What Does the Drupal 10 Update Mean for Businesses?

Waiting for updates of important third-party technologies and frameworks such as the Symfony Framework, the CKEditor, the new PHP and Composer version that Drupal depends on, ensures that the core uses the latest components and thus more performance, System stability and security.

For solidly built websites built on Drupal versions 8 and 9, the switch should be fairly smooth since no revolutionary changes have been made to the core of Drupal. Most importantly, obsolete code has been removed, unnecessary dependencies eliminated, and the JavaScript text editor updated. The latest version of the popular CMS promises a better user experience (UX) for content editors, administrators, and a better developer experience for Drupal developers .

What's included with Drupal 10?

The most obvious changes for administrators and users:

The new CKEditor

The state-of-the-art JavaScript rich text editor CKEditor 5 replaces the CKEditor in its 4th version. This latest update improves content editing, such as simplifying links, image uploads and styling, as well as the ability to insert documents. Since the new CKEditor uses the latest JavaScript technology, it is easier to customize or expand. Legacy issues relating to old JavaScript frameworks have also been removed in order to keep the editor as lean as possible.

Claro Admin Theme

The admin area is the place where content editors and administrators do their work for hours every day. To make the work of admins and editors as easy as possible, the modern Claro admin theme will continue to be available in Drupal 10 (since Drupal 9.4).

The admin interface is clear and appears in a fresh design. With the help of new color schemes, stronger contrasts and a lot of white spaces, the user's attention is drawn to the area where he is currently located. These visual cues for all UI elements, redesigned content page, and file and image upload widgets improve user experience and make operation more intuitive for users.

The most important changes for Drupal developers:

Frontend Theme Olivero

The Oliviero Frontend Theme (available since Drupal 9.4) is modern, intended to be responsive and barrier-free at the same time and offers all the functions that are indispensable for modern websites. Design elements such as drop shadows and color gradients are now only used sparingly, while typography, animation and color palettes are more sophisticated and visible. With the new Oliviero Theme, developers can more easily build modern themes, making it more attractive for frontend developers to use Drupal. The frontend theme Olivero offers the ideal basis for barrier-free websites and complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Decoupled menus for the headless approach

Drupal aims to become a leading headless

With the headless approach, developers can access or write the data via REST or GraphQL interfaces. The update to version 10 increases the number of available web service endpoints, so that more and more parts of Drupal can be used out of the box in headless mode, such as the menu builder.

PHP framework Symfony 6.2 replaces Symfony 4

The use of the PHP framework Symfony enables modern and flexible object-oriented programming and guarantees excellent performance. Drupal 10 is based on Symfony 6.2, which already contains improvements and bug fixes compared to 6.0.

The upgrade from Drupal 10 to Symfony 6.2 means that from the release, Drupal must also be based on PHP 8.1, which means, among other things, system security improvements. This finally says goodbye to support for Internet Explorer 11, which Microsoft has not developed further since 2015. It was about time and long awaited by developers. The expense of the double programming process was unnecessarily complex, because the use of IE11 has been declining sharply for years.

Removal of obsolete code

Code in Drupal core marked "deprecated" will disappear when updating to version 10. Here it is important for a developer to update these pieces of code to prevent problems in a Drupal 10 release.

Automated updates

Security updates should be carried out as quickly as possible so that security gaps on websites can be closed quickly. Using Composer as a package manager requires technical know-how. This is one of the reasons why such updates are often made late and security gaps remain for a long time. From a poll of thousands of people, the most anticipated feature is the Automated Updates feature. This was reported by the Drupal founder Dries Buytaert

In the first release added to Drupal 10, these automated updates will only be done in the core. A variant that also includes the contributed modules and themes is being actively developed.

How can you prepare your website for Drupal 10?

An important preparation now would be to switch your website to Drupal 9, if you haven't already done so. If your website is still running on Drupal 8, we strongly recommend making a “detour” via Drupal 9 and only then switching to version 10. This would be done in one and the same migration project.

Why we love Drupal!

As an open source CMS (no license costs), Drupal is supported by a large community of thousands of competent developers who are continuously working on the development and security of the CMS. With the enormous flexibility that this modular CMS offers, individual requirements in customer projects can be addressed and implemented. Because Drupal relies on the latest web standards and proven third-party technologies, it guarantees reliable security and strong performance, making this web framework a solid base for your next web project.

Do you want to have your site checked or transfer it directly to Drupal 10? We would be happy to offer you a free consultation .