Are you ready for Drupal10?

Drupal.org is ready to release Drupal 10 version on December 14. Are you ready for the change? If not, then this is the post you must read.

Drupal 8 was the major and game changer release that comes up with the new architecture design at the core and various marketer focused features at the core. Upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8 was pain sticking but yet important as Drupal 8 was the base for all future Drupal releases. Drupal 9 had a shortest life span and Drupal 8 to 9 was the easiest major Drupal upgrade in a decade.

Drupal 10 will be a refined version of Drupal 9. What’s in it for you?

• Claro administration theme (replacing Seven).
• Olivero default theme (replacing Bartik).
• Introduction of CKEditor 5 with better authoring experience and more modern editing (replacing CKEditor 4).
• Better decoupled developer and site builder experiences, especially for menu and URL handling.
• Modern JavaScript components to replace some uses of jQuery UI and jQuery.
• Theme starterkit tools for bespoke theme creation.
• Symfony 5 or 6 under the hood (replacing Symfony 4) and PHP 8.1 required to keep the system secure.
• Streamlined core by moving Drupal core components to contributed projects so that it can be freely improved by the community such as Quickedit, Aggregator, HAL, RDF, Color, CKEditor 4, themes - Bartik, Seven, Classy, Stable.

The Drupal 10 upgrade may require a site migration or an upgrade for your existing Drupal setup. Below options will help you in choosing an approach based on your current Drupal version.

Drupal 6 or 7 requires a full site migration to Drupal 8 or 9 or 10. If your website is hosted on Acquia Cloud you can use Acquia Migrate Accelerate tool to migrate, which accelerate and simplifies your migration process. If you're not on Acquia Cloud, use the Upgrade Status Module to check which of your Drupal contributed modules have compatible releases and the Migrate module suite to migrate your content and configuration manually. If you are not launching the updated site immediately, upgrading to Drupal 10 would be better option.

Drupal 8 reached its EOL on November 2, 2021. You can follow these steps to upgrade from Drupal 8 to 10:

Step 1: Upgrade from Drupal 8 to 9. 

Step 2: Install the Upgrade Status Module to assess your site’s upgrade readiness. 

Step 3: Go to the Drupal Admin UI and enable the module once installed. 

Step 4: Scan modules for Drupal 9 readiness and update modules with deprecated code as needed. 

Step 5: Finally, update Drupal core to Drupal 9, and you’re done.

Drupal 9 requires users to follow a series of steps: 

Step 1: Install the Upgrade Status Module and enable it. Environment readiness check will notify everything you need to do before moving to Drupal 10 as well as give you a checklist right in the UI. 

Step 2: Follow the upgrade instructions and update your modules as needed. For your custom code, run Drupal Rector to automatically fix most incompatibilities. For identified issues that can’t be addressed automatically, follow the documentation to fix them manually.

Step 3: Finally, update Drupal Core to Drupal 10.