer 11 to stop being supported

Easy out of the box

Our favorite CMS should get easier and easier for everyone from the start due to improvements in the core Media, Media Library, Layout Builder, and the Claro administration theme, as well as finally having them enabled out-of-the-box.

Automated updates

Smooth and secure updates are becoming a reality in D10, with the update functionality added to the core and made available for Composer-based websites.

Decoupled menus

The Drupal’s creators want to make it a leading CMS for headless and decoupled technologies, provide it with great JavaScript development experiences, and enable JavaScript front ends to consume menus managed in Drupal.

New front-end theme

The work is underway to make the new front-end Olivero theme polished to perfection, stable, and available as the default one in the core replacing Bartik.

Improved site builder experiences

D10 is going to be friendlier to site builders thanks to the new Site Builder Tool/Project Browser initiative. A special tool is meant to help them install and update modules without the command line.

How to prepare your site for Drupal 10?

1) Drupal 9 and 8 websites

Backward compatibility between D10 and 9, as well as 9 and 8, is a pledge for easy upgrades. According to a DrupalCon speech about D9/10 upgrade tools delivered by Drupal gurus Matt Glaman and Ofer Shaal, there is numerous feedback about the upgrade processes being really smooth.

They also assume that an upgrade to D10 should be even easier than an upgrade to D9 due to D9’s shorter lifecycle with a smaller amount of minor versions, less time for deprecations, faster iterations, as well as some changes in semantic versioning and approaches to dealing with deprecated code.

The steps and tools needed for Drupal 10 readiness will be very similar to those used to prepare for Drupal 9. Note: If you are using D8, you will need to do an move to D9 first.

Basically, the Drupal 10 readiness to-do list comes down to keeping your code updated. Update the core, use the D10 compatible versions of the contributed modules, and fix your own custom code for cleanliness from deprecated elements.

You can start providing your website’s Drupal 10 readiness now and complete it later when the new release starts coming closer so there is more clarity with the list of deprecations and requirements. The helpful tools include the following:

• The Upgrade Status module has a user-friendly interface and helps you find the deprecations on your website that need to be fixed.
• For those who are confident working with the command line, there is the Drupal Check that lies at the base of the Upgrade Status module. It analyses your website’s static code for deprecations even if the website is not deployed.
• An even more advanced level would be required for using the PHPStan Drupal tool. This static code analysis tool is the core component of all other upgrade tools. It checks your code for deprecations and much more.
• When you are aware of the deprecations that need to be cleaned up, you can automate the process of their removal and replacement using the Drupal Rector command-line tool.
• Finally, there is the Upgrade Rector module based on the Drupal Rector that will run the tool for those who are more comfortable working with the user interface.

2) Drupal 7 websites

Many of you might be interested in how to provide D10 readiness for a website still running on the 7th version. According to the official Drupal 10 page, D10 will include migration tools from D7. However, there is no guarantee that all the contributed modules will be immediately ready. So it is highly recommended to start your move to D9 and then you will be able to quickly switch to D10 in 2022.

To sum up

Stay tuned to learn more about Drupal 10 readiness and the hottest Drupal development trends. The Golems team is passionate about this CMS! We will be happy to help you prepare your site for Drupal 10 both with useful blogs and directly our with expert work. Let’s talk!