Drupal 9.1 Is Here: Are You Ready To Upgrade?

As expected, Drupal 9.1 was released on schedule at the closure of 2020. We have already talked about the Drupal 9 release and how it’s a testament to the predictable and reliable nature of the Drupal release cycle. Drupal 9.1 takes a step forward by adding more features and releasing them as predicted.

In this blog, we will be discussing the new improvements and more that will follow for improving digital experiences. 

Is it worth upgrading?

The Drupal 9.1 stable release was out as expected on Dec 2^nd, 2020. We previously advocated that if you are on Drupal 8.9, you needn’t hurry to upgrade to Drupal 9.0 as you would not see many new features. But that’s changed.

Drupal 9.1 adds exciting features and updates along with support for PHP 8 (we have previously written about making Drupal 9 compatible with PHP 8).

It’s also worth upgrading as Drupal 9.1 brings significant changes in the user interface for both sighted users and assistive technology.

New features

Olivero theme

The much-awaited beta experimental frontend theme Olivero has been added to the Drupal core. As a replacement to Bartik, this is a modern and clear theme planned to become the new default Drupal theme later.

This particular theme is named after Rachel Olivero (1982-2019), the head of the organizational technology group at the National Federation of the Blind. She was a well-known accessibility expert and a Drupal community contributor.

Additions to the Claro theme

Claro was added as an experimental theme in Drupal 8.8. And now, Drupal 9.1 has added designs for various key pages like the extensions administration page, views administration, and status report. Also, the media library received Claro styled designs too.

Composer 2 and PHP 8 support

Drupal 9 fully works with Composer 2, and it is strongly recommended to update. Many of the popular plugins have also been updated. If the one you use doesn’t have updates, please help the plugin author with a PR to add the support (it’s quite easy). The new release comes with a significant improvement in performance and also reduces memory usage.

Drupal 9.1 has added support for PHP 8. PHP 8 brings in a lot of newer languages, and even though Drupal core isn’t using any of them (it still supports PHP 7.3), you could use features like union types and more in your custom code. Further, it’s likely that PHP 8 could be a requirement for Drupal 10 due to release in 2022.

Additionally, the user experience has been improved by making the content load faster as the images rendered by Drupal with known dimensions will now be set to lazy-load automatically. 

How to update from a previous version of Drupal

Now, this begs an important question: how will the current users of Drupal 7 or 8 migrate to Drupal 9.1? And also, if users have already migrated to Drupal 9, is there anything for them to execute with this release?

Every version of Drupal demands a different approach to migration. The idea is to pick the right Drupal migration strategy. Let’s look at how to migrate from different versions in this section. 

Upgrade from Drupal 7

Drupal 7 users can easily continue to migrate to Drupal 8.9 or migrate to 9.0 or 9.1 directly. Migrating directly to Drupal 9/9.1 will help them skip a step. The upgrade path for multilingual sites remains stable in Drupal 8.9, 9.0, and 9.1!

For more on how to upgrade from Drupal 7, check out the ultimate guide to Drupal migration. 

Upgrade from Drupal 8

For Drupal 8 users, there’s still time to step up to the latest 8.9 version until the end of Drupal 8, i.e., in November 2021. The bug fixes will continue, and the next one is scheduled for January 6, 2021. 

Sites on Drupal 8.8 will no longer receive security coverage. This means moving to Drupal 8.9/9 becomes crucial from this update onwards. 

According to Drupal.org, of the top 1000 most used drupal.org projects, 85 percent are updated for Drupal 9, so there is a high likelihood that most of the modules and themes you rely on are compatible.

Upgrade from Drupal 9

Drupal 9.1 is a minor release of Drupal 9. It can be updated from Drupal 9 versions for utilizing these new features without breaking backward compatibility (BC) for public APIs. While Drupal 9 will keep requiring Symfony 4, Drupal 9.1 has adjustments required to support Symfony 5 already. 

All these updates are underway to make Drupal 9 forward-compatible with Symfony 5 and 6 (not yet released). And also, as Drupal 10 is planned for mid-2022, these new upgrades target an excellent growth curve.

Running the update

We will only talk about updating from Drupal 8.9 or Drupal 9 in this section. Updating multiple versions is possible but needs additional care and consideration, which we won’t cover in this section.

• First of all, if you are already using the Olivero theme in your project, remove that by running this command. We need to do this as Drupal 9.1 includes Olivero in the core.

$ composer remove drupal/olivero

• To begin an upgrade from Drupal 8.9 or Drupal 9, run the following command:

$ composer require drupal/core:^9.1
drupal/core-composer-scaffold:^9.1 --update-with-dependencies

• If your project is using drupal/core-recommended, use that instead of Drupal/core in the command above. Also, for the above, your project must be using the recommended Drupal Composer template. It is quite likely that the command might throw some dependency related errors. 

Since there are a wide variety of possible dependency issues, we won’t cover everything here. But to get started, try replacing the --update-with-dependencies flag with --update-with-all-dependencies flag in the command above and try again.

Drupal 9.1 seems to be a promising update for users ready to take the plunge. If you are still not sure, give us a chance to convince you why upgrading to Drupal 9 is crucial now.

Share your Drupal 9 experience with us and watch this space for more insights!