Drupal 9

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.

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.

I apparently released the Drupal configuration schema cheat sheet 7 years ago (wow!) to help people adopt the then new format to describe configuration structure. I keep getting questions and requests about it, so decided to make a major update to it now and bring it to the present day for Drupal 9.

I presented on the overall status of the Drupal 10 initiative in December at DrupalCon Europe. Then posted an update about the initiative one week ago on the Drupal Core blog.

More recently I worked on making Upgrade Status work meaningfully on Drupal 9 with Andrey Postnikov. Released Upgrade Status 8.x-3.5-alpha1 today to let you test this out. (You may need to use composer require --dev phpspec/prophecy-phpunit to make your phpunit setup complete).

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.

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!

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.

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!

I organized Drupal 9 Porting Day for April 28 as part of my #DrupalCares funding sub-campaign to help the Drupal Association bounce back from their financial losses due to the ongoing pandemic. It was a lot of fun with Lee Rowlands, Vladimir Roudakov, Adam Bergstein and Mike Lutz helping lead the contribution before and after my time of availability. 126 issues were worked on and 43 newly Drupal 9 compatible releases were made then.