Last week Drupal released its first feature update for Drupal 10. Drupal 10.1 is a minor upgrade, but it does contain some noteworthy improvements, including one that makes the platform even better for headless operation with a Next.js front-end.
Decoupled navigation now has dedicated support in the form of APIs designed to retrieve menus configured in Drupal using the Linkset standard. Such menus are ideal for enabling JavaScript front ends to consume configurable menus managed in Drupal. This makes it easier for front-end developers to render navigation without hard-coding it, while also allowing non-developers to manage application menus without writing code.
Fans of fast-performing websites will be happy to know that Drupal 10.1 provides a faster, smoother loading experience with fewer page reflows with the inclusion of BigPipe in core. It does this by flushing the initial page first and then streaming the replacements for the placeholders, allowing browsers to load some dynamic parts of the page after an initial page is loaded, resulting in hugely improved real and perceived front-end performance.
Other upgrades in Drupal 10.1 include:
- Autoformatting in CKEditor 5 recognizes when you are typing a list or header and formats your text accordingly.
- Improved field reuse experience, in which field settings are copied from the pre-existing field settings when reusing an existing field, thus enabling more streamlined content modeling and management.
- More flexible block and page management with the ability to create custom blocks directly under Structure in the administrative interface. Project announcements module and automated accessibility testing added to core.
If you’ve not upgraded to Drupal 10, now is the time to do it. Drupal 9’s end of life is still set for November 1, 2023. If you’re still using Drupal 7, you now have more time to migrate, with the end of life now extended to January 5, 2025. However, you can expect reduced support for moderately critical and lower severity security issues as of August 1 of this year, while support for some D7 modules has already elapsed.
Chapter Three’s decoupled front-end framework Next-Drupal is now fully updated for Drupal 10, with all deprecated code and APIs having been removed. We have also updated Next-Drupal and the JSON:API and GraphQL starters to Next.js 13. Demand for this platform is growing, with it currently being downloaded at a rate of roughly 3,000 times a week.
