Matt and Mike talk with Angie "Webchick" Byron, Gábor Hojtsy, and Nathaniel Catchpole about next year's release of Drupal 9. We discuss what's new, what (if anything) will break, and what will remain compatible.
Gábor and Angie selfie at DrupalCon Seattle.
Episode Guests
Gábor Hojtsy
Gábor is a Drupal core “Initiative Coordinator Coordinator”. He works at Acquia and is tasked with ensuring the Drupal’s 8 to 9 transition goes as smooth as possible.
Angie Byron
Herder of cats, Drupal core committer, Drupal Association Board Member, former Lullabot, Senior Director, former Product + Community Development for Acquia, Principal Community Manager at MongoDB
Nathaniel Catchpole
Nathaniel Catchpole has been using Drupal since version 4.5, and has been a regular contributor to Drupal core since 2006.
Mentioned in this Episode
Transcript
Transcript
- Matt Kleve:
- For May 2nd, 2019. It's the Lullabot Podcast. Hi everybody, it's the Lullabot podcast, episode 236. I'm Matt Kleve, a senior developer at Lullabot. With me as always, co-host of the show and senior front-end dev, Mike Herchel. Hey Mike!
- Mike Herchel:
- Hey, how are you doing?
- Matt Kleve:
- Hey, pretty good. Hey, we're still together.
- Mike Herchel:
- Amazingly. I don't even know how this happened.
- Matt Kleve:
- I'm looking into your deep gray eyes.
- Mike Herchel:
- Angie Byron. By now you should notice.
- Matt Kleve:
- All right. Anyway, we're at DrupalCon Seattle overlooking the skyline of Seattle, 26 floors above downtown, right at the end of DrupalCon.
- Mike Herchel:
- That is also accurate. And who do we have with us?
- Matt Kleve:
- We have a bunch of people with us. First on my right, we have Angie Byron. Hi Angie?
- Angie Byron:
- Hello.
- Matt Kleve:
- What are you doing these days? You're at Acquia?
- Angie Byron:
- I am also at Acquia.
- Matt Kleve:
- And what's going on?
- Angie Byron:
- Well I have been working with Gabor actually on all things Drupal 8. We oversee all the different initiatives going on. We try and unblock people who are blocked. We try and promote awesome things that are happening. We hold sprints, we try and get everybody rocking and rolling with Drupal 8.
- Matt Kleve:
- Angie your history you were a maintainer of Drupal 7. Am I using the words right?
- Angie Byron:
- Yes. Drupal 7 is all my fault. I was kidding. I was a core maintainer of Drupal 7.
- Matt Kleve:
- And during that time you were at Lullabot.
- Angie Byron:
- That's right.
- Matt Kleve:
- Yes. We worked together.
- Angie Byron:
- Yes. We did.
- Matt Kleve:
- A little bit anyway.
- Angie Byron:
- It was awesome.
- Matt Kleve:
- It's good. Next up we have Gabor Hojtsy from Hungary.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yes, indeed. Hi?
- Matt Kleve:
- Hey, so you are also Acquia, is that correct?
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yes ,indeed.
- Matt Kleve:
- What is your title at Acquia?
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- I was as a core initiative coordinator, coordinator to coordinate. Which means that I help all kinds of corn initiatives coordinate they work, and get their most awesome possibilities.
- Matt Kleve:
- Got you. We also have someone joining all the way from across the world. Nathaniel Catchpole?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Oh yes. Can you hear me?
- Matt Kleve:
- Yes. I totally can. You are catch on drupal.org and what is your role with a Drupal 9, which is what we're talking about?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- I'm a release manager and also framework for Drupal 8. I guess Drupal 9 as well at the moment.
- Matt Kleve:
- Okay. Who do you work for and what do you do?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- I'm funded half time to work at Italian Drupal Core by a third [inaudible 00:02:45]. The other half I work as a consultant for take one consulting.
- Matt Kleve:
- Got you.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- [inaudible 00:02:51].
