The new and improved version of DRUPAL has been released on June 16, 2021, with several technical improvements. What are its new features and why is this new version better than the previous one? Here is an overview of what has changed.
Let’s start by introducing what DRUPAL is about.
Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). A CMS is a software that allows to manage and update the content of a website dynamically. Its flexibility allows it to meet the majority of the market’s needs: institutional sites, blogs, directories, community sites, merchants, or intranets.
The new version of Drupal introduces mainly minor technical changes, meaning that the functionality is improved without impacting major features. Among these, we can mention:
- Changes to the files managed by the website owner: The web.config file used on IIS web servers has been updated to remove any configuration that may be unnecessary.
- Changes in session generation and session ID management: The use of PHP’s built-in session management. This is a way to store the data of each visitor with the help of a personal session ID. Session IDs will usually be sent to the browser via session cookies and will be used to track existing session data.
- Configuration file format changes: Configuration files with multi-line strings will be exported using Symfony’s multi-line literal block formatting option. This will help to improve the readability of these files.
- Managing potentially malicious file extensions: If you are limiting the allowed extensions and want unsafe files to be uploaded and renamed, you need to explicitly allow uploading of txt. files. This is mandatory when configuring the file fields via the user interface.
- Change in the name displayed by default in Views: Views, which is a module for extracting data, processing it, and displaying it, has renamed the display from “Master” to “Default”. This does not affect existing views, only those created after this change. In addition, the name of the parameter to hide or show the default display has been changed from ui.show.master_display to ui.show.default_display.
- README.txt has been replaced by README.md: The Drupal README now focuses on supporting new contributors to the Drupal ecosystem and uses the Markdown format. Note that a README file is a document that usually contains important information about the system, project, or software in question.
Read more: How do you prepare your site for Drupal 9 migration?
The usage information previously contained in the README.txt file for DRUPAL has been extracted into a newly created USAGE.txt file in the core directory. Sites that use the drupal/core-composer-scaffold plugin to exclude README.txt should update their configuration to exclude README.md instead.
This new release is also based on changes in dependencies, some of which have been removed, updated, or added:
- The Goutte test browser has been deprecated and replaced with a new mink driver, using Guzzle.
- Drupal has also replaced the behat/mink-browserkit-driver dependency with friends-of-behat/mink-browserkit-driver to ensure compatibility with PHP 8 and Symfony 5.
- The tabbable library has been added to replace the functionality provided by the selector: tabbable of jQuery UI.
Added dependencies:
- In this new release, Drupal uses Symfony’s PHPUnit-Bridge polyfills for future compatibility. This will help developers replace the use of obsolete assertions in preparation for PHPUnit 10.
- The core/once library, a standalone library that offers the same benefits as core/jquery.once but without the jQuery dependency, has been added to Drupal core.
- The psr/cache project has been added as a mandatory dependency for doctrine/annotations.
Updated dependencies:
- CKEditor has been updated from 4.15.1 to 4.16.1, which includes many bug fixes and improvements.
- The Sortable library has been updated to version 1.13.0.
You are now aware of all the new features of the new DRUPAL 9.2.0 version while waiting for the major changes announced for 2022 when the DRUPAL 10 version will be launched. For any further information, you can contact us by clicking on the following link: https://eminence.ch/en/contact-us/