The Anatomy of Drupal 10: Latest Features and Upgrades

By 2026, the Content Management System (CMS) market size is expected to reach $23,500^[i] Million, rising at a CAGR of 16.7%^[ii] from 2021.

The reason for this global growth is the increased demand for digital CMS solutions across industries like healthcare, BFSI, IT, telecom, government, and others. CMS systems help these industries combat common challenges like content management, website maintenance, workflow management, branding, etc.

One such open-source digital experience platform that has earned a reputation in the CMS ecosystem for its scalability, flexibility, performance, security, and accessibility is Drupal.

No wonder Drupal websites make up 3.24%^[iii] of the top 1 Million websites globally.

However, to take their CMS expertise a notch higher, Drupal launched its latest release on 14th December 2022, Drupal 10.

Drupal 10 comes with a modernized backend look and is built on the latest Symphony 6.2 version. It delivers powerful features and tools to provide a user-friendly interface, multi-language support, and enhanced user experience.

Let’s quickly dig into the latest additions in Drupal 10 and explore more about creating highly-functional, responsive, and immersive websites.

New Features and Upgrades in Drupal 10

1. Olivero Default Theme

Drupal 10 features a new default front-end theme, Olivero, with a modern look and feel. You can incorporate it to your website and leverage it for:

• Modern Designs: Drupal provides a theme that has a contemporary feel and remains visually appealing over time. It’s built after carefully considering design elements, such as drop shadows and gradients, and enables you to use them sparingly. Also, using it, you can enhance your website typography, animation, and color palettes.

• Enhanced Functionality: This theme incorporates support for the latest commonly used Drupal features, such as second-level navigation, embedded media, layout builder, and more. Using it, you can leverage robust and versatile functionalities into your websites, enhancing UI/UX.

• WCAG AA Conformance: This theme provides accessibility as a top priority, by eliminating Drupal’s existing stringent requirements. It adheres to the WCAG AA standards due to a close collaboration with accessibility experts and the Drupal accessibility team. It also ensures that your website and digital content are accessible to people with disabilities.

2. Claro Administrative Theme

A seamless administrative and editorial experience is a crucial aspect of any CMS. Drupal has long relied on the clean and functional administrative theme – Seven, which integrated well with contributed modules.

However, with recent advancements in Modern JavaScript, Seven fell short due to a limited module ecosystem, its poor performance in dynamic web, lack of modern JavaScript tooling, etc. This led to the development of a new administrative theme in Drupal 10, Claro. This offers a highly accessible user interface for efficient website management.

With Claro’s modernized editorial UI, you can elevate your administrative experience, while maintaining the core functionality for experienced users. Additionally, it ensures a more contemporary and user-friendly experience while retaining the essence of the Drupal CMS.

3. CKEditor 5

CKEditor 5 has undergone a complete rebuild in Drupal 10 to harness the latest advancements in JavaScript application development. Using this default editor, manage your application’s text data with exceptional editorial experience. Additionally, leverage its modernized user interface, replaced balloon panels, quick & easy-to-edit tables, and improved style-drop-down/list features.

Not just this, with CKEditor’s state-of-the-art solutions, collaborate & export content and streamline your editing process. This further enables you to:

• Track edits in your content

• Access revision history

• Add comments to text and block elements

• Experience real-time collaboration

• Set-up notifications

• Create Word and PDF files

4. Modern JavaScript Components

Within the JavaScript community, developers utilize ES6 standards and vanilla JS over jQuery for tasks involving DOM manipulation and AJAX requests. This shift is influenced by factors like the integration of jQuery functionalities into modern browsers and the reliance on advanced frameworks like React and Vue.js for application development.

Observing this trend, the Drupal community replaced its jQuery library with contemporary JavaScript wherever feasible in the core codebase. This enables your Drupal 10 websites with a cleaner front-end output, aligning with the evolving practices within the JavaScript ecosystem.

5. Theme Starterkit Tool

Theming plays a pivotal role in Drupal development as it determines the visual appearance of a website or application. Recognizing its significance, the Drupal community enhanced theming capabilities, making them more accessible, efficient, and aligned with current trends.

Now, Drupal 10 has included a Starterkit theme, which provides convenient commands for generating a new theme equipped with essential files and configurations. This simplifies your initial setup process and allows you to quickly get started with creating customized themes tailored to your project requirements.

6. Symfony 6

In Drupal 10, Symfony 6 is used as the underlying back-end framework, while PHP 8.1 is used as the minimum supported version. This strategic decision ensures that Drupal projects upgrading to Drupal 10 can benefit from all the backend advancements.

Moreover, Symfony 6 provides you with various enhancements like routing, services, locales, and multilingual capabilities. So leverage these latest improvements in Drupal 10 and enhance your website performance, expand functionality, and improve development experiences.

Unlock Your Website Potential With Drupal 10

Now that you understand the reasons for upgrading to Drupal 10, the next big question is how to do it. This process requires careful planning on how the content will be migrated to Drupal 10 or what changes need to be made to the website. It involves backing up your website, upgrading modules and themes, or updating Drupal itself. After the upgrade, thorough testing is required to ensure your website functions properly, followed by performance optimization for an optimal user experience.

So, leverage Drupal as your new CMS to build & manage a robust and dynamic website.

Wish to Empower Your Website Development With Drupal 10? Talk to Us!

References:

^[i] & ^[ii] Globe News Wire
^[iii] Web Tribunal