Download Drupal 9.2.0

Version 9.2.0 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. The program includes a content management platform and a development framework. Version 9.2.0 is the second update to version 9 with more than just bug fixes, including adding support for webp images and improvements to the Olivero frontend theme.

What’s new in Drupal 9.2.0?

The second feature release of Drupal 9 helps keep your site even more secure, and comes with increased visitor privacy protection, improved migration tools from Drupal 7, enhancements to the Olivero frontend theme and early support for the WebP image format.

Security and privacy improvements

Critical security advisories and public service announcements will now be displayed on the status report page and certain administration pages for the site’s administrators. This helps prepare site owners to apply security fixes in a timely manner. For increased privacy protection of your site visitors, Drupal 9.2.0 now blocks Google Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) cookie-less user tracking by default.

Better building blocks out of the box

The Olivero theme, soon to be Drupal’s new default frontend theme, has dozens of major improvements in this release, including a new form design and various accessibility fixes. The built-in Umami demo is now also more flexible with a built-in editor role and more versatile Layout Builder demonstration.

On the way to Drupal 10

In preparation for Drupal 10, all Symfony 5 and and several Symfony 6 compatibility issues have been resolved. As part of modernizing the frontend of Drupal 9, core’s Tour feature now uses ShepherdJS instead of jQuery Joyride. This significantly improves accessibility of tours and removes one more reliance on jQuery.

Other improvements

The already stable migration path from Drupal 7 is now expanded with migrations for user settings, node/user reference fields and other previously missing pieces.

Drupal’s GD toolkit integration, and, therefore image styles, can now manage WebP images. There is more to do for complete WebP support. Stay tuned for improvements in future releases.

Sneak peak at future core features

The upcoming core CKEditor 5 upgrade is being worked on in a contributed project. Progress has been made on various aspects of the roadmap, and the project is near to completing all issues identified as requirements for tagging a beta release. Core inclusion is expected in Drupal 9.3.0, but contributed projects are requested to build compatibility ahead of that.

the Automated Updates Initiative has been very active in the repositories under https://github.com/php-tuf building a PHP implementation of The Update Framework (TUF) with Typo3 and Joomla developers to provide signing and verification for secure PHP application updates. Results will be included with later Drupal releases.

Check out the initiative keynotes from DrupalCon North America 2021 on what else is in the works.