Drupal

With six days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

While a lot of Drupal extensions are now compatible with Drupal 9, it can happen that you encounter an incompatible extension. In case adopting the extension fits into your plans, that is the best way forward. However, there may be some delay until you can adopt the project and it may not fit into your plans to adopt in the first place. There are a few solutions to use drupal.org projects that are distributed as incompatible on your Drupal 9 sites.

With seven days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

Various people in the Upgrade Status issue queue are concerned about the module requiring Composer though. While Drupal 8 or 9 do not require Composer to work, getting any extension installed on your site that depends on third party components is a sizeable challenge without Composer. With Drupal 8 core dependent on various third party components, it was inevitable that a dependency manager will be needed to build Drupal sites. Upgrade Status itself does require various third party components to check for deprecated API uses and even to locate your Drupal site root. So you cannot avoid using Composer to even check for Drupal 9 compatibility.

With eight days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9. While more than 7 thousand modules are now Drupal 9 compatible, there are still various that are not yet compatible. However, most only need a one line change and a release or even if they need more, an automated fix is posted to their issue queue and is tested by the community.

With the Drupal 8 end of life in a little over two months and Drupal 10's release next year, this is the time of transitions again at Drupal. However, while Drupal 7 to 8 (or 9) was a big move, the transitions from 8 to 9 and 9 to 10 are much smaller and mostly automated.

Drupal 10 is planned to be released in June, August or December 2022 and the tools are getting ready to support that. The two key tools will be the same as the previous upgrade: Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.

Matt Glaman has been doing amazing work recently in the underlying components of both tools. Thanks to his work on updating phpstan-drupal for Drupal 10 support, Upgrade Status checks deprecated API uses on Drupal 9 too. Since my last update on that, I added reporting of deprecated modules and new system requirements as well.

I presented The Drupal 10 readiness initiative - here we go at DrupalCon Europe a month ago. While I published my slides with plenty speaker notes right away, the session videos just became public. While the live presentation was a month ago, most of the content is still up to date.

Do you own an existing drupal.org project that does not yet have a Drupal 9 compatible release? This week would be a good time to take that step and make a Drupal 9 compatible release! I am paying for two tickets to DrupalCon Europe for new Drupal 9 compatible releases. Read on for exact rules!

DrupalCons are a great way to learn and connect, but they are especially great to meet various people leading Drupal's future direction. DrupalCon Europe in a couple weeks is no exception.

There is of course the Driesnote to get an update on where Drupal's progress is and get inspired about where its going. There is a dedicated question and answer session with project lead Dries Buytaert where you can inquire about topics not covered in the keynote.

The initiative leads provide a glimpse into their respective areas in the Drupal Initiative leaders keynote. This is a great way to get to know the leaders and learn more about their plans and where you could help.

Various initiatives have dedicated sessions as well.

Drupal 8 and 9 core were already made compatible with Composer 2 back in May. Last week the Drupal package repository (packages.drupal.org) rolled out full support for Composer 2 as well. While Michael Anello did Drupal vs. Composer 2-alpha2 benchmarks in July and Malabya also did an even more detailed benchmark in July, various things have been improved in Composer 2 since July and the packages.drupal.org improvement should also show.

Last time I posted an update on Upgrade Status was four months ago. It is fair to say the Drupal contributed project landscape has changed quite a bit in the meantime and Upgrade Status should evolve too. Why? The primary role of Upgrade Status is to help get your site components updated for Drupal 9 compatibility. Most of your site components are contributed modules. In many cases, either your local copies or the remote available updates will already be compatible. 38% of Drupal 8 compatible modules are now Drupal 9 compatible (3535 out of 9258) and most others have a patch waiting to land to either improve or complete compatibility.

Drupal 9 was just released last month, and in less than two weeks we get together to celebrate it (again), learn, grow and plan together for the future at DrupalCon Global.

I presented my "State of Drupal 9" talk at various events for over a year now, and while the original direction of questions were about how the transition would work, lately it is more about what else can we expect from Drupal 9 and then Drupal 10. This is a testament and proof to the continuous upgrade path we introduced all the way back in 2017. Now that Drupal 9.0 is out, we can continue to fill the gaps and add new exciting capabilities to Drupal core.

DrupalCon Global will have various exciting events and opportunities to learn about and help shape the future of Drupal 9 and even Drupal 10. Tickets are $249 and get you access to all session content, summits and BoF discussions. As usual, contributions do not require a ticket and will happen all week as well, including a dedicated contribution day on Friday. Here is a sampling of all content elements discussing, planning on and even building the future of Drupal.