Drupal 9 was released in June of 2020, 5 years after the release of Drupal 8. However, you might have heard that Drupal 10 is tentatively coming in June 2022. This might sound confusing especially if you only recently upgraded your website to Drupal 9. The good news is that if you are currently on Drupal 9, the upgrade would most likely be painless and smooth.
Why 10 so soon?
The main reason is because of the dependencies of Drupal, Symfony is one of Drupal’s biggest dependencies and Drupal 9 requires Symfony 4. However, Symfony 4 reaches its EOL (end of life) by November 2023. Similarly, dependencies such as CKEditor 4 will also reach their end of life in 2023. Composer and PHP versions are also reasons why Drupal needs to release a new major version.
When these major dependencies have major upgrades, Drupal needs to update its major versions as well. Therefore, by releasing Drupal 10 in mid-2022, organizations have about a year or so to upgrade their websites or web applications.
What is Drupal 10?
Drupal 10 is built in Drupal 9, similarly to upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, the first version of Drupal 10 will most likely be the latest version of Drupal 9, but it will come with the updated dependencies and removal of deprecations.
According to Drupal.org, other than updating dependencies and removing deprecations, Drupal 10 will also focus on out-of-the-box user experiences, and make Drupal a more user-friendly CMS. It will simplify the maintenance and process for developers and allow for the creation and innovative and flexible digital experiences. It should improve all the advances in Drupal 9 and include improvements contributed by the worldwide community.
What does it mean for your website?
If you are currently on Drupal 9, it would mean that sometime before November of 2023, you should upgrade your website to Drupal 10. You can already use the Upgrade Status module that you might have used when upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 to get an estimate of the work needed, but from the currently available information, it does not seem it will be an overly difficult process.
If you are currently using Drupal 8, you really should upgrade your website to Drupal 9 and Drupal 8 is already at its end of life, which means there are no more security patches and updates available and that is definitely not good news. We’ve previously talked about how to upgrade from Drupal 8 to 9 and you might find some useful information here.
If you are currently on Drupal 7, you might have a bit more time because the end of life for Drupal 7 is in November of 2022. Since it is after the planned release of Drupal 10, technically you can wait until then and make the jump, however, there is no guarantee that the earliest release of Drupal 10 will be on time as things changes, according to drupal.org, there are set fallback dates in August and December of 2022. Even if things go as planned and Drupal 10 is released on time, if you have a large website with a bunch of custom features and functionality, even if Drupal 10 releases on time, you might have a very tight timeline to get everything migrated. Therefore it is highly recommended to not wait to migrate to Drupal 10 directly but start to upgrade to Drupal 9 first. The move to Drupal 10 from Drupal 9 will be way easier as well.
Technology is moving faster than ever, Drupal, one of the biggest opensource projects, also needs to move fast to accommodate the increasing demands of high quality, high performance, high-security websites and web applications. Drupal 10 is around the corner and you should be prepared, Whether you are on Drupal 7, 8 9 or even 6, reach out to us if you have any questions about moving to Drupal 10 and we will be more than happy to help.