Upgrading to Drupal 9 and Beyond

Drupal 9 is the culmination of the work of thousands of contributors around the globe, collaborating to create an innovative platform that's designed for everyone to use. What's really exciting about Drupal 9 is that it represents the work of 4 and a half years of steady work since Drupal 8 was released. Rather than a single cycle of new features added all at once, features have been released steadily since Drupal 8.0.

Now that it's time to upgrade, you're probably wondering what steps to take to ensure a smooth transition to Drupal 9. While the upgrade path from Drupal 8 is designed to be smooth, you will still need to take steps to analyze your code, select modules, and test the upgrade. It's also a good opportunity to implement continuous integration into your workflow to make future upgrades simpler. As it has been with Drupal 8, major upgrades are scheduled for Drupal 9 every 6 months as new features are added, so having a strong workflow in place will be a huge benefit to teams maintaining Drupal sites going forward.

The key to a successful preparation for Drupal 9 combines project planning and a development workflow that can accommodate the ongoing maintenance requirements.

Learning Objectives

You'll come away from the course with knowledge of:

• The Drupal 8 and 9 release cycle
• Underlying changes and upgrades to the technology stack that come with Drupal 9
• Steps to planning successful upgrades
• Best practices for testing after upgrades, and why testing is important
• Handling upgrades at a Dev Ops level
• Rolling out upgrades after each release going forward

Syllabus

• Differences between Drupal 7, 8 and 9
• Technical requirements for hosting a Drupal 9 website
• Planning an upgrade
• Module selection
• Reviewing deprecated code
• Upgrading contributed modules
• Upgrading custom modules and themes
• Project management and governance for upgrade processes
• Adding continuous integration and automated testing to your development workflow

Who Will Gain the Most From This Training?

Developers and sysadmins who are responsible for maintaining and supporting Drupal sites.