Announcing Our First Client Drupal 9 Website!

Anthony Lindsay

Director of Managed Services

With decades of experience, Anthony leads the Annertech Managed Services Team, delivering top quality design, development, and, ultimately peace-of-mind services to all of Annertech's wonderful clients.

Wooden blocks in the shape of a loudspeaker

This week we deployed our first client Drupal 9 website for WBT Systems and it was probably the first one in Ireland, but what’s the big deal? Well, actually quite surprisingly: it’s not really a big deal, updating from Drupal 8 to 9.

Drupal 8 was released in late 2015, heralding a significant departure from its predecessor, Drupal 7 and required a complete re-build.

However, the benefits of moving were evident early, and companies who decided make the jump were glad they did so.

The benefits included:

Ease of use - in-place editing, using CKEditor
New theme engine, using Twig
New Symfony Framework
Enhanced multilingual capabilities
Extensibility - enhanced capability to integrate with third-party systems
Better performance - using BigPipe technology that loads pages quicker
Media library - browse and reuse media across your site
New features - new features are released every 6 months

But the big news was that there would be no more major re-builds – you didn’t have to re-build the site for future upgrades, new features will be carried out in smaller updates.

Though Drupal 9 does not offer any new features in its initial release, it does offer a leaner, more secure system with APIs that are easier to work with - these changes are most noticeable to developers.

Future releases of Drupal 9 will continue to feature additions and improvements along the six-month release timeline that has been established with Drupal 8.

Drupal Train Analogy

Unlike previous new major versions, Drupal 9 is not a reinvention of Drupal. It was largely built in Drupal 8 through deprecating APIs and updated dependencies. Other than these two things, Drupal 9.0.0 is the same as Drupal 8.9, the last Drupal 8 minor release.

To illustrate this, Drupal.org came up with a rather nice analogy and visual. "Imagine your website is a train. Previously, moving major versions meant moving the train to a different track entirely. After Drupal 8, new major versions will just be stations on the same track."

Upgrading to Drupal 9 as part of your support contract

In our recent blog post, Drupal 9 is Here - Upgrading has Never Been So Easy, we outline the relatively straightforward steps required to move from Drupal 8 to 9.

WBT Systems decided to upgrade under their support and maintenance contract with us and a number of other clients have now decided to follow suit.

As you can see from the train analogy, those of you still on Drupal 7 – that is end of life in November 2022 – there is no upgrade path. However, now is the time to improve your customer experience and take advantage of the new features and functionality that will be released every 6 months.

Why not make the jump to Drupal 9 today!