Software update: Drupal 9.3.0

Version 9.3.0 of Drupal has been released. Drupal is a PHP-written, user-friendly and powerful content management platform, with which, for example, websites can be created. It’s simple enough for a novice user, but powerful enough to build a more complex website as well. Drupal includes a content management platform and a development framework. Version 9.3 includes the Olivero theme no longer referred to as beta, version 5 of the CKEditor is included under experimental flag and a new content editor role has been added to the default profile.

The Olivero frontend theme is now stable!

The new Olivero frontend theme was added in Drupal 9.1.0 and thanks to various contributors since then is now stable. A modern and clear theme, Olivero is planned to become the new default Drupal theme later (replacing Bartik). Subtheming Olivero is currently not supported, but formal support may be included in the future.

The theme is named after Rachel Olivero (1982-2019). She was the head of the organizational technology group at the National Federation of the Blind, a well-known accessibility expert, a Drupal community contributor, and a friend to many.

New experimental support for CKEditor 5

A new beta experimental CKEditor 5 module is included with Drupal 9.3.0. Version 5 of CKEditor is an entirely new editor with visual and architectural improvements. While building the integration, the team worked hard with CKSource to implement functionality crucial for Drupal sites, such as General HTML Support and ways to dynamically load CKEditor plugins, so the visual web based setup of the editor is still available in Drupal. Also special care was given to providing a fluid upgrade path from CKEditor 4 configurations.

Drupal extensions that integrate with CKEditor 4 still need to be updated for CKEditor 5however the plan is to remove CKEditor 4 support in Drupal 10, so we encourage everyone to try the new module on non-production environments†

New Content Editor role

A new dedicated Content Editor role was added to the standard profile with content editing, media management, translation, content workflow and revision handling permissions enabled by default.

Various developer improvements

Entity bundles can now declare their own class, encapsulating the required business logic. A bundle class must be a subclass of the base entity class, such as \Drupal\node\Entity\Node. Encapsulating all the required logic for each bundle into its own subclass opens up many possibilities for making more clear, simple, maintainable, and testable code.

Each user role now depends on the modules that provide the role’s permissions, which means that permissions will be automatically cleaned up when a module is uninstalled†

PHP 8.1.0 was recently released and Drupal 9.3.0 comes with full support for the new version. The recommended PHP version to install Drupal 9.3.0 is PHP 8, but PHP 7.3+ support is kept.

Read the 9.3.0 release notes for more information on developer improvements and changes.