What’s New in Drupal 10

Drupal 10 is the latest release in the long-time open source project. Drupal 10 launched with a series of improvements, features, and modernization. And, Drupal 11 is built in Drupal 10. Deprecations will be proposed, but not removed until Drupal 11 is launched. Features desired for Drupal 11 will be built during Drupal 10’s life cycle. This chapter covers everything about Drupal 10, from its platform requirements to its features to its maintenance considerations.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Release methodology
• New to Drupal 10
• Built in Drupal 10

Release methodology

Drupal 10’s initiatives and requirements were defined before Drupal 10 was launched. This was based on several factors.

Drupal 10 has a defined life cycle with roughly 6 months of minor releases. There is no explicit number of minor releases before a major release is announced. However, major releases, starting with Drupal 8, have been on an approximate 2-to-3-year cadence. After this cadence, a new major version is released and the previous major version reaches its end of life. The only exception is Drupal 7, which has extended end-of-life support. Details can be found on drupal.org by searching for Core Release Cycles.

Drupal applications inherit life cycle considerations of Drupal’s dependencies. Infrastructure, such as PHP and MySQL, have explicit supported versions at the time a major version is supported. As an example, Drupal would not explicitly support an end-of-life version of PHP. Application-level dependencies, such as Symfony components...

New to Drupal 10

Many new features and updates to Drupal were delivered when Drupal 10 launched.

Symfony 6.2

While this is not necessarily a user-facing feature, Drupal 10 upgraded the underlying Symfony components to version 6.2. This version is the current, stable release of Symfony at the time of Drupal 10’s launch. Drupal core leverages Symfony as a framework for underlying capabilities such as routing, services, dependency injection, events, kernels, and processes. Drupal also adopts utilities for serialization, validators, YAML, and translation. This helps Drupal leverage a well-adopted framework instead of creating its own code to achieve the same outcomes as exemplified by other PHP projects, such as Laravel and Joomla. Symfony components also helped define the platform requirements of Drupal, given Symfony 6.2 required at least PHP 8.1 and must maintain parity with the Drupal application.

Upgrading Symfony incorporates improvements such as bug fixing and stability...

Built in Drupal 10

Dries, the founder of Drupal, announced strategic initiatives that are actively being built in Drupal 10. It is common for strategic initiatives to deliver in the next major version of Drupal, but occasionally, these efforts will get merged into minor releases of the current major version. As such, the following strategic initiatives will be created in Drupal 10 and may be delivered in a minor version of Drupal 10 should they finish. And, adopters of Drupal 10 can try out work-in-progress initiatives and contribute to them.

Automatic updates

As this book mentions multiple times, Drupal requires ongoing maintenance. Complex Drupal sites with a large number of installed projects may have updates routinely as new releases span both Drupal core and its projects. Security updates are especially important to prevent a Drupal application from being compromised. Performing updates today is a largely technical task that requires knowledge of Composer, Git, and more...

Summary

Drupal has established a methodical release process for both major and minor releases and a definition of platform requirements. Major and minor releases differ in expectations for performing updates. Drupal 10 delivered the latest major release of Drupal with notable features, improvements, and updates. It shipped with new default themes, a CKEditor upgrade, and updates for underlying Symfony components. New strategic initiatives are expected to deliver even more features during Drupal 10’s life cycle.

The next chapter will teach you how to load a new Drupal application, perform an installation, and review common upfront configuration use cases.