What Is Open Social Planning With The New Drupal 9?

This June Drupal launched the newest major version release of their open-source software: Drupal 9. What does Drupal 9 entail, what promises does it hold for the future, and how does it fit within Open Social’s own plans for constantly improving online community software?

What is new with Drupal 9?

The improvement of Drupal 9 is that it is a cleaned-up version of the large and powerful framework. This means that a lot of the old redundant code, such as deprecated APIs, in the framework has been cleaned up and removed.

While Drupal 9 doesn’t yet offer any significant new features if you are coming from Drupal 8.9, what this change provides is a new foundation for the Drupal framework. The full name of the new release is, after all, Drupal 9.0.0. From this new cleaned up code-base, Drupal will start building new features with the release of Drupal 9.1., Drupal 9.2., and so forth, promising feature updates twice a year.

It’s not so much about ‘what is new’ in Drupal 9, as it is about Drupal 9 ushering in a new era for its open-source framework and community of developers. As stated in their press release, Drupal 9 will “empower Drupal’s vision for the next generation of the web”

Open Social & Drupal

When Open Social released its first online community software solution, it was built on an earlier version of the powerful open-source CMS framework: Drupal 6. Since then, keeping up with new Drupal versions, and the consequent developments made by the community, have allowed Open Social to consistently improve our software and services. The Open Social platform available today has a long list of amazing features, tools, extensions, and integrations, made possible by keeping up with new Drupal releases.

This is because Drupal is an open-source framework supported by a large, active, and extremely talented community of developers and organizations, of which Open Social is a part. Open Social has grown alongside the Drupal community over the year, as we develop new tools, modules, extensions, and improvements together— many of which Open Social has been able to integrate into our own software.

Over the years, Open Social has also been an active participant in the Drupal community. Not only in terms of engaging with the Drupal community through hosting summits, participating in conferences, and demonstrating important thought-leadership, but also in terms of making contributions to the open-source tools that we integrate and help further develop.

Why Drupal 9 Compatibility is Important for Open Social

For Open Social to keep up-to-date with the latest developments from the Drupal community, we must make sure that going forward Open Social becomes fully Drupal 9 compatible. This way, we will make sure that we can integrate any new Drupal open-source tools released.

Keeping Open Social updated and compatible with the latest version of Drupal will also help us going forward with the ambitious decoupling process Open Social is embarking on, making Open Social more flexible and customizable.

This forward-thinking approach to software development is called “forward compatibility” and how Open Social is going to make sure that we are ready for the great things to come after the wide-spread adoption of Drupal 9 throughout the open-source Drupal community.

Read more blog posts:

A change is coming: decoupled Open Social

DrupalCon Europe 2019 | Open Social blossoms!

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