- Matt Kleve:
- Cool. We're here and we're talking about Drupal 9 and-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Drupal 9? [crosstalk 00:03:00] We're just kind of getting into the flow with Drupal 8. It feels like, right? We're doing client projects, big stuff is being built. Cool things are still happening. Drupal 8, right? Isn't that what we're doing in Seattle?
- Matt Kleve:
- That's what I'm doing. Well, we've been doing Drupal 8 since like Denver, I don't know.
- Mike Herchel:
- Sure.
- Matt Kleve:
- So Drupal 9, right? It's only fitting that we're talking Drupal 9 I guess.
- Mike Herchel:
- Let's do a little bit of learning about Drupal 9 now. Maybe a year ago we saw or so driesch a blog post saying that the Drupal 9 was you're just going to have an easy upgrade. Is that correct or has that changed and who wants to talk about that?
- Angie Byron:
- Yes, that is entirely true with a little tiny asterisk, which is, yes scandalous. The asterisk is as long as people's modules and themes and such are not using deprecated code. The deal with Drupal 8 is that we've worked on it for, Geez, four years now or so since it got released. And every release we make improvements, we make new features, we make API improvements and this kind of thing, and then we'll deprecate old stuff that isn't as awesome as the new stuff that we put in. We retain backwards compatibility throughout all of this.
- Angie Byron:
- So that means that you, even though new releases of duplicate come out every six months, you don't have to change anything about your site. You can just use the new stuff optionally if you want to.
- Mike Herchel:
- Got you.
- Angie Byron:
- Yes. But Drupal 9, the big change between eight and nine is that we're going to remove all of those deprecations because it leads to easier to maintain code. It leads to more performant code, this kind of thing.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Well that's kind of the Drupal was moving forward, right? You don't need to maintain all of the bad stuff that Jeff did years ago and keep paying for your sins.
- Angie Byron:
- Right.
- Mike Herchel:
- Yes, sure. What we used to do, however is we worked on the new version in an entirely different branch, and we went crazy and we rearchitected everything because we like to reimagine how we do things and improve them. And what we decided to do with the Drupal 8 to nine transition is to instead work within Drupal 8 and do these deprecations in a way where we introduce some new thing. Then we also market the old thing as deprecated so we can gradually add the new capabilities to Drupal 8 and the new APIs and the new better practices that way we want to do them. And then we deprecate the old practices and we do it all in the same code base. That encourages us to not go crazy and be thoughtful of what we are doing precisely.
- Mike Herchel:
- It also allows us to get all of the new things tested with people and it allows us to then have this transition where we only need to remove the whole things and still keep most of the same code base for Drupal 9.
- Matt Kleve:
- What is involved when you deprecate code? Can you give me maybe an example of maybe a code or a function or something like that that you have deprecated, and how do you market deprecated and how does a module developer know that their code, that function is deprecated?
- Mike Herchel:
- We do two different things. So let's take file, a managed copy for example, if the function is a global function that is still existent jubilate and we add a PHP doc annotation on the function that says at deprecated and then we explain when we deprecated it, we explain when it will be removed and we also explain what you should do instead. In this case we introduce the file system service that you can use to copy files around. And the reason we did that is because now it's a service that you can replace with. You have a different file implementation, you can test the service separately, you can instrument the service.
- Mike Herchel:
- It's much more flexible and it's also consistent with the rest of the Drupal 8 code based the way Drupal 8 works. We keep the file, I manage copy function around and internally we change it to use the new way. We also add a trigger error call at the function which is meant to notify the testing system that, if there's something Drupal 8 is being used. So the testing system can be configured to fail on the occasion of hitting those trigger error calls. And then it will notify you if you are using deprecated functionality.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Mike, when I'm writing a module... And so if I'm working on client code for example, I know you probably don't end up doing this, right?
- Mike Herchel:
- Correct.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- If I end up writing something that is using a deprecated function because I have my id configured right, it's going to draw a strike through the function call and give me this little popup that says, "Hey, this is a deprecated function."
- Mike Herchel:
- Got you.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- And generally you can find documentation that says, "Do it right stupid." And-
- Mike Herchel:
- You can just Google it.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yes. Pretty much, exactly.
- Angie Byron:
- There's also tools for this to the... Matt Gleeman from Sentara wrote-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Sentara.
- Angie Byron:
- Yes.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- That sounds Nice, doesn't it?
- Angie Byron:
- [crosstalk 00:08:08] wrote a tool called Drupal check, which wraps this static analysis tool called PHP Stan. So you can run it on your module and it will spit out a list of problems with it. It's a command line tool. If you want something more graphical, Gabor has been working with a contractor to build a Drupal 8 version. Sorry, of a upgrade status module, which is a cool little UI wrapper around this that will give you a report.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Is there other function calls or method calls in Drupal 8 that are currently deprecated? Is it all done?
- Angie Byron:
- Yes.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Oh no.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- There's duplications in Drupal 8, but we deprecate it a lot of things before we had a system for deprecations. We still in the process of adding, collect documentation and grab calls to some of the things that with deprecated say six years ago when there was no policy and we never deprecated anything before. But most of that work is done now. It's actually she really, really close. One thing I would say is that, the trigger we have a is only help you if you have full test coverage for your module. If you don't, then you're still your [inaudible 00:09:26] and the static analysis tools will work for that. But you really want to test coverage to be able to find everything that's going on.
- Angie Byron:
- Hey Catch if people want to help fix the remaining deprecations and core, is there a tag for that or is there a way to Italy find
- Mike Herchel:
- [crosstalk 00:09:41] that's a great leading question.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yes. It's the deprecated tag on the core issue queue.
- Mike Herchel:
- Cool.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Okay. That sounds like a pretty good way to get some core commits. So using these tools, I think Angie is planning to do a contribution date topic tomorrow to lead people to act on these deprecations and contributed modules.
- Angie Byron:
- That's right.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- You want to know?
- Angie Byron:
- Yes. Well actually This got started by Dwayne or at Pantheon, he was at mid camp and ran this tool that took the Drupal check tool and ran through bash against the top 400 modules, I think, and created issues for all of them with the report of what the tool generated. So it would give a report of which deprecations were in which modules. We're trying to build off that work and tracking things under the Drupal 9 compatibility and the Seattle 2019 tags. So basically getting a whole bunch of people together tomorrow to work on those issues and read through the deprecation notices, which points them to the change records where they can find out more information. For example, Drupal set message should now be a messenger service and should use different object oriented programming, standards and sort of like think that.
- Angie Byron:
- What we wanna do is get a whole bunch of people together tomorrow to try and tackle the top 400 modules and get all of the deprecated code that we can remove, removed and in the process educate people on the fact that, if you're kind of been around for awhile and you've moved from say, six to seven or seven to eight, which was maybe less enjoyable to put it [crosstalk 00:11:23] nicely tiptoe around this. But anyway, it's trying to spread the word though, that that from eight to nine, it really is going to be a lot less onerous.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- And you're talking tomorrow Angie [crosstalk 00:11:36].
- Angie Byron:
- I don't know when this podcast-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Exactly. We were talking on the Thursday of DrupalCon, the closing session just happened. It's April 11th today, but today is probably, I don't know, two weeks from now or something.
- Angie Byron:
- The last thing of DrupalCon is a contribution sprint day. But this same model is being set up in a reusable way. And so this the same sprint can basically run it any Drupal event for the next like year.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Cool.
- Mike Herchel:
- There's some old versions of symfony and twig that Drupal 8 currently uses, right?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yes.
- Mike Herchel:
- How are we handling that?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- One of the big things, obviously with everything that's not a PHP dependency, we control what we do with it. But with Symfony and Twig, they have their own development teams that own release cycles, their own supports cycles, everything like that. And symfony for you that we use in Drupal 8 is going to end support at the end of 2021. So for us to release Drupal 9 with like full security support and for Drupal 8 security support to last long enough, we need to get onto Drupal 9 before that happens. Otherwise we'd not only be providing security score with Drupal 8, but we'd be providing security for Symfony as well and potentially triggered, I think triggers going to this security support yet, but it might get announced soon enough. What we've been doing is wanting patches against Symfony for finding the issues that we hit against Symfony 4 and fixing those in Drupal 8 too, which is, has not been the most straightforward thing that we've done in [inaudible 00:13:26] actually keeping up so far. I think we have a green patch against Symfony 4.2 at the moment.
- Angie Byron:
- Right.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- So there's maybe one or two issues still to commit from that group of issues. And if theoretically you can run a Drupal 8 site with Symfony 4, but you'll have to kind of patch composer or Jason to allow that still. But we're getting closer. With a bit of lack within the next six months, we will actually relax the composer requirements so that if you want to you can do a Drupal and still [inaudible 00:14:03] use it. And to be honest there's one or two things that contrib modules, one and two, but most of the changes contributed, just don't interact with those Symfony APIs. It's really... We have a few things that affect the core APIs and most of the people won't notice.
- Mike Herchel:
- Now my understanding is that symfony 5 out and if so, are we considering going to that or-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Symfony 5 is not out yet, but it will be I think in November. Yes, November last year. So there's Symfony 4.3 will come up in about a month and then simply 4.4 and 5.0 land in late November, December, 2019. But there's no simply five branch yet as, but once it is, we'll start thinking to that as well. I think... I don't know whether they were going to be on 74th Symfony five when we released you put nine. So we'll have to see how big a Symfony five changes are. Hopefully if at the same kinds of changes that we've run symfony 4 we should be able to at least for Symfony five and it shouldn't be a big jump for contrib to at all, but we'll have to see how it looks when it comes out.
- Mike Herchel:
- Yes, we don't know that yet. When in each case, I think for the dependency updates, we need to weigh the cost against the benefit because we are saying that the Drupal 9 update is going to be easy, but it's only going to be easy if we can control the extent of the code updates required in Contrib. The deprecation updates that we do, we document in our code base and for Symfony they document in their code base so it can automate finding those things and educate the community on how to do them. That's in fact what happened with a Twig 2 as well, is that we followed the same process and Drupal eight, seven that's coming out May 1st as already took two compatible if you are a patching your composer files. If I'm a contrib module, if I'm a control module, Arthur-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- It sounds like a terrible users [inaudible 00:16:19]
- Angie Byron:
- What I be?
- Mike Herchel:
- Yes. Is it going to be a situation where one module will work in both Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 or are there going to be two different branches that are very, very similar to each other?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- There's an issue open, but it's not yet fixed to change the version constraint in info files to allow you to specify more than one major version.
- Mike Herchel:
- Ooh, fancy. So we can't have... Well, assuming that this gets fixed, we will be able to have one version of a module that can support multiple major versions of Drupal.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yes [crosstalk 00:17:05].
- Mike Herchel:
- Wow. So actually the data that Pantheon worked on that they also run the bash script on off contrib at like 7,000 or 8,000 contrib branches and they found that all of those, I think 47% of them were already Drupal 9 compatible. They are core key and their info file and then a half off the rest of the pie was up to five things that they need to fix. So half of them modules already, Drupal nine compatible, other than the core key in the info file basically.
- Matt Kleve:
- Got you. I'm guessing like a lot of those are just the old depreciated Drupal set message or similar.
- Mike Herchel:
- Yes. A lot of the issues are.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- That's good. Hey, we're talking Drupal nine on the Lu;llabot podcast, closing off DrupalCon should go, where the are we?
- Angie Byron:
- Seattle.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Closing of DrupalCon Seattle. More of that coming up right after this.
- Chris:
- Hey, it's April from Drupal Camp Asheville. Tell us about the next camp April [inaudible 00:18:15].
- April:
- Hey Chris. The next camp is July 12th through 14th in Asheville, North Carolina. On Friday you are going to have trainings and contribution. On Saturday we'll have sessions and lightning talks. On Sunday, we're going to do hiking and tourism within the community. Our ticket price is $35 early bird and then starting May 13th it will be $45. We also have a great student discount for high school students, university or college students. So you can find out more information at druaplasheville.com.
- Chris:
- Excellent. We'll see you there.
- Matt Kleve:
- We'll come back to the Lullabot podcasts where at DrupalCon [inaudible 00:18:49].
- Mike Herchel:
- DrupalCon.
- Matt Kleve:
- Seattle.
- Mike Herchel:
- Yes. Seattle.
- Matt Kleve:
- [crosstalk 00:18:52]
- Angie Byron:
- To 2011.
- Matt Kleve:
- Yes. We are on DrupalCon Seattle 2019, April.
- Mike Herchel:
- And we're talking about Drupal 9.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- The rain fell. The Drupal fell and it was wonderful.
- Mike Herchel:
- Okay. That's horrible. But let's see [inaudible 00:19:09]
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- I don't think it fell like that's not right.
- Mike Herchel:
- [inaudible 00:19:14] I guess.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- It did a little bit.
- Mike Herchel:
- Seattle.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yes.
- Mike Herchel:
- We talked a little about like the upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 nine and that's going to be knock on wood, very easy to do.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- That's what they say.
- Mike Herchel:
- Yes. That's what they say.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- And [inaudible 00:19:26] is here with us. We have more Gabor Catch and web check that have the answers.
- Mike Herchel:
- But what about other websites are in Drupal seven, how screwed are they? Or are they at all?
- Angie Byron:
- If you're on Drupal 7, you will need to move off of Drupal 7. We are giving you an inordinately long time to do that. If you're on Drupal 7 now you don't need to panic. It's all good. The community will continue supporting Drupal until the end of 2021. And then in addition to that, there are a variety of vendors that we'll be offering longterm support, for at least three years after that'd be til 2024. Drupal 7 still going to be fine and still being around a sudden we supported it won't there'll be security coverage that kind of.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- I was at lunch today and there were the person that was sitting across me had a Drupal 7 website and they felt it was important that they get upgraded, but their boss said, "No, no, no, no, no. We need to work on sales. Like let's get sales out in front. Like our current website features are more important than any kind of future upgrades."And in the back of their mind they said, "Yeah, maybe like next year we really need to seriously start looking into it." And it's probably the right idea.
- Angie Byron:
- I think as soon as it makes financial and business sense for you, the sooner it is the better to do. A lot of people couple it with a larger digital replatforming, they couple it with a large redesign, something like that where it's like we are doing something that has business value and requires doing a lot of work on our website anyway. So why not do it on the latest version so that we're covered? The bottom line is the sooner you get on Drupal 8, the sooner that you don't have to do it with these like enormous migration pass every single time that we release a new version.
- Angie Byron:
- So once you make that leap to Drupal 8, then you're on the version of Drupal that's continuously going. So it'll be called Drupal 8 and then because you nine and then Drupal time, but it's the, the modern version written on top too. As you're going your code at the module versions, we'll continue to work on that kind of thing. So you should make the jump as soon as you can, but I don't think you necessarily need to panic and stop doing any kind of user facing features on your site.
- Matt Kleve:
- But there will be actual overlap where we are having security coverage for a Drupal 7 Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 all at the same time?
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yeah. That's a new thing. We used to drop support for the previous stable version when we released a new one.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- The two major versions at a time. That was the old way of going.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yep. And in this case, we extended the Drupal 7 support until November, 2021. This the same as when depilate subordinates, so we can provide more lead time for people to upgrade.
- Mike Herchel:
- Remind me, what is the estimated release date of Drupal 9?
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- The estimated release date of Drupal 9 is exactly June 3rd, 2020.
- Mike Herchel:
- Got you. So it's ready when it's ready. [inaudible 00:22:25]
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- I'm just going to say Angie, when we first met I remember you saying that's been 12 years or something. Maybe 11
- Angie Byron:
- [crosstalk 00:22:34].
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- When it's ready. Drupal 6 There'll be read will ready when it's ready. Right?
- Angie Byron:
- That was the old way that we did things because we had ambitious future goals that we wanted to get in. What we saw around the time of Drupal seven release and Drupal 8 or development is, in the past, the way Drupal we get into organizations is you'd have some techie that worked there and was Duvel evangelists. They're like, "I like Drupal, so we're going to use Drupal." [inaudible 00:23:01] And then eventually someone got wise and was like, "Huh, the people who have to use this shit everyday, should probably... The people who have to use this stuff everyday-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- No, no, no. We're okay.
