The finalized release date for Drupal 10.0.0 is December 14, 2022

As we announced previously, our Drupal 10 release schedule included three possible windows for the Drupal 10 release date. Today, we have finalized that we will use the third and final release window of December 14, 2022. This gives site owners 11 months to update from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.

Why is the August release date no longer an option?

We’ve worked hard over the past months to complete the requirements and strategic objectives for Drupal 10. The community has been hard at work removing deprecated code, deprecating unneeded dependencies, updating our JavaScript, and preparing modules to be moved to contrib.

The most critical requirement for Drupal 10 is our CKEditor 5 integration. CKEditor 4 is end-of-life at the end of 2023, so Drupal 10 must use CKEditor 5 instead. We’ve spent thousands of hours working on Drupal’s CKEditor 5 integration and collaborating closely with the CKEditor team. We also sprinted on CKEditor 5 at Drupal Developer Days, including accessibility and upgrade path testing. Through our work, we’ve discovered additional critical issues that need to be solved in order for CKEditor 5 to be stable, and these issues won’t be completed in time for the May 13 beta deadline required for the August release.

What are the advantages of the December release date?

Releasing 10.0.0 in December instead of August gives us more time to stabilize CKEditor. It also means more time for site owners to test moving their content from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5 in Drupal 9, so that we can ensure a smooth and safe upgrade path for this major change.

Additionally, with the December release, we have more time to complete strategic requirements for Drupal’s frontend and themes, including updating JavaScript dependencies to the latest major versions, making Olivero and Claro Drupal core’s default themes so that Drupal 10 has a fresh new look, and stabilizing the Starterkit Theme Generator to improve the theme developer experience and make maintaining Drupal core easier.

The December release also means we can release Drupal 10 with Symfony 6.2, which will have improvements and bug fixes over the current 6.0 version, and also will reduce the workload for our Security Team.

As we announced previously, Drupal 10 will require PHP 8.1, and the December release means that most hosting service providers will support PHP 8.1, so that sites don’t have to wait for platform fixes to start their Drupal 10 upgrades. PHP 8.2 is also scheduled for release in November, and Drupal 10 will include as much forward-compatibility with it as possible. (PHP 8.1 will remain the minimum requirement for Drupal 10 until November 2024.)

The beta deadline for Drupal 10’s requirements is September 9, 2022

Under the December schedule, Drupal 9.4.0 will be released on June 15. Drupal 9 and 10 development will continue in 9.5.x and 10.0.x after that date. All requirements for Drupal 10 must be completed by the beta deadline of September 9, 2022. The week of September 12, beta versions of both Dupal 9.5 and Drupal 10 will be released, and the stabilization and testing phase will begin.

While this gives us four extra months to complete the strategic requirements for Drupal 10, there is still a lot to do and we need your help! Read our previous announcement about how you can help, or join the #d10readiness channel in the Drupal community Slack to help with the latest needs. Or, if you’re attending DrupalCon Portland, come to the session on Getting ready for Drupal 10 and the contribution events.

However, new deprecations for removal in Drupal 10 must still be completed in Drupal 9.4 by May 12, 2022

Drupal 9 is end-of-life in November 2023, because that is the end of life for both Symfony 4 and CKEditor 4, which are dependencies of Drupal 9. This means site owners will only have 11 months to upgrade their sites from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.

We can make this easier on site owners by having as many modules Drupal-10-ready as possible on the day 10.0.0 is released. In order to make it easier for modules to add Drupal 10 compatibility now, no new deprecations for Drupal 10 will be added to Drupal 9.5. This means that the public API of Drupal 9.4 will be essentially the same as the API of Drupal 10, so modules can create their Drupal 10 versions using Drupal 9.4 so long as they do not use deprecated code.

The only exception is that core modules and themes may still be deprecated and moved to contributed projects as-is, since the upgrade path simply requires installing the contributed version of the project and ensuring that modules, themes, or sites declare the correct dependency on the contributed project.

Much of the migration path for contributed modules and themes can now be automated with Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.

Since Drupal 9.5 deprecations will not be removed in Drupal 10, we need to finalize what will be deprecated by the beta deadline for Drupal 9.4 on May 12. This includes deprecations of legacy JavaScript APIs and dependencies as well as PHP APIs. We need your help to complete this work!

There is still time to improve Drupal 9.4

Drupal 9.4.0-alpha1 will be released the week of May 2, and 9.4.0-beta1 will be released the week of May 16. This means that three weeks remain until the beta deadline for Drupal 9.4, so there is still a little time to complete improvements for it!

In particular, with your help, we still have a chance to make Claro stable, and to make it and Olivero the default themes of the Standard profile. If you’re attending Drupal/Con Portland, check the Birds of a Feather (BoF) schedule for the Claro BoF.

Read more on the DrupalCon Portland contribution events page (scroll down for Claro contribution information). Also join the #d10readiness channel in the Drupal community Slack to be involved in Drupal 10-related changes in Drupal 9.