Saturday, May 23, 2020
That's exactly how the Drupal community is feeling right now !! We all are super excited for the Drupal 9 release.
Mark 3rd JUNE 2020 on your calendar and do not forget to stay up to date.
Before we move ahead and talk about Drupal 9, let's go down the memory lane and take a look at the history of Drupal for the last 2 versions.
Drupal 7 was released on January 5, 2011 and had following improvements
Vastly improved administrative UI
Flexible content and custom fields
Better visual presentation and theming with Render API
Accessibility was greatly improved
Image support was included
Automated code testing
Improved database support
Better distribution support
Support for the Semantic Web through RDFa markup and many more...
Drupal 8 was released on 19 November 2015, 3 days after I joined Srijan for Internship :)
Modern PHP standards and practices, with integration of popular libraries such as Composer, Symfony2, Guzzle, and Twig
Significantly improved front-end performance out of the box
Enhanced caching and best-of-class integration with CDNs and reverse proxies
Full compatibility with PHP7, and the PostgreSQL and SQLite databases
Reliable configuration management for safe and straightforward deployment of changes between environments and much more...
There were so many things to learn about Drupal 8!!
What about Drupal 9 ?
The official Drupal 9 Release documentation says :
Drupal 9 will be a cleaned-up version of Drupal 8. It will be the same as the last Drupal 8 minor version with our own deprecated code removed and third-party dependencies updated.
Basically, Drupal 9 will be released alongside Drupal 8.9 and the only difference between the Drupal 9 release and the Drupal 8 LTS release will be Drupal 9's updated dependencies and the removed deprecated code.
And the reason for updating and releasing Drupal 9 in 2020 is -
Updates of dependencies to versions that stay supported.
Third party libraries such as symfony, twig, guzzle etc. are some of the major components of Drupal 8 and newer versions of these libraries are released from time to time. Eventually a third party library will be updated to a newer version and the previous version will land to "end-of-life" for support. Drupal must be updated to support the updated versions of these libraries. So, to sum up, the Drupal 9 release is all about :
Updates of dependencies to versions that stay supported.
Removing the deprecated Code.
Refer the presentation and slides by Gábor Hojtsy here : http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2020-mar-16/whole-new-version-open-source-state-drupal-9-slideshow-present-it-yourself for detailed explanation about the release cycle overview.
Also, you can install the beta version of Drupal 9.0 from here and walkthrough the Drupal 9 interface.
Following are the system requirements :
Drupal 9 requires PHP 7.3 or higher, and the version requirement for Apache has been increased to Apache 2.4.7 or higher. The following database versions are supported by Drupal 9 core:
MySQL or Percona 5.7.8.
MariaDB 10.3.7 (Note that this is a more recent release than the MySQL version.)
PostgreSQL 10 with the pg_trgm extension.
SQLite 3.26
Your site is still on Drupal 7?? no worries!!
Drupal 7 community support is provided until November 2021
Yes !! If your site is still running on Drupal 7, the support timeline is extended to November 2021 and the vendor extended support is provided until at least 2024.
Also, if you want to upgrade to newer Drupal versions and if you are a developer, you can follow these steps to upgrade:
Upgrade Status: Use the Drupal 7 version to check to see if modules and themes used for your site have Drupal 8/9 versions.
Drupal Module Upgrader: Convert the custom code to Drupal 8/9.
Refer the step-by-step instructions on Migration Tutorial .
How Can I Contribute !?
You can contribute to Drupal 9 release by porting modules to Drupal 9 by simply removing the deprecated Code !!
The Drupal community is super enthusiastic about Drupal Contributions and is really helpful to make others learn about how to contribute. If you are new to Drupal and want to learn more about Drupal contribution, refer the official Drupal Documentation here : https://www.drupal.org/contribute/development
And, if you are a regular contributor refer these helpful links here, to get started and be part of Drupal 9 :
https://www.drupal.org/node/3032484
https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/drupal9
Pick up modules from : https://dev.acquia.com/drupal9/deprecation_status and start porting modules to Drupal 9.
Celebrate the release!!!
In the end, let's celebrate the release !!
Join the Drupal slack channel #d9launch for more details
References
https://www.drupal.org/docs/understanding-drupal/drupal-9-release-date-and-what-it-means
https://www.drupal.org/docs/understanding-drupal/drupal-9-resources
http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2020-mar-16/whole-new-version-open-source-state-drupal-9-slideshow-present-it-yourself
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