With support for Drupal 9 fast coming to a close, we'll be upgrading our various websites to Drupal 10 in the month of November. In April 2006, I chose Drupal to build this site, originally known only as CMS Report, with a beta version of Drupal 4.7.  Along the way, except for a detour in the 2010s when we relied on the Agility CMS for a few years, Drupal has been our content management system of choice.

This isn't my first upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. This past week I upgraded bryanruby.com from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. This being a Drupal upgrade, I'm happy to report the experience was an average event for me. After installing countless versions of Drupal over the years since then, the upgrades have not always gone well.

To be fair, any content management system upgrade can present challenges but with Drupal those challenges have often produced some late nights working out the problems. As I have no interesting upgrade stories this time around, this Drupal 10 install is as good as it gets for me. Better yet, since Drupal 8 the upgrade process does seem to me to be getting easier and with much less drama. I suspect, even in my eyes, Drupal's reputation of being difficult to upgrade are numbered. 

Although Drupal 10 was released almost a year ago, my experience with this version of Drupal is limited so far. Some of the highlight changes from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 (and 10.1) include easier UI customization, support for decoupled navigation, improves content modeling and editing, improved block management, and performance improvements. This upgrade also deprecated a number of modules and themes from Drupal core. I for one will miss the Aggregator and Quick Edit modules from being officially supported although they don't come as a surprise given past Drupal community comments. Luckily, many of the deprecated modules, themes, and libraries are now being supported as contributed projects. 

For those that contribute articles by logging into socPub, I'll do my best to keep this option available through the transition. For those that are new and wish to contribute articles to the website, we'll start opening up to new writers in the new year.