OSTips – Here We Go Again! The Changes Coming To Drupal 10

(Transcript of the OSTips Video)

During this year’s Drupalcon North America, Dries took to the stage at his DriesNote speech and mentioned that Drupal has never been more stable. The adoption rate for Drupal 9 is faster than any other version of Drupal ever and modules are ready for Drupal 9 faster than ever before. So of course, he went straight into Drupal 10…

Here we go again! The changes coming to Drupal 10! Let’s dive in.

Welcome to OSTips from OSTraining.  

In this video, I want to talk about the major initiatives for Drupal 10. Now it’s not released until 2022, but of course, it’s hot news right now.  At the last Drupalcon, there were initiative tracks for each of the main initiatives, and they were terrific. I’m going to give you a resource here in just a moment, but at the DriesNote, Dries took some time to go through each of the major initiatives.

If you want to watch DriesNote, click here.  Honestly, there’s a lot of stuff at the beginning, so just fast forward to about 30 minutes into the video, and you’ll find the major initiatives.

Now what are they?Let’s take a look at the list starting with Automatic Updates:

I’m pretty excited about this. I know a lot of people aren’t, but i think it’s time. Updating Drupal core in the past has been a nightmare for beginners and site builders. Here at OSTraining, we’ve been working with beginner Drupalers for 10 years, and one of their constant frustrations has been updating Drupal.

With Drupal 9 it’s a lot easier using Composer, but with Drupal 10, it’s going to be automatic. As long as your installation of Drupal is compliant, then automatic updates are a no-brainer.

Next up is Decoupled Menus: 

This is for people who use Drupal in a decoupled way or “headless” way. A lot of people are pretty excited about this one. Drupal 10 is going to be released in 2022 and Drupal 8 end of life is November 2021, so this initiative is pretty important.

Next, we have Easy Out of the Box:

This is the other initiative I’m pretty excited about, because we deal with a lot of beginner site builders who will really appreciate this easy out of the box feature. However, I wish it was going to go further, because there’s a lot under the hood in this initiative that doesn’t really impact site builders, and there’s a lot of work that needs to go into Layout Builder to make it completely usable. Fortunately, there are a lot of additional contributed modules for Layout Builder that fill in a lot of those gaps.

While I would have liked to have seen this go further, I’m excited that Layout Builder and Media Manager specifically are going to get a lot of attention in Drupal 10. If you’ve seen my OSTips video on how to make Media Manager into a Digital Asset Management System, you know how much of a fan I am of Media Manager. I think it’s the best of all three of the major Content Management Systems, and so the fact that it’s going to get more attention, is really terrific.

The last part of this initiative is a brand new administration theme that’s turned on by default named Claro.

Finally, the New Front-End Theme:

Poor Bartik! We’ll be saying goodbye, but there’s a new front-end theme that’s modern and beautiful called Oliveiro. It’s going to be standard in Drupal 10. I think again that’s a terrific update to the out of the box user experience.

That’s the key for this entire Drupal 10 initiative; better out of the box experience, and I think that’s going to be really helpful for Drupal in the long run.

Finally let me give you a terrific resource. Drupal.tv has every Drupalcon video including all of the major initiative trainings and keynotes. I highly recommend you go and take a look at it.  Of course the top one there is the DriesNote.

Thanks for tuning in today! For more information, visit Drupal’s list of strategic initiatives here.  (The images used in this blog are from Drupal.org, & we appreciate them! )