The Drupal 10 Readiness Initiative - What’s your Drupal 10 plan?

Drupal has scaled the heights of success through its community contributions and group collaborations. It additionally came up with some strategic initiatives that allowed its users to attain optimal benefits by securing their software and sites, making it user-friendly for all. One such primary initiative, Drupal 10 Readiness will be looked at closely in this article. 

How strategic initiatives significantly contribute to Drupal

Drupal majorly emphasizes implementing its numerous suggested strategic initiatives and endless innovation. The large architectural change in Drupal 8 and 9 that was brought by Drupal 7, is a good example of continuous innovation within the community. Dries Buytaert, the project lead and founder of the Drupal project believes that strategic initiatives play a significant role in the success of Drupal. After gaining support from community collaboration, these initiatives could produce exceptional developments driven by forces such as:

• Market relevance was enhanced by improving editorial, developer, and customer experience. 
• An idea of building an open-source digital platform experience.
• Engaging with the core maintainers.
• The opportunity of validation by community decisions and collaborations.
• Usability studies and survey data availability.

Once these initiatives are suggested, they are put across to the planned initiative stage where every initiative is built up with plans and strategies in detail. After finishing this stage, the initiative finally moves towards the active initiatives stage. This is the process of how an initiative comes into place. To know more about how community initiatives are proposed and how strategic initiatives come about in Drupal, read here. Also, learn what’s happening with Decoupled menus initiative and Automatic updates initiative. Moving forward we will explore one of the most essential strategic initiatives of Drupal i.e. Drupal 10 Readiness which keeps us curious to know more about the future of Drupal 10. Before we move on, here's the complete guide on Drupal 9, the burning questions on Drupal 9, the Drupal 9 upgrade and migration particulars, must-have modules to start Drupal 9 project, configuration management strategies, and web development strategies that are specific to Drupal 9 project.

Familiarising with Drupal 10 Readiness

The Drupal 10 Readiness aims at providing an agenda to ensure that Drupal 10 gets released by 2022, also maintaining the security status along with keeping it up-to-date. This initiative provides the Drupal 10 roadmap and primarily focuses on:

• To identify the tasks that are to be completed before the Drupal 10 release, emphasizing updating dependencies and eliminating deprecated APIs.
• Support contributed module maintainers to move forward while also keeping modules updated. 
• Plans to release Drupal 10 by the summer of 2022 or if not surely by December 22.

The Drupal 10 Readiness initiative was launched at the DrupalCon Global 2021 and has started putting down the plans into action. This further will help in ensuring the release of Drupal 10 in 2022 as per planned by the Drupal community. Although the exact Drupal 10 release date is yet not fixed, it is still planned to be released by June 2022. So, here are the Drupal 10 features. Take a quick look. 

Drupal 10 is built on Drupal 9. There is one major exception, the CKEditor 5 project is being built as a contributed module so that it can be easy to test it and also make it easier to collaborate upon. 

Both PHP 8 and Composer 2 support shipped in Drupal 9. Backporting of composer 2 was made to Drupal 8 but the same was not possible for PHP 8 compatibility. For Drupal 10, PHP 8 will be needed as PHP 7 to be ended by November 2022.

Symfony 5 is good but Symfony 6 will be better. Since Symfony 4, one of the two main drivers of the Drupal 10 timeline is to be ended by November 2022, so a plan has been made to be updated to Symfony 5.  The Symfony 5 compatibility issues are also resolved, which can be an added advantage. In the case of Drupal 10, Symfony 5 will be on the long-term supported 5.4 branches, which would "only" be security supported till November 2025, providing Drupal 10 a 2.5 year lifetime. The Drupal team is trying to update Symfony 6 at the same time, making an effort to resolve incompatibilities identified in Drupal 9. Since Symfony 6 development is not itself open yet, they are only able to work on things that are previously deprecated.

CKEditor 4 to 5 update needs more support. One of the motivations behind the Drupal 10 timeline is CKEditor 4 support lasting till 2023.  As of now, CKEditor 5 support is being worked on in a dedicated contributed module.  Drupal is actively collaborating with the CKSource team on runtime plugin support (Webpack DLLs), general HTML support (to avoid the loss of data while using CKEditor 5 on legacy content), etc. Some of the benefits of CKEditor 5 include optional collaborative editing functionality (using a paid server component).

Feedback needed for Starterkit theme prototype. It’s a Drupal-theming paradigm shift. Duplication can be avoided by inheriting from runtime base themes but at the same time, it can cause serious issues for innovation and make Drupal support old bugs not to break live sites. So, rather they try to provide built-in support for generating a theme in a core that is based on a prepared starterkit. 

The jQuery UI components have replacements prototyped, requiring reviews. All the jQuery UI components and numerous uses of Backbone. JS have replacements prototyped: dialog, toolbar, tabbing manager, autocomplete, tours, etc. They are in need of feedback. 

Internet Explorer 11 support to be dropped. An agreement is made to drop support for IE11 from Drupal 10. The official announcement will be made shortly. 

Some one-off feature modules might be removed. Drupal decided to deprecate the aggregator module in Drupal 9 and eradicate it in Drupal 10. There will be a removal of some other single-use core modules which lack momentum and maintainers. They are also taking the initiative to indicate individual module lifecycle states.

Now that we already know Drupal 10 is slated for a mid-2022 launch, more and more contributions will be paramount to the initiative’s success. Here are some recent updates on the initiatives shared in the DrupalCon Europe 2020 and DrupalCon North America 2021:

Conclusion

Drupal strategic initiatives are constantly making an effort to escalate the productivity level of the community leading to remarkable expected results and outcomes. Drupal 10 Readiness is such a strategic initiative that depicts the future of Drupal 10 for which we all are excitedly waiting. So, this article was written to prepare you for Drupal 10 and help you get the proper insights into its significant functionality. Hope you are now ready for a Drupal upgrade.