The future of Drupal: 8.8, 9 and beyond

In 2019, DrupalCon took place for the third time in Amsterdam from October 28 to 31. As usual for one of the largest community events in the Drupal community, there was a lively exchange and dozens of exciting presentations and discussions as well as an outlook on the future of Drupal. This outlook took place as part of the Driesnote, the traditional keynote by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, and covered the upcoming Drupal update 8.8, the next major version update Drupal 9 and the future of Drupal in general.

Drupal 8.8

The presentation began with a look at the upcoming feature release 8.8, which will be released on December 3rd. As Drupal 8.8 is the last feature release before Drupal 9, the outlook was linked to the progress made in Drupal 8 so far.

In Drupal 8 there are so-called "strategic tracks", strategic goals that have been set for this major version:

• "Make Drupal easy to evaluate and adopt"

• "Make Drupal easy for content creators and site builders"

• "Reduce the total cost of ownership for developers and site owners"

• "Keep Drupal relevant and impactful"

These strategic goals are each divided into initiatives (13 in total), in which individual sub-goals are implemented.

During the presentation in Amsterdam, Dries discussed the key points and progress of three of these strategic goals in general and in the context of upcoming changes in Drupal 8.8:

"Make Drupal easy for content creators and site builders"

The results of the individual initiatives of this strategic goal were primarily aimed at making the day-to-day work of non-developer users easier and at the same time providing them with new features.

The first topic of discussion was the Media initiative, which, based on the Contrib Media module, aimed to introduce a separate Media module into the core that would make the management of all types of files more accessible and standardized.

Drupal 8.7 already included an initial version of the Media module as part of the core, which has now been finalized in version 8.8, marking the completion of this initiative. New features in 8.8 include support for audio and video files as well as the simple integration of any files in a WYSIWYG editor.

A second initiative of this strategic goal deals with the now somewhat outdated design of the backend and is currently developing a completely new administration theme called Claro, which will replace the previous Bartik theme. The current plan is to release the new theme together with Drupal 9.

The other initiatives "Workflow" and "Layout" were not mentioned as they have already been dealt with elsewhere. However, great progress has been made in the "Layout" area in particular with the "LayoutBuilder", a new core module that provides a simplified solution for creating and arranging content. Further information on the "Layout Builder" can be found here: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/core/modules/layout-builder.

"Reduce total cost of ownership for developers and site owners"

The premise of this strategic goal is to reduce the costs for developers and owners of Drupal sites. The term "costs" here refers more indirectly to money, as the initiatives are largely concerned with saving time when setting up and operating Drupal sites. These time savings are mainly achieved by simplifying existing regular processes that developers or operators of Drupal sites have to carry out.

As part of this, there is a new feature in Drupal 8.8, for example, which enables the exclusion of certain modules during configuration synchronization and thus aims to reduce the effort required for this activity.

Another initiative has set itself the goal of simplifying the often time-consuming updating of modules, their dependencies and Drupal itself. This is to be achieved through a still experimental module called "Automatic Updates". The vision of the team behind this initiative is to carry out all core and contrib updates at the touch of a button, taking dependencies into account. The release date for this module is currently still roughly Drupal 9, although delays are certainly possible.

Composer is currently the de facto standard for managing and updating modules and their dependencies. Nevertheless, up to and including Drupal 8.7, there was no one hundred percent clear convention on how to use Composer in connection with Drupal. This led to a large number of different solutions that Drupal users developed over time and adapted for their purposes.

In Drupal 8.8, however, this will now be a thing of the past. With Composer as a fixed part of the core and a clear specification of how Composer should be used, these specific solutions should be a thing of the past and give way to a clear standard.

In addition, Drupal 8.8 also comes with full drupal.org integration for Composer.

"Keep Drupal relevant and impactful"

Drupal has been around for almost 20 years. As the Internet has evolved, Drupal has had to adapt to new circumstances. To ensure that Drupal remains on par with the competition and current technological advances in the future, there are a number of initiatives that address this issue.

Drupal's API First approach in connection with decoupled or headless solutions plays an important role here. Websites, or more generally systems on the Internet, have no longer been based on individual technologies for years. Instead, interfaces that enable the connection of other systems and solutions are becoming increasingly important. As part of this approach, there will be improvements to the JSON:API in 8.8. In addition to improved documentation and performance, there will be a JSON:API Explorer that will make it possible to create URLs for data transfer via a UI.

Another step that has already been taken is the publication of a new feature release every six months. Past updates 8.6 and 8.7, and soon 8.8, are and will all be released at six-month intervals, which should result in a steady flow of new functionality on a predictable and regular basis. This six-monthly rhythm will continue after the release of Drupal 9.

