Drupal 10: What's that all about then?

Years ago, when Drupal 8 was released not only did it usher Drupal into the modern age of PHP frameworks and CMSs but it changed how Drupal upgrades were managed and controlled.
Gone were the days of painful major upgrades with frequent compatibility breaks; instead we got lovely 6 monthly upgrades that added functionality followed by occasional major releases that removed old code and marked certain features as old ('deprecated' in technical jargon).

Several years later and we've seen not only the release of Drupal 9 in 2020 but Drupal 10 in the last few months.

If you have a site on Drupal 9, what's new in Drupal 10 and what does this mean for you?

What's new?

This one is kinda easy - there's not really much new stuff in Drupal 10.0, and that's the point! It's pretty close to Drupal 9.5 but upgrades some behind the scenes code and removes a whole bunch of old/deprecated code that was holding Drupal core back. If your site is running on Drupal 9 and doesn't use this deprecated code, then actually the upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 is very straightforward indeed.

We've got an article series covering some of the more technical aspects of taking a Drupal 9 site and upgrading it to Drupal 10, go give it a read if that's what you're after 🙂

Another change with Drupal 10 is Internet Explorer support has been formally dropped from Drupal core, which means that large amounts of code and effort to provide compatibility can be dropped too. This will enable lots of features in the future, but at the moment means relatively little. It'll allow the pace of frontend improvements to Drupal to really pick up, and we're really excited about that.

Security coverage for Drupal 9 ends in November 2023, so in my mind the biggest 'feature' that Drupal 10 has is that the wonderful Drupal security team will continue providing security support beyond that date. Go Drupal!

What do I do?

If you're website is running Drupal version 9.4 or less then the best thing you can do is get yourself running Drupal version 9.5 as soon as possible and get your site ready to make the switch to Drupal 10 before November 2023. Major Drupal upgrades are not the major projects to be feared that they once were. For simple sites upgrades can be completed in hours rather than weeks.

We've got an article series outlining the technical process of making that switch on a mediumly complex site, go have a read of that if you want to attempt an upgrade yourself.

If you're not technically minded and want a hand, then contact your friendly ComputerMinds development team who would be happy to talk through the options for your upgrade project.

Major Drupal upgrades don't need to be feared!