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Last month, the Drupal community was abuzz with anticipation of version 9. Our recap of May’s top Drupal posts, then, features a lot of those related to the release of Drupal 9, from the new Drupal brand to recollections of the Drupal 9 Porting Weekend. We hope you enjoy revisiting them!
New Drupal Brand Ready for Drupal 9 Launch
Let’s start with the already introduced new Drupal brand, unveiled early enough for all Drupal 9 related messaging to feature the updated branding. In this first post, the Drupal Association’s CTO Tim Lehnen introduces the new Drupal logo which aims to reflect the flexibility and modularity of the CMS, and the strength of its connected community.
The new design, created by the Italian company Sixeleven, prioritizes continuity and is planned on being used for Drupal 10 and beyond. The inner drop idea was inspired by a past DrupalCon logo design. While the new logo has become the standard in all messaging, the famous Druplicon still exists, along with its many variations, of which we’ll likely see more again as the new Drop is reimagined.
The bliss of contributing to Drupal 9
The second post on this month’s list, written by Hadda Hreiðarsdóttir of 1xINTERNET, functions kind of as a second part to their post about the Drupal 9 Porting Weekend, with the first post announcing the event and this second one providing a recap of it.
1xINTERNET’s main goal was providing a stable release for every module maintained by someone from their team. They worked on 46 different projects, produced 15 stable Drupal 9 projects, enabled several first-timer contributions, all while working together in the true spirit of Drupal.
You’ll also find first-hand recollections from specific team members in the post. Big kudos to the entire 1xINTERNET team for their strong commitment to the project and its community!
Thanks for making a difference at Drupal 9 Porting Weekend!
Next up, we have another post about the Drupal 9 Porting Weekend on May 22 - 23, this one by the Drupal 9 initiative coordinator Gábor Hojtsy. Following the success of the first Drupal 9 Porting Day Gábor organized in April, he decided to do another event lasting the whole weekend.
This one turned out to be even more successful, with a large number of people and organizations actively participating and working on over 500 issues during the weekend. The weekend and the days following it also produced more daily Drupal 9 ready projects than any day before. As such, the two events were definitely important last steps towards Drupal 9 readiness.
Multilingual Drupal - Part 1: The Process
Moving on, we also really enjoyed Amazee Labs’ Christophe Jossart’s guide to creating multilingual websites and web applications with Drupal. In part one, Christophe covers the basics you need to get started, such as the main considerations and concepts.
He starts off with how to define the right approach to the translation strategy, then continues with some of the most important concepts for multilingual Drupal and the expectations of different stakeholders.
Next, he gives a summary of the translation features in Drupal Core and some contributed solutions, e.g. Translation Management Tool (TMGMT). He finishes the post with some quick tips and a list of additional resources to check out.
Accelerating Drupal 9 module and theme readiness with automated patches
We continue with a post jointly written by Tim Lehnen and Acquia’s Ted Bowman. While the update to Drupal 9 is already unprecedentedly smooth, there exists a certain tool that facilitates upgrading even further: Drupal Rector, supplied by Palantir.net and Pronovix.
Using Drupal Rector, developers are able to automatically remove deprecations and make code compatible with Drupal 9. To make this process even easier and less time-consuming, the Drupal Association also introduced the Project Update Bot which provides patches generated by the tool. Still, ultimately, it’s left to project maintainers to decide whether to use the patches provided by the bot.
Content creators going layout – with Drupal Layout Builder
In May 2019, the up-until-then experimental Layout Builder was included in Drupal’s core and is now included as an out-of-the-box feature with new versions of Drupal. This post by Jan Lemmens of Amplexor takes a look at how the job of content creators and site builders is greatly facilitated thanks to Layout Builder.
The tool gives non-technical users a lot more control over a page’s layout, allowing them to manage the layout of fields or structure the placement of blocks, for example. When comparing it to the more established Paragraphs module, Jan points out that it is more suited towards managing page content, whereas the Layout Builder is for page layout.
Assessing your Drupal 9 Readiness, Part I: Estimate, plan and action. Without tears.
Almost at the end of this month’s list, we have a blog post by Manifesto’s Gabriele Maira aiming to prepare users as best as possible for the upgrade to Drupal 9. The key question to ask, according to Gabriele, is: How Drupal 9 ready am I? (If you’re keeping up with Drupal 8.x core releases, you’re already well on your way!)
The first thing he suggests doing is reviewing the usage of your modules and themes, then installing the Upgrade Status module to scan them, beginning with custom code. Then, make sure that the hosting platform requirements are still satisfied and, finally, make a plan for upgrading any custom code you’re using, taking special care with those that depend on contributed projects.
A Guide to Preparing for Drupal 9
Last but not least, we have another post concerning Drupal 9 preparation. Its author, Sarah LeNguyen of Forum One, first gives some historical background on the upgrades between major versions of Drupal, then explains how Drupal 9 differs from previous major versions.
Namely, it’s exactly the upgrade process that has been smoothed out, with backwards compatibility; Drupal 9.0 thus only removes deprecations and updates third-party dependencies, while new functionality will come in 9.1 and beyond.
The second half of Sarah’s post is dedicated to helping people get ready for the upgrade, whether it’s the easier upgrade from Drupal 8 or the more demanding one from Drupal 7. She covers both cases, as well as provides some key information on support timelines.
At the time of writing and publishing this post, Drupal 9 has already been released, and we at Agiledrop have already worked very successfully with the new version. Reach out to us if you need any help with an upgrade, or with custom development for your new Drupal 9 site.
