Drupal 9 is scheduled to be released on June 03, 2020. This is when the final Drupal 8 minor release 8.9 will also be released. Considering the history of previous Drupal major upgrades, Drupal 9 will relatively be smooth. Thanks to the semantic versioning introduced in Drupal 8. The upgrade to Drupal 9 will just be another minor upgrade with deprecated code removed. Drupal 8 has brought a lot of standardization in the Drupal world, thus allowing Drupal as a project to grow incrementally.
To put it in simple terms, Drupal 9 contains the same code as of 8.9 + deprecated code removed. Here’s a reference image from the Drupal 9 documentation.
That is if you reduce Drupal 9 from the last Drupal 8 version (8.8.x) the rest is just the deprecated code and dependency upgrades.
However, upgrading all the underlying dependencies and removing all deprecated API is a challenging task. Contributors around the world are working hard to get this done especially when the world is facing an epidemic. This is a challenging time for the entire world, yet Drupal contributors have shown their love towards Drupal and are helping it advance to the next release.
This article highlights some of the system requirements, the new dependencies and some of the most commonly used APIs which are going to be removed in 9.0.0.
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Third-party dependency updates
System requirement updates
Modules being removed in D9
New features in Drupal 9
Drupal 9 will have the same new features as of Drupal 8.9. Thus, Drupal 9.0 will not include new features. But Drupal 9.1 will continue to receive new features as it did for the minor D8 releases.
Breaking APIs
Following is a list of major APIs which were deprecated in Drupal 8 and will be removed in Drupal 9.0.0. That means if your code contains any of these codes, they need to be replaced before upgrading to Drupal 9. This list is not exhaustive and has been curated by scanning Drupal core codebase for deprecated warnings and sorted according to the usage of these APIs in contributed projects as given Drupal 10 Deprecation Status by Acquia.
Some of the functions and hooks removed (change record)
Following functions removed (change record)
More Changes/Updates
Conclusion
At this point, 9.0.0-beta2 is released, which means the code for 9.0.0 is stable and is ready for testing by end-users. Now is a good time to test upgrade your existing D8 sites to the latest version of 9. If you have contributed a project in drupal.org, it is also a good time to check your extensions for D9 readiness. There are several tools which can speed up this process of making your extensions compatible with D9.
Have questions about how Drupal 9 will impact your site? We are here to help. Check out our Drupal Services or send us an email at business@qed42.com!
Important References
If you see any discrepancies in the information provided above, please let us know.
Thanks!Drupal 9 is scheduled to be released on June 03, 2020. This is when the final Drupal 8 minor release 8.9 will also be released. Considering the history of previous Drupal major upgrades, Drupal 9 will relatively be smooth. Thanks to the semantic versioning introduced in Drupal 8. The upgrade to Drupal 9 will just be another minor upgrade with deprecated code removed. Drupal 8 has brought a lot of standardization in the Drupal world, thus allowing Drupal as a project to grow incrementally. To put it in simple terms, Drupal 9 contains the same code as of 8.9 + deprecated code removed. Here’s a reference image from the Drupal 9 documentation.