Last week I had the pleasure to present my open source State of Drupal 9 talk at Drupal India Conclave. It was great with very timely questions. While I keep the slides up to date, there is always some new development. Since the recording of this video, Drupal 7's community security support was extended with a year to November 2022. The session should be fully up to date otherwise as of today. Feel free to use the slides to present at your own meetup or in-company training. Thanks Drupal India Association for having me on the program!
When I announced the Drupal 9 module porting challenge two weeks ago, I did not fully understand what was gonna come. I offered to donate €900 to the Drupal Association #DrupalCares campaign for 100 projects newly ported to Drupal 9. Then more funders started to appear. Ron Northcutt offered another €900, Ofer Shaal put in another €450. QED42 offered to match Ron's €900. It certainly grew much bigger than I anticipated so it was time to step up the game.
So last week I announced and started organizing Drupal 9 porting day for April 28, 2020 to not let our funders keep their money. While my funds were almost gone in the first week, there was still the rest of the funds to get donated. The idea of the porting day sounded good because we raise funds for the Drupal Association, we get people together to do their first Drupal 9 releases, we help others' projects out, drive the tools to their boundaries, do Drupal 9 core quality assurance and grow the ready module pool before Drupal 9's launch all at the same time. Some people would learn how to get ready for Drupal 9 for the first time, so we would spread some know-how and confidence in the release as well. That is like a win-win-win-win-win-win.
The #DrupalCares program is all around the Drupalsphere. Project lead Dries Buytaert broke the news on March 25th, that the Drupal Association needs our financial help to overcome challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I almost immediately donated and if you have the financial means, I would suggest you do so as well. However this is a tough time for many, and even without COVID-19, unfortunately not everyone is financially privileged to have money to spare.
Upgrade Status is growing to be an almost (if not entirely) indispensable tool for Drupal 8 sites to asses and prepare for their upgrade to Drupal 9. With the latest additions of the Drupal core version and environment checklist as well as additional deprecation checking for Twig, deprecated libraries, deprecated theme functions, info.yml files and composer.json files, the results are much more complete. Unfortunately not all of those are possible in drupal-check due to Drupal not being bootstrapped there. With the addition of two drush commands though, this expanded set of results is available for the command line as well, including for CI system integration.
Drupal 9.0.0-beta2 was released this week and there are only 63 days to go for Drupal 9.0.0's release. Many product developers, distribution authors and so on are now looking at what is left to be Drupal 9 compatible and which of their dependencies are doing what where. So effectively tracking a list of drupal.org issues somewhere is on many people's minds. While you can follow issues on drupal.org that only works for your personal needs. Actually Surabhi Gokte asked me yesterday about tools for group issue tracking, and I decided to write up a quick blog post because the answers are likely useful for many people. Here are two public and two possibly private ways to track drupal.org issues. I've used each in some form throughout my years with the project and you may find some of them useful.
Public: use a drupal.org META issue
Drupal.org project developers, this is a good way to track your tasks belonging to a larger goal like Drupal 9 compatibility. Create a regular drupal.org issue for your project and use the issue link filter. [#123456] is the format to use to link to issues and get their title and even status colors represented on your issue. The only thing you need to keep an eye on is that issue summaries are cached, so as the status/title of listed issues are updated, that is not reflected on the summary. As you are likely to adjust the list as things get done and new things are discovered, the status and titles of the listed issues should get updated in the meantime. An example of this technique is [META] Requirements for tagging Drupal 9.0.0-beta1. This technique allows anyone with a drupal.org account to help maintain your list of issues.
Once you have a META issue like this for Drupal 9 compatibility, please link it from your Drupal 9 plan on your project page, see:
65 days to go until the Drupal 9 release on June 3, 2020.https://t.co/JmRQ2Cdaun project maintainers, now is a great time to indicate your Drupal 9 plans! Edit your project page and fill in the Drupal 9 plan field to help contributors help you the most effectively pic.twitter.com/QrBpZCDgiW
— The Drop is Always Moving (@DropIsMoving) March 30, 2020
Public: use Contrib Kanban
Contrib Kanban is a great service developed and ran by Matt Glaman of Centarro. You can register and create custom boards based on a list of issues, such as this kanban board for Umami's Spanish translation. Only you will be allowed to maintain your issue list but the results are shown very visually and dynamically in a kanban board style.
Public/Private: use any tool with the Drupal issue Chrome browser extension
Matthew Grasmick built the Drupal Issue Chrome browser extension which turns links to Drupal.org issues on any webpage to their colored and titled forms very much like in the META issue method. This will pull the data for issues live, but only people with the extension installed will see the titles and statuses. You can use this for private tracking or public tracking. We use it at Acquia to track some drupal.org issues through Jira tickets.
Public/Private: use a scripted spreadsheet
This method could work in any scriptable spreadsheet system. We used it extensively at Acquia with Google sheets and I believe it originates from Andrea Soper (ZenDoodles) and Jess (xjm) from several years ago. Set it up like this:
Assuming an empty spreadsheet, designate a column for issue numbers. You will use this column to enter the ID of issues you want to track. Let's assume this is column E for the rest of the example. Also let's assume you use the first row for header text for the columns.
