Shefali Shetty
09 Jun, 2020
The future of the web is here. Drupal 9 has arrived, and we are more than just thrilled! All that elbow greasing that went into building Drupal 8 has finally paid off. A much more modern, reliable, compact, and revolutionary open-source CMS has emerged.
Drupal 9 promises much more than continuous innovation. Incorporating the best of open source technologies, the latest version of the CMS opens doors to many more open source communities while offering a secure and sustainable ecosystem.
It goes without saying that none of this would be nearly possible without the incredible Drupal community. I have been fortunate enough to talk about Drupal 9 to some significant Drupal contributors and community members recently. Read on for some honest and passionate comments on what are they most excited about Drupal 9.
The thing I’m more excited is that it is an uneventful event. We all know how painful it has been migrating between previous releases. We’ve been talking for years about migrations Drupal 8 and wrote hundreds of pages. The least exciting the better in this case. And Drupal 9 on that aspect is not exciting at all. It just works changing a switch, a label… which makes it super exciting!!
As a developer, I am excited about Drupal 9’s removal of deprecated code. Removing old code allows us to move forward with improving and extending Drupal core. For the Webform module, I have been working toward tagging a new major release that removes deprecated code, fixes some significant bugs, and improves to some key APIs. Professionally, I am most excited about using Drupal to build a headless content authoring platform. Drupal 8’s API first and media initiatives were so successful, the Drupal community can now focus on improving Drupal’s content authoring experience.
The fact that Drupal 9 is the simplest and easiest major release in Drupal’s History is exciting. The community made some great decisions in developing Drupal 8 and that laid the foundation for extending and maintaining Drupal. It is because of those decisions and community support that Drupal can be modified iteratively and can include industry’s best practices into Drupal. Modifying Drupal core has never been easier. There are lots of new features which are in progress and might land soon in Drupal 9. One particular feature I’m very interested in is the Automatic Updates. With this in place, Drupal sites will receive automatic updates which greatly reduces the maintenance effort. This initiative is in the development phase and you can see lots of communication happening for this initiative. While there are many other reasons to be excited for the new Drupal 9 release, I think it’s time to thank the community who supported Drupal in difficult times and allowed a planned and timely release of Drupal 9. This shows how the Drupal community is not just engaged in consuming, but also nurturing it and growing it every day. That’s why it makes me proud to be a part of the Drupal Community.
I’m excited about Olivero (the new front-end theme), the upgrade transition and ease/experience.
I am excited about Drupal 9 because it’s basically Drupal 8 minus the deprecations and plus upgraded dependencies which removes the dichotomy between the two version. This will help developers to stay relevant as alike modules. If you know Drupal 8 then you will know Drupal 9.
I’m just excited about the newer Symfony version and semantic versioning. To be honest there’s not too much I’m really excited about. I’m more and more concerned about the fact that “fancy” features are accepted for core. On the other hand essential backend components, for example the Form API to just mention one, aren’t state of the art anymore. So while Drupal becomes more “complete” as out-of-the-box CMS it becomes less attractive as development framework.
Well, there is very minimal new feature wise, but all that deprecated code being gone and less excess ways to do things is nice. I guess beyond all the internal cleanup, I’m very eager on updating of all the Symfony dependencies – lets me update them for a bunch of personal projects too. Also, really keen on the new complete node migration for D7 projects to D9. That’s gonna make complex site migrations quite a bit cleaner and simpler.
I’d say that the most exciting thing about Drupal 9 is how we now have a far, far better way to handle the relentless pace of change in technology. For me, it is actually exciting that Drupal 9.0 brings “nothing new” over Drupal 8.9; it is simply an exercise in dropping old code that is no longer needed. It means that we can then bring great new features in 9.1, 9.2 and so on, whilst having a smaller, more modern, codebase we have to check against.
I remember thinking back to the Drupal 8 release and being a little scared at the huge change to everything. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way and we learned from that lesson. Drupal 9.0 is “no big deal” and that IS a big deal!
I’m very excited about Drupal 9 because it will be very important to use the new version of Symfony and Twig. Another important point is that the deprecated code will be removed, and this will make the code cleaner and more organized. Last but not least: I’m very happy because the contrib projects will work on both versions D8 and D9. This is excellent for me as I help the community and I maintain 40+ contrib projects and it helps the maintainers’ job.
And Lastly….
Much gratitude to all the community members on this list for taking the time out of their busy schedules to share their thoughts with me. We at Specbee are especially thrilled about Drupal 9 because we can offer more modern digital experiences and easy migrations. We’re ready to shine with Drupal 9!
- Shefali Shetty
- | June 09, 2020
A Community that Inspires
