Drupal 9 Release Date: New Features and Argentina Readiness

Official Release Date

Drupal 9 release will launch in a couple of weeks, more specifically June 3rd 2020;  and will be the first major release for the CMS with built-in backward compatibility. For all Drupal 8 users this means the upgrade should be hassle-free, and bringing you the benefits of more updated underlying libraries as well.

New Features

 

Drupal 9 Release

Code Obsolescence

As many media outlets like Bounteous and The Meisle have already discussed, the most prominent feature of this new release is code clean-up. Drupal 8 had a very characteristic ‘innovation model’, in which minor releases came out twice a year. As a result, it accelerated the number of new and improved ways to solve problems that are currently being implemented and code becomes obsolete (deprecated). The deprecated code which is not in use anymore, is needed for backward compatibility – however, a major thing about Drupal 9 is that it will let you remove this code and anything else that is no longer needed.  

Third-Party Dependencies

The other major upgrade has to do with third-party dependencies. Currently, given that Drupal integrates with common PHP code like Twig and Symfony, it necessarily has to go hand in hand with the respective vendor support lifecycles for these projects. With Drupal 9, it will have supported software versions that will be around for a long time like Twig 2 and Symfony 4/5.

How to prepare older Drupal versions for Drupal 9

Some tools help identify code obsolescence. The first is Drupal Check. This is a series of command lines that can be run on different modules and alert to instances of outdated code. Another quite useful tool is the contributed module “Drupal 9 Readiness” that ships with Drupal 8.8. This is a GUI-based tool that users and developers can run from the Drupal user interface to easily determine what will be needed to prepare their site for Drupal 9.  

Final Thoughts

Drupal.org developers have given us a heads up way ahead of the release date in order to prepare. Although we did mention that if you were on the latest version of Drupal 8 (Drupal 8.9) migrating should be fairly straight-forward; upgrading from previous versions like Drupal 7 will not be easy. Regardless, it will be necessary in order to get full functionality (of the very own CMS and third-party vendor solutions) and also retain the ability to have supported security updates every 6 months.   Get in touch with us for any questions or concerns regarding how to upgrade your current version of Drupal to the latest release!