Drupal 10 is not too far!!!
There might be a lot of curiosity around this title and you may have tons of questions around.
What? Why? and When?…
Yes, even I am more than excited to share this information. Because, we have not even passed a month on Drupal 9 release, but we started hearing about Drupal 10.
Drupal is the most promising CMS system in the market. Every few months, we have been hearing exciting announcements about drupal platform improvements and its dependent product support. In that series, we have the announcement of Drupal 10. The reason behind we are hearing the next version of Drupal as sooner as Drupal 9 is released in the market. Drupal 9 is released with a sanitized version from Drupal 8 and added the value of the dependency engines upgraded versions like Symfony, Twig, and PHP.
I hope, we have discussed more on Drupal 9 and I don’t want to repeat the same :-). If someone missed the update on Drupal 9. Please read my Drupal 9 Post.
Drupal has a long path from 2001 to now. Nearly they have released around 9 versions including Drupal 9. The latest 2 major releases took around 5 years. But Drupal 10 is planned to release in June 2022. Just 2 years from now. If you take a development effort to release the next version of Drupal, It may come around 16 months of time span.
Whenever we discuss new releases from drupal, we should also know about the End of Life(EOL) of the current Drupal version (Yes, I am speaking about Drupal 9). Fact is drupal versions are announced depends on 3rd party components EOL. Yes, when we look back at the history of Drupal announcements, 3rd party engines are playing major roles. Even this time also it's going to be the same scenario to end the life of the current drupal version. 3rd party components are playing a major role in the drupal architecture.
What are that 3rd Party Components?
- PHP
- Symfony
- Composer
- CKEditor
- jQuery UI
- Guzzle (PHP Client on HTTP communications)
However, now we need to know when is the EOL for Drupal 9.
It is on “Quarter 4 of 2023” (Probably it will be around Oct / Nov / Dec)
This is very early stage of the Drupal 10 information, we could expect any information can change at any time. Even they have not finalized some of the technical stack implementation for Drupal 10. Let's consider this is just the initial piece of information, not the final release notes. May this information will help us to prepare ourself on technical and business solutions designing in current version of Drupal.
Let’s dive into the Drupal 10,
What is Drupal 10?
Personally, I believe Drupal 10 is going to a more customer engaging solution. There are a couple of reasons when it comes to the technical and business requirements on any project development. Keep the technical stack up-to-dated and Providing a more user-friendly interface to the users. In the 2 aspects, Drupal 10 going to fulfill both aspects at one shot.
If you look at the above image, you must be able to set the expectation on Drupal 10. Let's get into each one of them and will see reality on it.
Automated Update is going to be placed with the help of the composer 2. When you consider the automated update, it is not about updating the new version or patch to the system. It also has another darker side of it, What will happen if my system updates are failed?(At extreme, There will be a chance to crash your system). Drupal is considered even the fact and came up with the new update medium with the help of composer 2 with more improvements on memory.
Generally, Technical Stack expectation going to be on 2 different sections like upgrading the existing stuff and introducing the new stuff into the architecture. The below table helps you to identify the expectation of the technical stack for Drupal 10.
When you look at the Drupal 10 development time span, it is very short when you consider releasing the major version of the product development. At the same time, any new version we need to consider two aspects like improving the existing feature and introducing the new foundation/feature.
We can expect the improvements on the existing features on the current version, the below component is going to be a major contributor.
Media Library is been introduced in Drupal 8 latest version. Even though it is part of Drupal 8, but not enabled by default. In Drupal 10 planned to keep them enabled by default with few more extra features like Content moderation integration and CKEditor integration with the media library. Obviously, there will be an improvement in UX and accessibilities on media library contents.
Layout Builder is again part of the latest version of Drupal 8, but it is not enabled by default. In Drupal, you can expect that to be in default enabled with new UI experience including the improvements on accessibilities.
The New Admin theme (Claro) is still in beta. we could expect within another minor release on Drupal 9, there is a chance to become a stable version. But in Drupal 10, you can expect on the extensive toolbar, module administration page, and better media integrations.
To enable strong competition towards Drupal in the CMS world, Drupal has to be more up-to-date on the technology stack. when you compare the last 2 major releases of Drupal, it is really going good and improving a lot on the technical stack point of view. But personally I felt sometimes, we are not good enough to give good competency to the modern UI framework tech stack with Drupal UI tech stack. Even this also good to be addressed on Drupal 10.
If you look at my above picture, you will be able to guess what we can expect as UI layer improvement in the Drupal world in a couple of years. Yes, Drupal 10 is going to be a JS-based component layer for the front-end UI designs and implementations. Could there be a chance to integrate the existing UI frameworks like React? Let's wait and watch :-)
This marks the end of this post, So Drupal is started preparing themselves for Drupal 10. We should be more conscious about new solutioning design and development on drupal to make sure it will support future versions with this technical stack informations.
Stay tuned, I will be posting more information about Drupal 10 and detail technical stacks. Thanks lot for reading along with this post…
