9 THINGS TO EXPECT IN DRUPAL 9!

Do you want to serve personalized experiences to your users? Are you managing a large amount of data, served from disparate systems? Is your IT team unable to support you with rapid changes to your marketing platform? Are you concerned about data ethics and how your technology is geared to ensure standardization? Do you want to quickly prototype your marketing platform and test it for your specific use case? Drupal 9 is here to solve many of the content problems you may have.

Drupal 9 is scheduled to be released on June 3, 2020. The next major release of Drupal comes with features aligned with the future.

Here are 9 things to look out for in Drupal 9.

1. User experiences for new users.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The experience of new users, beginners and testers with Drupal is that this context facilitates greater overall adoption of Drupal.

In Drupal 9 there will be an improved user experience for new users. Some of the specific features in the roadmap include installation profiles for common use cases, role-based separation and an enhanced 'Try Drupal' experience that helps users become familiar with the platform. Installation profiles mean a ready-to-use Drupal package that solves specific use cases such as a profile for conferencing, a profile for a government project, a profile for setting up a multilingual project, etc. This will make it easier for first time users, to not only try Drupal but to try Drupal in a context that is relevant to them. Role-based separation of journeys is a concept where what the user can experience based on their role is different. Today this is limited to an anonymous user and an administrator role. "Try Drupal'' is a quick and free compilation of Drupal in the cloud by popular Drupal cloud hosting providers.

2. Decouple CMS capabilities.

Tomorrow's content can flow to digital screens at conferences, kiosks and other marketing channels from a central content repository. Decoupled / headless CMS capabilities are a prerequisite for this "cross-platform publishing". 

Drupal 9 offers enhanced decoupled CMS capabilities. Some of the key enhancements in this area include automatically generated API documentation, JSON API explorer to quickly generate APIs and optimized performance. The JSON API Browser is an interactive web application that simplifies the creation of JSON queries. Performance optimizations are much needed in the context of large-scale applications running on a decoupled CMS design.

3. Native DAM

Enterprises have a large volume of content. Digital Asset Management (DAM) brings this content to a central location, making this content accessible and contextually available to serve the end-user the content they need. This is important for marketers whose goal is to interact with their users/customers. Artificial intelligence and content analytics are closely related to DAMs.

The Drupal 9 roadmap includes the creation of a DAM solution.

4. Integration framework

Today's marketing solutions are a combination of different tools, cloud services and content publishing channels that provide specialized capabilities. Some of these interactions include social integrations, integrations with bots, integrations with CRM solutions, marketing automation solutions and so on.

Drupal 9 continues to act as an integration framework. Depending on popular needs, this layer is usually connected by contributed modules. To make sure you have access to these modules, it is important to keep them up to date.

5. Enhancing editor tools

Publishers are one of the main stakeholders using Drupal. They constantly use Drupal to produce new content. Drupal has always prioritized improvements to the content editor tools.

These tools allow marketers and content teams to work independently of the technology teams and allow content to be published with faster time to market.

The Admin UI Claro theme brings a modern look and feels that enhances visual appeal with a focus on accessibility and mobile compatibility in Drupal 9.

Rich media content such as images, videos and tweets are an integral part of today's digital content. Managing this rich media content in a centralized repository that delivers it to different devices, channels or various experiences further improves the speed at which publishers can publish. 

Drupal 9 brings with it the media module as part of the core. Media will help organize media assets in a way that allows for easy reuse. These are augmented by existing capabilities to manage accountable images, integrations with streaming services or external video hosting services.

6. Structured data

Structured data is simply data that is organized based on specific data models. Information around a particular piece of content is captured, stored and displayed based on the meaning that the particular piece of data provides to the content as a whole. Structured data also helps build relationships.

As we move into an era of personalization and individualized experiences with data forecast to increase in the coming years, structured data becomes extremely important. Structured data is also important in the context of search engine optimization.

Some new features under consideration in Drupal 9 include GraphQL support for managing large amounts of structured data.

7. Open web standards

Open web standards" define a set of best practices to follow while publishing on the World Wide Web. With increasing data privacy challenges, the abilities of certain organizations/browsers to take control of user data have increasingly focused on "open web standards" that help preserve the "open web".

Aspects of the "open web standard" that will continue to be a priority in Drupal 9 include GDPR, Accessibility, Privacy, default speed, Webmentions and Semantics. 

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is the core of Europe's digital privacy legislation. Accessibility is something that Drupal has been. Web accessibility means ensuring that Drupal is designed and developed to be usable by people with disabilities. Drupal has adhered to WCAG accessibility guidelines since Drupal 8. Webmention is now a standardized protocol that allows one website address (URL) to notify another website address that the former contains a reference to the latter. 

8. Simple update process

Ease of software maintenance reduces the cost of maintenance for the end-user.

Drupal maintenance is made easier with a simple upgrade process in Drupal 9. The fully integrated Composer initiative facilitates updates to third-party tools which will continue to be a key area of focus in Drupal 9. Further down the roadmap there are automatic upgrades that further enhance this process.

9. Application Change Management

Agile development is the norm of the day. Customers want to be on a project where the product is developed interactively, quickly testing their ideas. The key to this is a technical process that ensures tools that facilitate easy implementation of application changes. 

Continued emphasis to support automated deployment using Devops tools such as Jenkins or Kubernetes and enhanced configuration management systems make this possible. 

What is unique to the Drupal 9 version is that the upgrade process is really simple. You only need 4 steps to upgrade your Drupal 8 site. Many of the most complex sites go beyond Drupal core and today, well before the release of Drupal 9, we also have close to 1500 fully supported contrib modules and more than 3400 modules to be completed. 

Are you evaluating migrating to Drupal 9?  Write to us for a free audit consultation and approach for your site.