Today marks a major milestone: Drupal 9 is released! Here are three things you need to know:
Drupal 9 is Easy to Upgrade
It’s been a long time coming to say that, from an engineering effort standpoint, Drupal 9 is a non-event. If your site runs on Drupal 8.8, and you followed our Definitive Readiness Guide for Drupal 9, you probably don’t need to do much of anything to upgrade to Drupal 9.
This is a major turning point for the Drupal ecosystem. Going from Drupal 6 to 7, and especially 7 to 8, was hard work. The APIs were different, the modules were different, and the platforms were different. But with version 8 Drupal moved to a model to balance the ease of upgrade with the ability to maintain innovation in the framework.
Drupal 9 delivers on this promise.
API First Takes A Big Step Forward in Drupal 9
Drupal 8 was architected from the ground up to be API-first, to support headless use cases, data integrations of any kind, and any innovative use cases we can’t even conceive of today. Drupal 9 represents a big step forward in this commitment with the addition of JSONAPI in core (first added in Drupal 8.8, it is now standard in every Drupal 9 site). JSONAPI has become the de facto framework for modern API work.
Why be API first? Well, you can do fun, bleeding edge things like using Gatsby to make your site one of the fastest in the world.
Drupal 9 Supports Workspaces & Editorial Flexibility
Drupal has long supported the ability to track a future revision of a piece of content so that one version can exist live to the public and one version can exist for the marketing team to ideate and refine for future release.
Drupal 9 now includes built-in support for workspaces. A workspace is a collection of content pages that exist as a group together, that can be defined as a group, and most crucially, pushed live as a group. Workspaces can include any number and combination of content pages, taxonomy terms, menu items, media, you name it.
This new addition to Drupal makes the editorial flexibility for marketers dramatically more powerful.
And Finally, Thank You!
Drupal 9 could not have been possible without the countless contributions of thousands of developers around the world spending tens of thousands of hours quietly writing code. Thank you, thank you, thank you!