Drupal 9 was released on 3rd Jun 2020. Drupal lovers await latest Drupal versions due to obvious reasons of benefitting from new features and advancements. However Drupal 9 is somewhat special. Drupal 9 holds a special place in the Drupal evolution. Why? Let's understand a bit of history first and then reach to the answer of this question.
If you are new to Drupal, then let me give you a quick overview about Drupal. Drupal is a content management framework which is built in PHP with a support of multiple types of backend databases. Drupal is quite similar to other content management solutions that prevails in CMS domain, e.g. Wordpress, Joomla, Typo3, and many many more. Despite it is being called another CMS, it is much different than others . Most of CMS available are inclined towards building a blog website or quick & easy or faster website development, whereas Drupal sets its stage in much wider domain than just a website building tool. Drupal core team has been always focusing to build it as an Enterprise solution that can be used for not only building website but also to build large scale enterprise web applications.
Drupal got its maximum popularity when it was in it's version 6 in about 2008 or 2009. At least I started to learn about Drupal during that time. After that it gained its peak when Drupal 7 was launched with much advanced features and entirely changed core structure. Changes were made to bring betterment, but that caused lot of disappointment to Drupal developers and users, who faced difficulty in migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Migrating from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 was much like building everything from scratch. Drupal community did raise their concern about this problem, and expected Drupal core team to make this process easier in future Drupal 8.
Drupal 8 was launched in 2015, and unfortunately with the same problem being unresolved. Even though the core structure of Drupal was not much changed, yet the Migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was not very smooth.
I am sure Drupal core team must have felt the pressure of making it easier in future or end up in disappointing Drupal lovers.
On 3rd June this year, Drupal 9 was launched, and with it's biggest propaganda is focused on the ease of migration from Drupal 8. How true and valid is this? It will be evaluated by Drupal community over next few months, but from first impression it seems like Drupal core team has nailed this old trouble this time, which can prove to be a turning point in Drupal history. This can lead to more acceptability and popularity across the globe.
I am excited to learn more about Drupal 9 at the moment!
