Drupal 9: All you need to know about Drupal 9 Readiness

Ever since the launch of Drupal 8, the Drupal community has launched minor version updates to make the adoption easy. Incorporating Drupal 9 into your systems depends considerably upon your current Drupal version. This blog will walk you through Drupal 9 and its readiness as you decide you upgrade your existing implementation.

Overview of Drupal 9

Launched on June 3, 2020, Drupal 9 is a cleanup of Drupal 8. This version has abundant features with deprecated code removed and third-party dependencies updated. It used to make number of the websites and applications people use every day. It has abundant standard features such as reliable performance, easy content authoring, and excellent security. Previously, switching from one version to another has been similar to moving from another CMS to Drupal, bringing in more time and fatigue.

Drupal 9 readiness Checklist

The preparedness for Drupal 9 is quite dependent on the current version of Drupal in use. So we’re offering Drupal 9 readiness checklists for Drupal 8 site owners.

1. Review your website’s goals:
   With the constant changes in trends and customer expectations, brands need to stay updated on a daily basis. Brands must be clear about the digital experiences they want to provide to their customers.
2. Consult with your editors and administrators:
   Get in touch with your content editors to understand their pain points and verify how Drupal 9, with its new features for content editing proves to be beneficial for them.
3. Conduct an inspection of modules with developers:
   Based on your reviewed requirements and ideas in points (1) and (2) of this checklist, ask developers to help you prepare a cleaned-up and updated list of modules for your desired functionalities. To get an audit of modules, you can contact Altudo Drupal support Team & maintenance team. During the module audit, the best practices are to use the core where possible, since many nice features have been moved to it. Examples include using the core Content Moderation instead of Workbench Moderation, the core Media instead of the contributed Media, the core Layout Builder instead of Panels, etc.
4. Update to Drupal’s latest minor version:
   Use the latest version of the core, modules, themes, and third-party libraries. According to the new innovation model, every six months a new core release with valuable features comes out, and between them, there also are patch releases. By keeping up with the latest minor version, you are already preparing for Drupal 9.
5. Clean up the deprecated code:
   This is the cornerstone of Drupal 9 readiness checklist. Websites that are not using deprecated APIs and functions will be instantly ready for Drupal 9. This is not going to take much time. They will use D9 preparation tools like the Drupal-check command-line tool, the Upgrade Status contributed module with a UI for deprecated code checking, the Rector automatic deprecated code removing tool, etc.
7. Upgrade to Drupal 9:
   After Completion of all the essential steps mentioned above, you are ready to upgrade your website to Drupal 9 with the help of Altudo Drupal support team. It’s really exciting to work with Drupal 9.

Conclusion

However, this upgrade from D7/8 to D9 is much easier and effortless. There are numerous competencies added in Drupal 9 which further will be consistently updated semiannually to help enterprises stay up-to-date. Some of the key features that are added to Drupal are Backward Compatibility, Cleaner code base, Olivero Theme, Key additions to Claro administration theme, support for PHP8 and composer2, Headless CMS, Layout builder, Major versions of Symfony and Twig etc. In Drupal9, installer performance is enhanced significantly. It has support for responsive images. BigPipe in Drupal9 is increasing page view performance. Drupal9 has multilingual capabilities. Content workflow allows users to define multiple workflows.

The best way to prepare yourself for tomorrow is to give your best today. And very apparently, the Drupal community has done just that. I know, migrating to Drupal 8 from previous versions was hard. It means a complete rebuild of the code and a lot of learning. But once you are fully onboard Drupal 8, life gets easier. So, if you’re still on Drupal previous versions, this is the right time to migrate to Drupal 9.