Today I made a new 4.1.0 feature release of Upgrade Status available. Thanks to these 23 contributors: DrupalDope, Grimreaper, MacSim, PapaGrande, Shubham Rathore, abramm, akshay.singh, apaderno, arti_parmar, gorkagr, joelpittet, lamp5, leymannx, lostcarpark, marvil07, mrinalini9, nsavitsky, prudloff, randallquesadaa, rishabjasrotia, samir_shukla, thakurnishant_06 and wells.
The new release adds Drush 12 support, fixes PHP 8.2 and 8.3 compatibility and adds Drupal 11 environment readiness checking. Various additional bugs have been fixed related to CSS deprecation checking, info file handling and so on. This is also the first tagged release that relies on GitLab CI entirely for testing in three PHP and core version combinations.
After 16 years, I was back in Brussels for another FOSDEM last weekend. Back then, as the lead maintainer, I presented about the brand new Drupal 6 version. Now I revisited the pieces that made the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative super successful (dedicated post about that coming soon). That reminded me how much I used this website and other custom websites to support initiatives I worked on, and how I neglected to take care of the site in recent years. I wanted to move a bit forward, and kind of got carried away in the best way possible.
Last week was DrupalCon Portland, our first in-person big DrupalCon back together with 1300+ attendees. I was fortunately one of the attendees along with leaders of in-the works Drupal admin theme Claro and frontend theme Olivero. Both Claro and Olivero have been in the works for years, and both were quite close to get done, yet we did not even dream of getting both be the new defaults in Drupal within the week. But we did it!
This weekend (Friday to Sunday) is Drupal Global Contribution Weekend 2022! While there are some in person events such as in Ukraine, there are various online events that allow anyone to join. I'll highlight three opportunities to work on your Drupal 9 or Drupal 10 readiness.
As you may know, we are planning to release Drupal 10 in 2022 (as early as June), because Drupal 9's Symfony 4 and CKEditor 4 are both end of life the year after, around the end of 2023. So we plan go give enough time for people to update to Drupal 10 before Drupal 9 goes end of life. A similar situation happened with Drupal 8 to 9 driven by Symfony 3 to 4. However, moving Drupal 10 from Symfony 4 to 5 would again only give us a couple years of time to move on to Symfony 6 next, so the current plan is to move to Symfony 6 straight.
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.
How is this different from prior releases of Upgrade Status? It should run very similar on Drupal 8 as it did before. However prior releases of Upgrade Status explicitly forbid running it on Drupal 9 as the UI was very focused on the transition from 8 to 9. Now the UI elements are adapted and in some cases more general to support running either on Drupal 8 or 9.
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.
