We’re card carrying members of the Drupal fan club. There are over a million users in said club, which may surprise no one. Drupal is free, open source, flexible, secure, fast, and scalable, and just released a brand new version on December 14th, 2022. But before we get stuck into the new features and updates, it feels like we’d be missing a big part of the story (namely the Why) if we did so without discussing Drupal’s strategic initiatives. 

What are the big ideas driving Drupal? 

In 2019, four strategic tracks were articulated as part of the vision for Drupal 9, and evolved into the current strategic initiatives. These overarching goals formed the development strategy for D10, and will continue to shape Drupal’s future. The Drupal community is focusing their combined efforts on these ideas to bring impactful new features to Drupal core.

Automatic updates

In  the past, updating your Drupal site could be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Drupal has put a lot of time and effort into addressing the risks involved, and while the end goal of this initiative is to provide a safe and secure system for automatic updates, the other goal is to lower maintenance costs. This initiative will handle minor updates, like 9.2.9 to 9.3.

Decoupled menus

Thanks to its support for REST and JSON APIs, Drupal has been a reliable CMS for hybrid or headless configurations for a while. This initiative is aimed at making it even easier to use Drupal for headless architecture, with devs now able to create JavaScript projects and build/consume configurable menus. It’s a massive leap that puts them in front of the headless CMS platforms pack.

It's now even easier to use Drupal for headless architecture, with devs able to create JavaScript projects.

On top of React and Vue components for menus, D10’s authorization capabilities mean that content creators can make menu changes without needing to write backend code. For traditional sites, Twig templates are still available. In the future, the plan is to expand its headless capabilities even further by adding read-only menus for Drupal HTTP APIs.

Drupal 10 readiness

Basically, the goal of this initiative was to keep all the necessary tasks, updates, and cleanouts moving and supported so they could release Drupal 10 in 2022. While the release was postponed for various reasons, they made it happen.

Easy out of the box

At DrupalCon 2019, founder Dries Buytaert presented the results of an Acquia CMS UX survey as part of his keynote (at 1:00:18). It revealed that novice users found Drupal really challenging, and the subsequent strategic track to prioritize the beginner experience evolved into this initiative.

It’s easier to manage content, navigate the admin interface, and make great layouts from Day One.

They bundled the Media Library, Layout Builder, and Administration themes to create an easy default experience and clear pathway for site editors, content creators, marketers, and so on. In D10, the new admin theme is standard along with Layout Builder and Media, and it’s easier to manage content, navigate the admin interface, and make great layouts from Day One.

Gitlab Acceleration

This initiative is about making it easier for developers to become Drupal contributors—and increasing the amount of contribution that happens as a result—by moving to more standard GitLab workflows. They want to make the process more accessible and less overwhelming. 

Maintainers can already manage code contributions with merge requests instead of patches that have been in the community for ages. If there’s no conflict, they can now merge new code with one click. The credit system was recently integrated with Gitlab, but the goal is to go even further by also integrating testing.

Project Browser

When you wanted to add a new feature to your site, you used to have to trawl through 40,000+ modules on Drupal.org to find the right one and then download it. You might also need the technical chops to install using Composer.

This initiative wants to simplify that whole process by letting people search, filter, and add modules within the user interface of their site. Project Browser is currently a contributed module, but will likely become part of Drupal 10 core in upcoming versions. 

Recipes and Distributions

This initiative is another ingredient in the overall drive to create a smoother introduction to Drupal, with ready-to-use tools and default setups that make getting started easy for non-developers. Recipes will be bundles of Drupal functionality for building specific kinds of sites, like a blog, news site, or e-commerce store. The vision is that you’ll be able to install recipes through the Project Browser, add a recipe at any point in a project’s life, and install multiple recipes on the same project.

What are the significant changes for D10?

CKEditor 5 replaces CKEditor 4

Drupal 10 will come with CKEditor 5 because support for CKEditor 4 is ending this year. Drupal has also been consistently making things better and easier for content creators and editors, and D10 keeps that party going. CK Editor 5 was an experimental module introduced in D9.3, and is D10’s only WYSIWYG editor. Some features needed for Drupal were dropped in CKEditor 5, so the Drupal community worked with the CKEditor team to bring them back.

The improved authoring experience lets you edit objects in place, manage media and tables easily, and edit collaboratively in real time.

CK5’s improved authoring experience lets you edit objects in place, and easily manage media and tables. The out-the-box features include formatting, styling, advanced productivity tools, and a bunch of plugins, but one major improvement in CK5 is a contextual balloon that allows you to edit content inline. Another exciting new feature is real-time collaborative editing, which allows multiple people to work on the same text. This feature isn’t free, but it brings other potential new features to D10.

Third party software updates

PHP 7 and Symfony 4 were both decommissioned in November 2022. While Symfony 5 compatibility issues were resolved for Drupal 10 as a first step, it depends on the Symfony 6.2 framework. Symfony 6.2 requires PHP 8.1, so a lot of interconnected compatibility had to be addressed. PHP 8.2 is fully supported in Drupal 10.

Claro theme replaces Seven

Claro gives the administration interface a makeover, with a modernized look and feel and familiar UI patterns. Besides being less cluttered and easier to learn, it’s also compliant with the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA accessibility standards out of the box—thanks in part to its high-contrast colour palette.

Olivero theme replaces Bartik 

The new front-end theme was named after Rachel Olivero (1982-2019), a Drupal community member and head of the National Federation of the Blind. It started as an experimental theme in Drupal 9.1, and now replaces Bartik as the default for D10.

Olivero is modern and accessible, with secondary navigation and a built-in media and layout builder.

Olivero is modern and accessible, with secondary navigation and a built-in media and layout builder. Design elements like shadows or gradients are minimal, and text, animation and colour options have been thoughtfully chosen. Read Lullabot’s case study to learn more about the Olivero design process.

Olivero also backs multilingual functionality and can display right-to-left languages like Hebrew, Arabic and Urdu. It’s compatible with all the latest browsers without having to customize code, and uses PostCSS which you can use to customize the theme further.

Starter kit theme

Previously, you had to subtheme to create a custom theme. You would use a core or contrib theme as a foundation, and get all its code and functionality as well. Which was fine, unless you wanted to change or remove any inherited parts of your Frankenstein’s monster. With Drupal 10, there’s a new theme generation tool in town. The starterkit command creates a copy, giving you a new theme with basic templates and CSS: a ready-to-go skeleton. You can also generate your own “starter” theme and copy that! No more worrying about your subtheme breaking when the base theme changes.

The future of Drupal

While these innovations are the major headlines for Drupal 10, they’re only the tip of the iceberg according to Buytaert. 

“Since the initial release of Drupal 9, 4,000+ changes were committed to Drupal Core alone. These contributions came from 2,129 different people and 616 unique organizations over the course of the last 2.5 years. Incredible!” (Source: Drupal 10.0.0 released)

But despite all that work, no one is applying the brakes at Drupal. Their initiatives are already forging the strategy for Drupal 11, with two goals in the crosshairs: empowering ambitious site builders and accelerating innovation in their contributed modules repository. To achieve them, composability is key, and Buytaert has actually codenamed their two-year plan “Composable Core.”

What is certain is that Drupal has a clearly defined vision for its future; one that is rooted in the needs of its users and the relevance of its industry innovation. We can’t wait to watch it unfold, and get into everything that’s yet to come.