What Every Nonprofit Marketer Needs to Know About Drupal 9 in Three Minutes

Let’s get right down to it: Drupal 9 has been released, and nonprofit marketers have opportunities and decisions to make. Here is everything you need to know about this new version of Drupal in a super-succinct punch list. If you can only read one post about Drupal 9, this should be it.

Bottom line: If you are on Drupal 8 today, an immediate upgrade to Drupal 9 is not critical, but you should plan one in the next six months.

OK, here is what every nonprofit digital marketer needs to know:

1. The upgrade to Drupal 9 isn’t the large, painful investment going from Drupal 7 to 8 was. In fact, as long as your development team follows Drupal 9 readiness best practices, the upgrade should take hours, maybe days, but absolutely not weeks or months. 

2. Headless is getting easier: Moving to a headless architecture isn’t a viable solution for every nonprofit organization using Drupal, but if this is a direction you are looking to move toward, you need to upgrade to Drupal 9 first. That way, you will have a better foundation for your headless adventure than if you were still on Drupal 8.

3. If your upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 went badly, you likely have work to do before you can consider a move to Drupal 9. Strongly consider addressing all technical debt issues before attempting the upgrade.

4. Deploying the latest and greatest in nonprofit marketing technology tools is not dependent on upgrading to Drupal 9. Don’t let your Drupal 8 instance be a factor in quickly deploying tools that will move the needle on engaging your audience, raising community awareness, and fundraising.

5. Workflow is easier: Drupal 9 now includes built-in support for workspaces. A workspace is a collection of content pages that exist as a group together, can be defined as a group, and most crucially, can be pushed live as a group. If you have editorial workflows you want to build into the CMS itself, consider moving to Drupal 9 sooner rather than later.