Drupal 9

After discussing the current progress of the initiatives in Drupal 8, the focus of the presentation shifted to the next major version update: Drupal 9.

There was definitely a need to talk about this, as the currently targeted release date of June 3, 2020 is less than 8 months away. One issue that has always bothered Drupal site operators is switching to a new version, as this has always proved to be a time-consuming and costly undertaking in the past.

Fortunately, Drupal 9 will put an end to this. The aim is to make the update from Drupal 8 to 9 no more complicated than from 8.7 to 8.8. A click of a button or the execution of a command should be all it takes to successfully carry out the update.

Nevertheless, there are still a few pitfalls to watch out for: With Drupal 9, a number of old functions will be discarded and will no longer be functional. For this reason, it is worth taking another look at your own "custom" code to ensure that it will still work under Drupal 9. Support is available from modules such as Upgrade Status.

The same of course applies to the contrib modules, some of which contain code that will no longer be functional in Drupal 9. The good news here is that of the top 200 contrib modules, around two thirds are already compatible with Drupal 9 or only require minor changes to achieve this status.

Currently, the clear goal is to prevent a split of the community and associated modules as with Drupal 7 and 8 and to enable as clean and standardized a path as possible from Drupal 8 to 9.

The roadmap for Drupal 9

Similar to Drupal 8, several "strategic tracks" are to be defined for Drupal 9 along the lines of Drupal 8. At the time of the presentation, it was not yet clear what these are, but Dries presented a few of his ideas that could play a role in Drupal 9.

"Do more with less"

This track would be a kind of continuation of the "Reduce total cost of ownership for developers and site owners" track. Even though great progress has been made in Drupal 8, it is still a proven goal to reduce the time and money spent on the daily use of Drupal.

The integration of Drush - a CLI tool with a large library of commands for working with Drupal - into the core was mentioned as an example of an initiative that could be tackled as part of this track.

"Ease of use"

Even though Drupal has done a lot in recent years to improve the usability and general operation of Drupal, beginners in particular are still often overwhelmed and have problems finding their way around.

A UX survey conducted by Acquia came to a similar conclusion. As part of this survey, newcomers, experienced users and experts of the CMS solutions Drupal, Wordpress, Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore were interviewed.

One part of the survey presented the individual groups with the task of rating the attributes "Modern", "Premium", "Empowering", "Clear" and "Would recommend" positively or negatively for their respective CMS solution.

The result showed that the attributes of Wordpress, Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore were rated as positive, especially by beginners. However, the more experienced the users were with their CMS solution, the more negatively they rated it. The initially positive assessment therefore diminished as users gained more experience.

The opposite effect was observed for Drupal. While users initially rated Drupal rather negatively, the more experienced they became in using the CMS, the more positive their assessment became.

The conclusions from this survey are therefore clear: those who find their way into Drupal can expect an increasingly better experience and will ultimately be more satisfied than with the competition. However, many do not find this entry point and leave Drupal frustrated and with a negative experience. The aim must therefore be to improve the experience for these beginners in particular - without restricting the experts.

In the course of this realization, a new frontend theme called Olivero was introduced, which will "hopefully" be released in time for Drupal 9 and replace the now somewhat outdated Bartik theme.

"Open Web"

Currently, about every 40th website is operated with Drupal. According to Dries, this high number of Drupal sites on the web gives rise to a responsibility towards the Internet and its development.

As part of this "strategic track", initiatives are to be defined that will influence this development positively and with the values that open source and Drupal stand for. These initiatives could, for example, revolve around data protection, security and anonymity on the Internet.

"The explosion of content + data"

Over the next few years, billions of new users and devices will join the Internet. To ensure that Drupal is ready for this massive growth, it is important that Drupal becomes better at managing larger and more diverse data sets and that it can be linked to other systems as easily as possible. Drupal must therefore no longer see itself as a pure "content repository" and must take on more of a role as an integration platform.

Improved or new API interfaces such as GraphQL could play a role in achieving this goal in the future

"Taker to Maker"

The final part of the presentation looked at the differences between "Maker" and "Taker" and how each influences the Drupal open source ecosystem.

A " maker" is an individual or organization that actively contributes to the development of an open source project in whatever form. This contrasts with "takers", who simply make use of the freely available resource without giving anything back.

Dries sees one of the central challenges - not only of Drupal but of open source projects in general - in converting as many of the existing "takers" as possible into "makers" in order to be able to continue to grow and maintain a competitive balance, especially among agencies. The exact measures to initiate this conversion have not yet been determined, but they will be discussed in the coming weeks and months on the basis of this introduction.

Below you will find additional links to the complete presentation on YouTube and the corresponding presentation slides:

• Presentation slides (pdf): https://dri.es/files/state-of-drupal-october-2019.pdf

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• Watch the video: