Our lead community developer, Alona Oneill, has been sitting in on the latest Drupal Core Initiative meetings and putting together meeting recaps outlining key talking points from each discussion. This article breaks down highlights from meetings this past May. You'll find that the meetings, while also providing updates of completed tasks, are also conversations looking for community member involvement. There are many moving pieces as things are getting ramped up for Drupal 9, so if you see something you think you can provide insights on, we encourage you to get involved.
Drupal 9 Readiness
Meetings are for core and contributed project developers as well as people who have integrations and services related to core. Site developers who want to stay in the know to keep up-to-date for the easiest Drupal 9 upgrade of their sites are also welcome.
- Usually happens every other Monday at 18:00 UTC.
- Is done over chat.
- Happens in threads, which you can follow to be notified of new replies even if you don’t comment in the thread. You may also join the meeting later and participate asynchronously!
- Has a public agenda anyone can add to at https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3054328
- Transcript will be exported and posted to the agenda issue.
Meeting Highlights From 05/13/2019
Update on Drupal 9 dependency targets (CKEditor, Symfony, PHP)
- The plan is to release Drupal 9 with CKEditor 4 support, add optional CKEditor 5 support during D9's active support, and deprecate CKE4 before D10
- D9 will probably be EOL in Dec. 2023 and CKE 4 can have security coverage through then
- Policy issue
Documentation Updates for Drupal 9
- You can find Drupal 9 FAQ as a set of guidelines at https://drupal.org/docs/9.
- Released open source slides for anyone to present at http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2019-may-03/present-your-own-state-drupal-9-session-get-slides-here.
Drupal.org tasks for Drupal 9
Opened an issue today to track these and currently working on Drupal 9 plan summary via https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg/issues/3046058.
Deprecations
Upgrading to Drupal 9 version of Classy and Stable could be hard given the number of unknowns. We are proposing to provide the current versions of Classy and Stable in contrib space. This would allow pre-existing themes to add a dependency to the contrib version of the themes and have the exact same behavior in Drupal 9 as they had in Drupal 8.
To avoid this problem in Drupal 10, we are proposing to not ship Classy as part of Drupal 9. The feature gap would be replaced with a new starter kit theme.
- https://www.drupal.org/project/upgrade_status alpha2 was released exactly 2 weeks ago and we keep improving drupal-check.
- Just posted a proper introduction to Drupal Check over the weekend.
- Plan for Drupal 9 markup and CSS backwards compatibility was discussed at DrupalCon and documented as a Drupal Core issue.
Risks for June 2020 Target Date
- Biggest worries right now are: D7 to D8 migration support, including finishing multilingual support and UX improvements.
- Filtering fails that are not actionable.
- Roadmap for Simpletest moving forward. Currently Simpletest isn't formally deprecated, we're welcoming any thoughts and suggestions here https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2866082.
Meeting Highlights From 05/27/2019
New Drupal 9 Readiness Features & New Contrib Readiness Data
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https://twitter.com/DropIsMoving/status/1130868996771844096 is now live on drupal.org.
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Also Dwayne McDaniel figured out a new way to run his contrib analysis scripts and published a fresh set of data at https://github.com/mcdwayne/d9-drupal-check-allthemodules.
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Gábor Hojtsy took that and analyzed the top ones up to 50 uses and created this summary doc with docs pulled from api.d.o with a script: http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2019-may-24/analysis-top-uses-deprecated-code-drupal-contributed-projects-may-2019.
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Also the coder rules got fixed to conform better to the core trigger_error()/@deprecated formats and a new coder release is out now, so core can update to that https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3049433.
Documentation Updates for Drupal 9
An extensive review was completed of the Drupal 9 docs. The review yielded grammatical improvements to improve English formatting.
New Critical for the D9 Roadmap
There's some discussion already in the other meta https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2866082.
Sprint plans for DrupalDevDays Transylvania?
- WebTestBase is officially deprecated, "Convert contrib test suites to BTB" might be a good sprint topic.
- Alex Pott has a good start on getting the conversion docs a little more up to date and we're trying to continue to add to it, https://www.drupal.org/node/2166895.
Release schedules (branch opening, alpha, beta, rc) for Drupal 8.9 and 9.0
- Beta1 would be tagged the first week of April 2020 if we are ready for 9.0.0 in June.
- If we're not ready for 9.0.0 in June by say March, then we switch 8.9 back to a normal minor with a normal minor schedule (and announce the December release date).
- Also with regards to documenting on the releases page we should probably inform the rest of the committers first. The email should outline the alphas, March as a go/no go decision, deadline for June vs. Dec. 3. as well as the beta and RC dates.
Freezing entity schema updates between 8.9 and 9.0
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With 8.7 especially, but not only, entity schema updates are causing a lot of trouble for sites trying to update. Sometimes it is a bug in the update, just as often it is corrupted data or custom code on sites trying to update. Given 9.0.0 will have a lot of other changes, we should consider not committing any big entity schema updates to 8.9/9.0.
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Opened an issue, freeze entity schemas in 8.9.x and 9.0.x to work on solving this.
Out of the Box Initiative Meeting 05/28/2019
- We want to create a roadmap for Drupal 8.8 release. You can find the details here: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3047414
- Talking about SimplyTest.me Umami Demo.
- Trying to shave off all installation time and figure out where it goes.
- Adding an option with and without multilingual.
- Talking about creating help pages about all new features and things in 8.8 release.
- Add a floating tour button on pages that have an explanation (need to create an issue).
- Implement Layout Builder on every page, recipe, and article.
- Working on Umami’s Language-switcher as a drop-down menu.
Layout Initiative Meeting 05/29/19
Currently, when using Layout Builder, the already added sections give no indication of their layout or its configuration. This isn't a big deal for sighted users who are only using the default Layout Builder layouts, because the only configuration is the widths of the columns, which they'll be able to see visually.
However, for non-sighted users, or if a layout has more complex configuration (for example, using different proportions for different view port sizes, or adding class names, or anything since layout plugins have full control over their settings and rendering), then there is no indication given of the section's layout or its configuration.
An issue was created to document this concern.
That's A Wrap
Check back for frequent meeting recaps to gather insights on the latest Drupal Core developments and find ways to get involved. Our community thrives when we all come together!