Add this to F2: =IF(E2="","", regexreplace(importxml(hyperlink( concat("https://www.drupal.org/node/", E2)), "//*[@id='block-project-issue-issue-metadata']/div/div/div/div/div/text()"), "\n","")). This column will be your issue status.
Add this to G2: =if(E2="","", hyperlink( concat("http://www.drupal.org/node/",E2),concat("#",E2))). This will be your issue link.
Add this to H2: =if(E2="","", substitute(regexreplace(importxml(hyperlink( concat("https://www.drupal.org/node/", E2)), "//title/text()"),"\n",""), " | Drupal.org","")). This will be your issue title.
At least in Google sheets, you can hold-drag these values to fill in the rest of columns F-H with appropriate computed values. You can also apply conditional styling to status values, etc. A clear benefit of this approach is that you can assign tabular metadata to issues, like your private severity or priority information or assignments within your company as to who is planning to look into it without getting into a priority argument on the issue.
By the way it would definitely be more reliable to pull this data from the Drupal.org REST API. We used this method extensively for years at Acquia to track high priority issues leading up to Drupal core releases. However we are not currently using this method and I did not go to convert the logic from our old sheets, so improvements welcome.
These are methods I used that are still available and work fine. Do you have better ways to do issue list tracking? Let me know in the comments.
I heard a lot of good things about Midwest Drupal Camp (MidCamp) throughout the years. I also had the chance to follow Avi Schwab sharing best practices from it at various events. It is one of the real model events. I never had a chance to attend unfortunately.
In 2020, due to the ongoing pandemic, they did not have the opportunity to run the camp as usual. While that is sad, they decided to turn it around entirely and made MidCamp all digital and free to attend. This means you and I can attend finally and not just admire the event from afar! Let's do that! There is no registration or tickets required anymore, so sign up for details via email, or keep up on the site.
While there are lots of great sessions to participate in, I am really excited about the Drupal 9 content. Presentations will be streamed over Zoom with links being provided later in the week.
Following sessions on Thursday and Friday, there will be a virtual contribution day on Saturday from 3pm to 9pm UTC. I am really excited about these three contribution topics and would love to see you join in them! I will swap a workday out this week with Saturday to participate in this event and still have personal time for my family while they all stay at home due to the pandemic.
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Working on automation rules to fix deprecation issues in Drupal 8 projects. This is the practical application of Dan Montgomery's session. Dan and Ofer Shaal will be available and lead this topic. Rector saves a lot of manual work by automating code upgrades from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. The immediate goal is to create Rector rules for the 15 most popular deprecations. Those 15 rules will cover 50% of all Drupal deprecations so a lot less manual work would be needed!
Work on contributed project Drupal 9 compatibility. Applying the above tooling combined with manual work to make contributed projects compatible with Drupal 9. Mike Lutz will be leading this topic. I would also love to help anyone interested. I maintain the overview of contributed project readiness on dev.acquia.com (thanks for the source data to the Drupal Association), which can be used to find what to work on effectively.
Improve the proposed new Drupal 9 default frontend theme Olivero. Various members of the team will be available to work on outstanding issues for the proposed new Olivero frontend theme. Putra Bonaccorsi, Aubrey Sambor and Brian Perry indicated they would be there.
Contribution will be coordinated on Slack I believe, more information to come later this week. Sign up for details via email, or keep up on the site. See you (virtually) there!
Ten months ago I created the first version of "State of Drupal 9" and published it as an open source slideshow for anyone to review and present. It has been presented by myself and various other people since then. I kept it up to date and I got lots of feedback to improve it. Since we are closing in on the Drupal 9.0.0-beta1 release where milestone dates are better defined and the release itself is quite close, I decided to rework the whole slideshow with a more practical approach in mind focusing first on what happens to Drupal 7 and outlining the concrete practical upgrade paths for what people should do coming from Drupal 8.
I was slated to present this new version of it at DrupalCamp London, DevDays Ghent and DrupalCon Minneapolis (with Amber Himes Matz). Due to the ongoing pandemic I did not attend DrupalCamp London anymore and further events are being gradually cancelled or postponed. So I don't know if I or someone else will have a chance to present this in person anytime soon. (Which I think is for the better of our health). However, you can still review the content yourself and present it virtually on a remote Drupal meetup or conference or at your virtual company meeting. I did present the slides for DrupalCamp London remotely myself and the camp made the recording kindly available:
I added plenty of speaker notes. You can present/review it from https://slides.com/gaborhojtsy/state-of-drupal9 or fork it (even with a free slides.com registration) and replace the "About me" slide as well as the opening and closing thanks slide with your attribution. Please keep the rest of the attribution intact. Instructions are in the slides.
I'll keep this version updated from now on and archived the old version with a note pointing to this.
Drupal 8's biggest dependency is Symfony 3, which has an end-of-life date in November 2021. This means that after November 2021, security bugs in Symfony 3 will not get fixed. Therefore, we have to end-of-life Drupal 8 no later than November 2021. Or put differently, by November 2021, everyone should be on Drupal 9.
