Joris Vercammen
Drupal & PHP specialist
Four reasons why you should look out for Drupal 10
On 14 December, a week after St Nicholas, we will find real toys in our shoe. That's when Drupal 10 will finally be released. Even though updates follow each other at a rapid pace, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate Drupal 10's rollout. We list the four updates - two for content marketers, two for developers - that are already making our hearts beat faster.
New CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10
CKEditor 4 was the default editor from Drupal 8.0 onwards. But time flies, and due to security reasons and discontinued support for the editor, we are now switching to version 5. You may already know CKEditor 5 from Drupal 9.3. Whereas until then it was an optional WYSIWYG editor, it now becomes the default for websites built in Drupal 10. And it's a quasi complete good-news-show. Let's highlight it all.
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New, improved UI
The new editor is laid out in a lighter and modern design. Updated icons and toolbars provide a clear user interface and improved user experience. -
Media widget and hyperlinks with their own toolbar
If you want to embed media or a hyperlink in CKEditor 5, you can quickly customise it with a special toolbar that hangs just below the content. No more separate screens with numerous options, but a simple toolbar to edit accessible media and URLs.
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Tables with an assigned dropdown
The new editor lets you insert tables quickly and efficiently. Styling and customisation has become even easier.
- Styles dropdown reworked
The styles dropdown has been reworked, so you can preview nicely in advance what each specific style will look like. - Document lists
The biggest challenges addressed in CKEditor 5 were definitely the General HTML Support feature and document lists. In an editor, a well-functioning list function is tricky. You have to consider hundreds of interaction scenarios, nested list items and multi-block list items. All these interactions have been looked at for the best possible UX.
New front-end theme Olivero for Drupal 10 websites
As of Drupal 10, Olivero takes over from Bartik as the default front-end theme. Rub your hands already, because as usual, a new theme brings an up-to-date theme and functionalities.
- Modern design
Olivero's design is modern yet timeless. Design elements such as drop shadows and colour gradients are used sparingly, while typography, animation and colour palettes have been considered. Good decisions to stand the test of time.
- Support for new features
The theme provides support for many features that were recently built for Drupal. Think second-level navigation, embedded media, layout builder and more. -
WCAG AA compliant
The theme will be WCAG AA compliant, meeting Drupal's strict accessibility standards with flying colours.
We all breathe a sigh of relief. Bartik was still surfing on designs from 2008. So we are leaving those times behind. What this mainly means is that Olivero turns out to be an ideal default theme for intranet environments.
With Olivero as your default theme, you are off to a strong start. Yet Calibrate builds custom themes more often than not. These give us more freedom, without sacrificing design or performance.
Leaner code, meaner core
Less is more. hat certainly applies to code. Less code kills two birds with one stone: on the one hand, it makes it easier to maintain the Drupal core, and on the other hand, it speeds up page loading speed. This is precisely why there are some modules that will be removed from Drupal 10. A brief overview:
- Aggregator
The Aggregator module is a feed reader and one of the least used modules on Drupal 8 sites. REST and JSON:API are often better options. - HAL
The HAL module was introduced during Drupal 8 development, but always kept flying under the radar due to an overly vague specification and implementation problems. Moreover, JSON:API in Core offers a superset of capabilities compared to HAL. - QuickEdit
QuickEdit has usability issues, accessibility problems and several challenges that make it difficult to integrate with other parts of core and a number of unresolved bugs. Reason enough to jettison it as ballast.
Drupal Check
This update is one for the developers among you. Drupal has given its Drupal Check some more bells and whistles. Even before you update to a new version of Drupal, this tool goes through your current codebase. Drupal Check checks for decrepated custom code and automatically provides new code. Less research, less copy paste.
In the slightly longer term, this Drupal Check has a big advantage: a high start-up speed for subsequent Drupal versions. In other words, the overlap between two versions of Drupal becomes as short as possible. Already, weeks before the official release of Drupal 10, this tool has already detected and updated the lion's share of outdated code. As a result, we will already be fully ready to release Drupal 10 on new projects in the first weeks after release.
Four-in-one
A new theme, automation of upgrades, cleaned-up code and a new editor. Drupal 10 is basically four packages in one.
Want to know what else a website on Drupal 10 has to offer and what it can do for you?