- Angie Byron:
- The people who use this stuff everyday should probably have some kind of a say in what they have to use. And so they started bringing content authors into the CMS decision and they are very enamored with what they see when they look at something that's easy to use. And so, for Drupal's LUNGevity we had to invest in putting in a lot stronger user facing features. And those took a long time. That was why we were, when it's ready is because we had certain goals we knew he had to hit to keep the product relevant, but the problem was we could also change the API APIs really knowing we had very long window in which to do that. And that led to very long release cycles for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 a lot of times. So now-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Very widely different APIs too.
- Angie Byron:
- Yes. Exactly. So now we have flipped that model because we've done all that foundational work when you really needed to do with the product and now we do it in more of an a cadence. So it's every six months there's a minor release and every six months might release, that would be a year from now we're going to call Drupal 9.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- That was previously, there was a lot of pressure to do all kinds of things because we've only had a chance every four years or something to make a change and then it then whatever you did would be released two or three years later. You get feedback much later and your stuff was released much later and we changed it into this model where it's every six months. If you're a new thing does not make it in that six months, it has a chance to in the next timeframe. So you don't need to wait four years for it to happen. So it's much less of a pressure on the developers and it's a lot better feedback loop for us that we get feedback from people using Drupal, if that makes sense. Where we need to improve and it result in a better process altogether.
- Mike Herchel:
- Seems a lot more agile.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- And definitely fits better with like the speed of technological evolution, [inaudible 00:25:04].
- Mike Herchel:
- I would say so.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yes.
- Mike Herchel:
- For those on Drupal 7, there's a migration tools in core that they can use. We even have Drupal six migrations in Drupal core, that we're going to maintain up until Drupal 9. There's going to be direct migration from Drupal 6 to 9-
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Oh wow.
- Mike Herchel:
- ....on the day of the Drupal 9 release. We moved that out into contrib under release of Drupal 9, but it's going to be maintained up until the last minute, so it's going to be there. Angie and I worked on and several of our colleagues worked on the Drupal module upgrader [crosstalk 00:25:41] helps you update your module code to Drupal 8 and we hope to look back at it again and see if it uses any deprecated APIs and the generated code and hope to update that. So it's not using any deprecated APIs, in which case it's going to be a seven to nine upgrade tool as well as a seven to eight upgrade tool.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- I think I looked at that too awhile while back. That was fairly cool. It still works. Yes [crosstalk 00:26:07].
- Angie Byron:
- I give core maintainer access to that project with more or less anyone with a pulse. So it has been continued to be maintained even though we don't personally maintain it. It's really cool. It uses this underlying library called [inaudible 00:26:20] that basically parses PHP source code into more or less like a jquery likes structure. So you can say take a function that used to be called this and rewrite it into this type of Yammel file or rewrite it into this type of class with a [inaudible 00:26:34]. It can handle a lot of the most common kind of boiler plate things that converting hook block, converting a lot of the nodes saves stuff and all this kind of stuff.
- Angie Byron:
- It doesn't get you 100% of the way there by any means, but it got you like 70, 80% of the way there. The other thing I would do is it, it has two modes. It has an analyzed mode and I actually do it for me mode conversions. But the analyze mode is almost more helpful because it will point you to the documentation for each of these things. So you can kind of get your feet wet with how Drupal 8 does things differently. And then the auto conversion. So this is critical tool both for control module authors who for whatever reason haven't ported the jubilee yet. Drupal 8, it's been out for like three and a half years. So hopefully you have at least started that process. But a lot of sites have custom code, which no one is going to port for you. And so this tool was basically developed to help make that process easier.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Drupal, it's kind of come out and if I'm looking at a Drupal 9 the stock install Drupal 9 standard profile, is it going to look exactly the same? Are we going to see Bartek or they're going to be like any fancy new features? Is it going to have blockchain, AI support built in with the Omni channel surprise [crosstalk 00:27:48] maybe. I don't know.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all. [crosstalk 00:28:06] will be indistinguishable from [inaudible 00:28:10] apart from them and move code. But 9.1 we'll have new features again.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- [crosstalk 00:28:17]
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- And you won't get them into like once nine lanes do play is on security support for you and then it's gone.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Got you. We've had a few Drupal 9 Bob's here at Tribeca and Seattle. And a few people asked the same thing and I was like, The nice shiny new feature about Drupal 9 is the easy path through Drupal 9 because everybody's like, "So what's the new shiny thing?" And I'm like, "There's the new shiny thing that you always want it to have-
- Mike Herchel:
- as an easy upgrade. And that's the new shiny thing.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- And we are concentrating on making that happen. Then the other new shiny things will come with 9.1, 9.2 et cetera. And the new shiny things not going to happen anymore in eight. So we stopped the new shiny things in eight and according to our current plans. So the release of Drupal 9 on June three 2020 is going to be the same day for 8.9 and 9.0 and 8.9 is going to be supported until November, 2021 when Symfony support ends and we'll fix security issues in there, et cetera. But we will not build any new features in Drupal 8 anymore. So you need to hop over to Drupal 9 for the new features.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- That makes sense.
