Drupal 8 to 9 was the easiest major Drupal upgrade in a decade. The next version is planned to be a similar step. Planned to be released in June 2022 with fallback dates in August and December, Drupal 10 will be a refined version of Drupal 9. The tools and processes to use to prepare for it are the same as with the previous upgrade.

What's included in Drupal 10?

The following key features are in the works in Drupal 9 and will be included in Drupal 10:

  • Claro administration theme (replacing Seven).
  • Olivero default theme (replacing Bartik).
  • Further improved Layout Builder and Media functionality.
  • Better decoupled developer and site builder experiences, especially for menu and URL handling.
  • Introduction of CKEditor 5 with better authoring experience and more modern editing (replacing CKEditor 4).
  • Modern JavaScript components to replace jQuery UI and some uses of jQuery.
  • Theme starterkit tools for bespoke theme creation.
  • Symfony 5 or 6 under the hood (replacing Symfony 4) and PHP 8 required to keep the system secure.

Screenshot of the Olivero theme
Olivero theme screenshot

How do I prepare for Drupal 10?

Drupal 9 users
If you are on Drupal 9, the best right now is to help automate the process towards Drupal 10. Contribute to drupal-rector to help. There are already various APIs that could be covered there. You can already use Upgrade Status on your Drupal 9 site to get an estimate of the work needed, but new deprecated APIs will still be added until Drupal 9.3.0. 
Drupal 8 users
Drupal 8 will be end of life in November 2021! You must update to Drupal 9 first to update to Drupal 10 later on. Use Upgrade Status to analyse your site. There are almost 6 thousand contributed projects ready for Drupal 9. Work with contributed project maintainers to update any required projects that are not yet ready. Most code updates can be automatically done using drupal-rector, use that for your custom code too.
Drupal 7 users
Drupal 7 will be end of life in November 2022. Yes, this is after the planned release of Drupal 10. However, there is no guarantees yet that the earliest June 2022 release date will work out. Also, while Drupal 10 will include migration tools from Drupal 7, it is much more likely that the contributed projects you use are available for Drupal 9 already, and may not be ready shortly after the Drupal 10 release. Therefore it is highly suggested you don't wait to migrate to Drupal 10 directly but start updating to Drupal 9 soon. The move to Drupal 10 will be way easier from Drupal 9.

Read more about Drupal core release dates.

How to get involved?

The Drupal 10 readiness team holds meetings every other Monday at 6pm GMT in #d10readiness on Drupal Slack. Join the channel to discuss other questions about Drupal 10 anytime.