See February 2023 Update – UT Drupal Kit’s Roadmap to Drupal 10 for updates to this post.
Summary (TL;DR)
- Drupal 10 is scheduled to be released in December 2022.
- Rollout of Drupal 10 to the UT Drupal Kit will be a gradual process over the course of the next four scheduled maintenance releases.
- Owners of customized UTDK sites have specific responsibilities to ensure that their sites will be ready for the final transition to Drupal 10.
- Work on these tasks should start immediately.
(This post includes discussion of the Drupal project’s release cycle and version numbers. For more information, see “Drupal core release cycle: major, minor, and patch releases.”)
Drupal 10 is scheduled to be released on December 14, 2022, with a simultaneous release of Drupal 9.5 as the long-term support (LTS) version of Drupal 9. The end of security support for Drupal 9 is scheduled for November 2023.
As it was with the update from Drupal 8 to 9, the UT Drupal Kit will include the Drupal 10 update as part of a standard maintenance release. But due to the large scope of changes involved in Drupal 10, we plan to make the journey from Drupal 9 to 10 through a series of steps spread over six months, to allow site owners sufficient time to prepare.
Here is an overview of the high-level roadmap through the eventual update to Drupal 10, followed by more detailed discussion of each step.
| Date | UTDK version | Planned change |
|---|---|---|
| November 2022 | 3.9.0 | Update Drupal Core to 9.4 |
| January 2023 | 3.10.0 | Update Drupal Core to 9.5 |
| March 2023 | 3.11.0 | Update CKEditor to version 5 |
| May 2023 | 3.12.0 | Update Drupal Core to 10.x |
Step 1 – Drupal 9.4 (Nov. 2022)
Drupal 9.4 is a minor version update for Drupal 9 which was released in June 2022 but has not yet been included as part of a UTDK maintenance release.
The UTDK 3.9.0 release in November 2022 will include the update to the latest version of Drupal 9.4. This should not require any action from individual site owners.
Step 2 – Drupal 9.5 (Jan. 2023)
Simultaneous with the release of Drupal 10 in December, Drupal 9.5 will be released as the final minor release in the Drupal 9 series. The 9.5 release will serve as the long term support version of Drupal 9, as well as a bridge to Drupal 10, since any modules or themes that work in Drupal 9.5 which are not using deprecated code should also work in Drupal 10.
The UTDK 3.10.0 release in January 2023 will include the update to the latest version of Drupal 9.5. This should not require any action from individual site owners.
Step 3 – CKEditor 5 (Mar. 2023)
Drupal 8 and 9 used version 4 of the CKEditor WYSIWYG HTML editor, which had its initial release in 2012. Like Drupal 7, CKEditor 4 has been widely adopted during its ten year lifespan, but is approaching its official end-of-life (EOL). And CKEditor 5 offers many functional and usability enhancements over the previous version.
The Drupal project has taken an incremental approach to the integration of CKEditor 5, offering it first as a module in Drupal 9 which can be enabled in place of the built-in CKEditor 4 editor. With the release of Drupal 10, CKEditor 5 will become the default editor, and CKEditor 4 will be removed from the Drupal core codebase altogether.
The CKEditor 5 transition requires extensive updates to site configuration and will be a noticeable visual change for content authors. Because of the magnitude of this change, we plan to introduce CKEditor 5 first as the default editor under Drupal 9, before the planned update to Drupal 10.
The UTDK 3.11.0 release in March 2023 will update all sites to use CKEditor 5.
This will also be the last scheduled UTDK release based on Drupal 9.
The UTDK team will be responsible for making configuration changes required for most sites to update to the CKEditor 5, including updates to the Basic HTML, Flex HTML, and Full HTML text formats, and compatibility updates to our custom CKEditor plugin for embedding Qualtrics surveys. The UTDK-provided text formats will effectively be reset to their default configuration as part of this update (see Text formats).
Content editor documentation will also be updated to reflect the changes in CKE 5. See Enterprise GitHub for additional details on our roadmap to CKEditor 5.
UTDK 3 site owners who have created additional text formats, or added to or otherwise modified their CKEditor configurations in any way, should contact ITS for a consultation on how to address these customizations in the context of CKEditor 5.
Step 4 – Drupal 10 (May 2023)
Drupal 10 is the upcoming major version, and includes many new features outlined on the About Drupal 10 page on Drupal.org.
Of the many changes in Drupal 10, the one that stands out as most impactful for UTDK site owners and developers other than the transition to CKEditor 5 (see above) is code compatibility with Symfony 6 and PHP 8.1.
Modern versions of Drupal are built atop the Symfony web application framework. Drupal 9 uses Symfony 4, which will go out of active support in November 2022, and out of security support in November 2023 (see Symfony releases). Drupal 10 will use Symfony 6.
Likewise, Drupal 9’s minimum required version of PHP was 7.4, which will go out of security support in November 2022 (see PHP supported versions). Drupal 10 will have a minimum required PHP version of 8.1.
The UTDK 3.12.0 release in May 2023 will include the update to the latest version of Drupal 10. All sites must move to Drupal 10 in order to update to this release. Prior to this date, all contrib and custom code used with Drupal 10 should be reviewed for compatibility with Drupal 10’s underlying requirements.
The UTDK team has already begun the process of making compatibility changes in our custom code and in the contrib modules maintained by UT Austin.
UTDK 3 site owners with custom code or additional contrib modules can use the Upgrade Status module to get an estimate of the work needed to make them compatible with Drupal 10. The plan provided by Upgrade Status module will tell you where to use drupal-rector to update your own custom code and where to help contributed projects update their code.
Recommended timeline goals
In conclusion, there are two pieces of very good news for UTDK customers to keep in mind regarding the Drupal 10 update:
- ITS will do most of the work for you, by virtue of updates to the UT Drupal Kit distribution. Sites which have not been customized should not need to do anything.
- For the work required on custom sites, most of it can be started now. For example, many contrib modules have already released updates for compatibility with Drupal 10.
In order to stay current with the planned UTDK release schedule, we recommend following this timeline for work on customized sites.
No later than…
- February 2023 – Any additional text formats beyond those provided by the UT Drupal Kit should be converted to be compatible with CKEditor 5
- March 2023 – Any additional contrib modules beyond those provided by the UT Drupal Kit should be updated to a version which is Drupal 10 compatible
- May 2023 – All custom code should be compatible with both Drupal 10 and PHP 8.1
How to get assistance
The UTDK team is available for consultations on CKEditor 5 and Drupal 10 compatibility. We will continue to communicate detailed information about the Drupal 10 transition and schedule information sessions starting after the winter break.
To start a conversation, email drupal-kit-support@utlists.utexas.edu to open a ticket in ServiceNow, or attend an Office Hours session.