- Angie Byron:
- I think one of the things we can say about Drupal 9 it's like for a lot of the outside world, they kind of check in when a major version happens. That new thing is out. And this will be the first release of Drupal ever that already had layout builder content, moderation media, all this stuff in the box are ready to go out of the gate.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- But the upgrade is possible because it's easy. Looking forward to... I heard though the phrase Drupal 10 coming out. So the upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, what's that? What is that gonna look like?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- So with a bit of luck, all of the work that we've done in Drupal 8 will just continue to work in Drupal 9. We've spent a lot of the Drupal eight since release adding like deprecation support, a testing system. Some of the cytokine on us, this is only really come up in the past six months. We haven't had that in place during Drupal 8 lifecycle, which really kind of kicked in even a year or two off to release. We really got work on it. We've done that work, it will be there just to maintain way for Drupal 10. Drupal 9 modules should work on Drupal 10. All of this will be led. They'll still probably still be a migration path for Drupal 7. That should be a lot less work to do to enable the same thing to happen.
- Mike Herchel:
- To tell you the truth, I'm pretty excited about it. The larger CMS ecosystem, wordpress has taken a larger and larger chunk of the web. I think a lot of that is because their upgrades have been relatively easy, especially commercial Drupal. And I think even though there's nothing like fancy, there's unfortunately no blockchain support. But the easy upgrades are I yeah, a close second.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- That sounds nice. I keep thinking the Drupal has grown up, like not only have we thought about what's going to happen next, but the following step after that, like we're two steps ahead.
- Angie Byron:
- Literally.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Catch you. You weren't here. Do you have any DrupalCon thoughts? Sorry, you weren't here.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yeah, a Chunky emojis [inaudible 00:32:00]
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- So it works is not necessarily the lowest bar setting it should be. It works and might work on Drupal 9 too.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Actually the big thing I would say is that, a lot of people are still waiting to do work from when Drupal 9 branch opens.Still even now there's all of the things that you want to do in Drupal 9 you can do now. There's been massive refactoring to like entities storage to like automatic schema changes to entities and things like that. These are all landed in the past like year. If there's things that you are annoyed with Drupal, you can actually just work on those things and they'll either get into Drupal 8 or to Drupal 9 or possibly Drupal templates they can all decide to work on. But there's nothing that stops you from working if you want to like fix something, fix bugs, fixed UX issues. It's all available all the time. I think that it's not quiet that were quite patent or not quite got into that kind of way of thinking about changes yet. Those of us working all the time, all the time have, I think people are used to get involved at the end of the cycle is still kind of waiting for the end of the cycle and you don't have to anymore.
- Mike Herchel:
- Gabor, any final thoughts? Anything you want to add?
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yeah, I was very excited about the energy here at DrupalCon, how people-
- Mike Herchel:
- It was nice, wasn't it? The energy was a good one.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yeah. How people receive the news and how excited they are that this is going to be that we're on the right track.
- Mike Herchel:
- Angie?
