It's the most wonderful time of the year! We are almost at the turn of the year, and what better way to kick off the holiday season than with the release of Drupal 10 (Just a couple of weeks old by now).

That's right, the highly anticipated Drupal 10 is finally here and it's packed with new features and improvements. Whether you're a developer, site builder, content creator, or website owner there's something for everyone in this release. So grab a mug of hot cocoa, cozy up by the fireplace, and let's dive into all that Drupal 10 has to offer.

22 years in the making! Introducing Drupal 10:

Okay, that was a bit of a cheesy video but you get the gist, let's get on with what Drupal 10 brings, a host of new features and improvements, making it the most powerful and flexible version of Drupal yet. Some of the highlights include:

Improved performance

Drupal 10 has been optimized for better performance, with faster page loads and improved caching capabilities. with Drupal 10 built on top of Symfony 6.2 with support for PHP 8.2, expect a better site load and yet again a better/faster development phase

Enhanced security

Drupal is already very well known in cybersecurity spaces for it's keen eye on security but there's always more road to pave and achievement to unlock, Drupal 10 includes a number of security enhancements, most notably improved password hashing and support for modern cryptographic protocols and more to come

Better accessibility

Drupal 10 ships with two new default themes, one for the backend called Claro and one for the frontend named Olivero.

Even though we at Ramsalt already provide quite a great accessible website 😎, we lacked a bit on the editorial front with the accessibility features and standards, now that is taken care of with Drupal core itself, if you need a bit of standard accessibility for your editorial team as well, let us know and we'd hook you up!

Modernized codebase

The tech world and in general website technologies are moving forward fast, like Drupal. there are always new shiny things that pop out which makes the development/working with the website easier and better each day, Drupal tends to acknowledge that and inherit and adapt to such new tools like getting rid of jQuery for the most part, adapting the latest version of PHP and Symfony and integrating a lot more with the Javascript ecosystem with an API-first approach horizon

What's in it for the clients and website owners you might ask? faster delivery, better performance and shinier codebase underneath it all

New features

Not that Drupal was lacking any of these but there's room for improvements, right? Drupal 10 brings improved media handling, and a new, more user-friendly interface for managing your site, fancy developer-oriented things like better Distributions, Starter Kits & Recipes. Oh and to be soon possible "Automated updates" which is crucial to government websites and those who are concerned with their security the most, and even a new subtheme generator for a better component-driven design approach, which we won't bore you with the details but take our word for it, it's cool!

Oh and for the editorial teams, beside Gutenberg that we are so keen on, you can give CKEditor 5 a spin, with collaborations baked-in, exactly like Google docs

Easy upgrade

Back in the days of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 era, we had to practically rebuild and migrate the Drupal 7 version to a new Drupal 8 one, this definitely took a toll on the clients budget and well, takes some time to be rebuilt but with Drupal's latest approach on making sure that staying on the latest and greatest should be easy, we managed to upgrade Drupal 8 to 9 fairly easy compared to what we had to do in the past whenever needed to move from one major version to another.

With Drupal 10 this should be easier and more out of the box, so if you are on Drupal 8 or 9, let us know and we get you going with the upgrading process.

And if you are on Drupal 7 or Drupal 9, well it's getting late already, the final stretch of support for Drupal 7 is November 1st, 2023, the same as Drupal 9.

As I mentioned above, it will take time to migrate from Drupal 7 to the shinier versions, so get on with it and contact us

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Is it hard to upgrade to Drupal 10?

So as a Drupal website owner, you might want to know how hard of a job is it to upgrade to Drupal 10? well let me give you the TL;DR:

• I'm currently on Drupal 7: Yes, it will be time-consuming, due to the inherent need of rebuilding the website and then migrating the content, so plan accordingly
• I'm currently on Drupal 8: We first need to migrate to Drupal 9 and then the 10 version, should be possible to wrap the whole process up within a week, so fret not, it's a cake!
• I'm currently on Drupal 9: With the easy upgrade pass and considering your website complexity, it shouldn't be more than a couple of days to get there, with testing and making sure the website works flawlessly with the latest PHP version, it's a piece of pie!

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Overall, Drupal 10 represents a major step forward for the platform, and we can't wait for you to try it out. So why not make Drupal 10 the gift that keeps on giving this holiday season and start planning your upgrade today?

Happy holidays!