Working backwards from November 2021, we'd like to give site owners at least one year to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. While we could release Drupal 9 in December 2020, we decided it was better to try to release Drupal 9 on June 3, 2020. This gives site owners 18 months to upgrade. Plus, it also gives the Drupal core contributors an extra buffer in case we can't finish Drupal 9 in time for a summer release.
Here we are 14 months later and while most people took the June 3 release date and took it for granted, it is still not guaranteed! However you can help in various ways to make it much more likely!
Late last fall, we focused on defining what it means if we cannot make the June 3, 2020 release despite our best efforts and what is an early indicator that tells us we are going to miss it. First of all, that meant defining requirements for the first alpha release and requirements for the first beta (API complete) release. Also we needed to set some expectations as to when do we want to see the API-complete beta release to give enough time for the ecosystem to test it and find important problems in time. Based on how soon the beta requirements are met, there are three release scenarios and the best case ending in the June 3, 2020 release date for Drupal 9 has a beta deadline in 6 weeks! Yes, 42 days!
Alpha requirements simplified
The key requirements for the first alpha release are simple. We wanted to update the key dependencies: Symfony to version 4.4 and Twig to version 2, as well as remove frontend polyfills that were not needed and remove most of jQuery UI (which were already deprecated in Drupal 8). This gets our most important dependencies up to shape to what will be in Drupal 9. We also made it possible for contributed projects to depend on Drupal 8 and 9 at the same time, so they will not need to branch for Drupal 9 support.
There are two outstanding things for the Drupal 9 alpha:
Drupal core should use a major version agnostic update feed for projects which is already being provided by Drupal.org but the core code to consume it is still in the works. While this is actively being worked on, reviews are always helpful. This will make sure Drupal 9's Update Status gets only contributed projects that are actually Drupal 9 compatible, while contributed modules will not need to establish a Drupal 9 branch.
Beta requirements simplified
The beta requirements are a bit more complicated and longer of course because we are looking at being API complete here. Once again, for the June 3, 2020 release date, we need these done in 6 weeks! The issue lists must haves and should haves, however the should have issues should be considered must-have for the June 3, 2020 release date and would only be reconsidered later if that date cannot be met. Here is a simplified rundown of the beta requirements:
We want to keep dependencies up to date. There is no concrete pressing issue here at the moment that I know, but this really depends on how our dependencies evolve.
We want to make sure people can update to Drupal 9 from Drupal 8 by resolving critical upgrade path bugs. If you cannot update to a later version of Drupal 8 due to some critical bug, then you will be stuck on your version of Drupal 8. Not good. These include views, layout_discovery, taxonomy, menu_content, etc. related issues. All of them need help. If you are on an older version and can reproduce the problems, that is useful. If you have experience in these areas, your input would be useful.
It will only be possible to update to Drupal 9 from Drupal 8.8 or 8.9, so all older update paths and their tests should be removed. Older versions of Drupal 8 will themselves be unsupported already at the time of Drupal 9's release. This issue is getting close but needs reviews.
No new security or data integrity issues should be in Drupal 9. If there are any, they should be resolved. I don't know of any issues at the moment here.
The API should be complete. There are no critical API additions or changes that I know of at the moment in this general category.
We want to make sure people can migrate from Drupal 6/7 to Drupal 9. This needs the remaining multilingual migration paths to go stable. This is an area where we posted several call to actions, but still need your help. There are proposed migration paths for node translations and entity translations that respect revisions but they need at least code reviews to make sure they are good. Otherwise if you had content translations with revisions, the migration will not be correct. Without that, multilingual migrations will not go stable.
Database requirements should be finalised in terms of MySQL/MariaDB/Percona and PostgreSQL. Both issues need data as to which distributions and hosts support certain versions.
Drupal.org should support multi-core compatibility eg. on project pages, localize.drupal.org, etc. This work is currently deprioritised by the Drupal Association due to the focus on the packaging pipeline blocker that I listed first. Once this gets attention, it will likely uncover core issues to resolve as well.
While the above is a complete rundown of the current beta requirements, it may change later on, so refer to the beta requirements issue later on for up to date information.
What happens if all the above are not done by end of February (in six weeks)
If all goes well, with your help, we'll be done with all the above in six weeks. If that does not work out, we have a plan B and a plan C. Here is how those options unfold. If beta requirements are only done two months later by end of April, then Drupal 9's first beta will be released on the first week of May and Drupal 9 is to be released on August 5, 2020. If the beta requirements are only done by end of August (four more months later), than the first beta will be released than with a Drupal 9 release date of December 2, 2020. In this case a Drupal 8.10 may also be released if needed. These dates are spelled out well in the Drupal core release cycle overview. I created this visual to help understand the alternate timelines:
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While I think it is reassuring that we have plans for what happens if our initial date targets don't work out, unfortunately the end of life date at the end of next year for Drupal 8 is not movable because it is based off of Symfony 3's end of life. So the sooner we can make Drupal 9 happen (while meeting the upgrade and stability requirements) the better. What are you going to work on to help?