- Angie Byron:
- I have a thought which is we still have a large portion of sites that are [inaudible 00:33:46] today. And I would love to brainstorm with people about how to make the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 less painful. These kinds of podcasts are really helpful cause they're informing people of, what the future's going to look like, what tools are available and that kind of thing. But it feels like we're missing a really cohesive making this... It's not easy, but it's also not impossible and trying to make it as easy as possible so that people don't get intimidated to move to Drupal 8 because the sooner you adopt it, the sooner you get to benefit from where all the community innovation is happening.
- Mike Herchel:
- Sure.
- Angie Byron:
- I would love to make that a focus of the next couple of months while we're getting Drupal ready for Drupal 9, I would love to not forget about Drupal 7 and make sure that we focus on helping as many of those sites move to Drupal 8 and the new world order as possible.
- Mike Herchel:
- Seven to eight is a tough one though. Where should somebody start if they all they have now as heartburn?
- Angie Byron:
- One place to start is just like, look at your current site, do an audit, see if you actually need all of that stuff. A lot of people have, like especially if your site's been up for awhile, you know you have a bunch of stuff that's just hanging around maybe as disabled modules you don't even use anymore. So I think that's where I would start is like it's a good excuse to just kind of do some spring cleaning. [crosstalk 00:35:05]. And because that's joyful seven site is the easier the migration is going to be.
- Mike Herchel:
- And that's a little tough too cause lots of the sites that I've seen that had a bunch of Drupal 7 modules enabled, they may not have like a one to one Drupal 8 version because it's handled in a totally different manner. Right. It's like this is some decorative module that does something fancy for you. But in Drupal 8 you might use views to make that happen.
- Angie Byron:
- That's true. Especially if it's a Drupal 6 site or something. There are new approaches, upgrade status module, the seven version of that helps because it will inform you like, "Hey, this module now has a different module as a replacement. So like address field is now address or global redirect does now redirect stuff like that. So it'll help you with some of those basic things. But there are some things that to take different architectural approaches and you'll want to kind of think through those.
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- One massive difference with the migration path of Drupal 8, is because we have a migrate in Cornell or you can build a Drupal 8 site, how you would build a new site and then take the data from the old site and fill out the content. Whereas you used to have to have a code base and take a recent upgrade it, you don't have to do that anymore. You can just build a brand new site or the new way so that you would do things and then pull the data and it takes a little bit more custom work to do it that way. But it's slightly easier than it used to be to completely change which watch are you using? If you want to go from, I don't know, panels to lay or build or something like that, then you can just build the new layouts. You don't need to upgrade your old ones who just build a new ones and then bring your content in and that's it. The configuration to make this makes us a lot easier than it used to be when you saw quite from say six to seven.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yes [inaudible 00:36:53] is a very stable now it's a smart stable, is that correct?
- Nathaniel Catchpole:
- Yes.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- That's really the trio of migrate module upgrader and upgraded status. So much, a lot greater for your own custom code, migrate for your content and data and upgrade status for the contributed modules.
- Mike Herchel:
- So easy Microsoft could do it.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- God help us all.
- Mike Herchel:
- Any thoughts, Mike?
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- I had such a great time at DrupalCon, is so nice to talk about this Drupal 9 is so exciting and it's just fun to see where this is going. And I am looking forward to getting home because exhausting.
- Mike Herchel:
- I don't know that Drupal nine sounds exciting beings, that there's nothing new.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Drupal 9 sounds boring.
- Mike Herchel:
- That's the exciting part, right? The exciting part is that there's not a terrifying upgrade in our near future.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- I'm excited that we're not going to lose the sites that would otherwise have to do a complete replatform. When you go from say Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, it's a lot of work [crosstalk 00:37:57]opportunity to move away. That is not a good thing for Drupal as a whole I think that with the ease of Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, people are not going to take that opportunity to move away because Drupal 9 is so easy.
- Mike Herchel:
- There's a sales pitch there.
- Angie Byron:
- There's also going to be whatever, 12,000 modules available on day one.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Exactly.
- Angie Byron:
- [crosstalk 00:38:23].
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- I am honestly excited about it.
- Mike Herchel:
- That's good.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Cool.
- Mike Herchel:
- Thanks for joining us everybody.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Yes. Thanks.
- Angie Byron:
- Thanks for having us.
- Gábor Hojtsy:
- Thanks for joining us from Japan, Catch!