Drupal 9 — enhanced flavor in new packing
First of all Drupal 9 is not a reinvention of Drupal. Drupal 9, contains all the features of Drupal 8, but with deprecated APIs removed, and some 3rd-party libraries updated. There are only two key differences in Drupal 9:
- Updates of dependencies to versions that stay supported.
- Removal of code that is deprecated with removal before Drupal 9’s release.
Other than these two things, Drupal 8.9 has most of the changes that Drupal 9 does but retains backward compatibility layers added through Drupal 8’s release and is a good choice to update to first if you have an existing Drupal 8 site, to ensure maximum compatibility and the smallest necessary changes for the Drupal 9 update. Long story, short- the vast majority features of Drupal 8 will be the same in Drupal 9 sites.
So one thing is sure that migration from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 will be smooth. The up-gradation of the contributed module will also be quick and no major changes will be required for the Drupal 9 support.
Basic Requirements for Drupal 9
Drupal 9 requires PHP 7.3 or higher, and the version requirement for Apache has been increased to Apache 2.4.7 or higher. The following database versions are supported by Drupal 9 core:
- MySQL or Percona 5.7.8.
- MariaDB 10.3.7 (Note that this is a more recent release than the MySQL version.)
- PostgreSQL 10 with the pg_trgm extension.
- SQLite 3.26 (PHP does not always use the system-provided SQLite, so verify that your PHP is compiled with at least this version).
Backend (PHP) dependency changes
Symfony
Symfony has been updated from Symfony 3.4.32 to 4.4.9. Like Drupal, Symfony follows a continuous upgrade path and deprecation policy, so that Symfony 4.0 has the same API as 3.4, minus deprecated code. Read about Symfony’s Backward Compatibility Promise.
symfony/mime and symfony/var-dumper have been updated from 5.0.7 to 5.0.8, and symfony-cmf/routing has been updated from 2.1.1 to 2.3.1.
Twig
Twig has been updated from 1.38.2 to 2.12.5. The changes for PHP developers and template creators are listed at Preparing for use of Twig 2 in Drupal 9.
For all the details please check — https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/9.0.0
Drush will only provide Drupal 9 compatibility in Drush 10.
So as a conclusion, Drupal 9 is an enhanced and secure version of Drupal 8. The migration from Drupal 8 is going to be smooth as well as you can easily plan direct migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9.
