Drupal 9 Upgrade Won’t Require a Rebuild
You may miss our next major Drupal version upgrade, but that’s all part of the plan.
Stanford Sites built on Drupal 8 (D8) will automatically upgrade to D9 on Feb. 18.
We’re pushing updates to D8 websites without the rebuild process associated with previous releases. That means you won't have to lift a finger. Instead, you can focus your time and effort on communication strategies, creating and maintaining content, and keeping up with the evolving needs of your website audience.
Sites currently running on D7 can be rebuilt on D9 and bypass D8 entirely. When D10 is released in 2022, these sites will be upgraded without a need to rebuild.
We do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to
Our team takes on tasks like reworking code to use new services, removing deprecated code, monitoring core and contributed module status, and managing minimum security compliance, just to name a few. In turn, you can take advantage of new themes to refresh the look of your sites, access a vast media library, and use drag and drop features to quickly and easily update pages.
The goal of the multi-year Drupal project is to develop a central system that improves reliability and security for the Stanford Sites Drupal platform as a whole and allows sites to automatically receive regular security patches and upgrades.
But wait, there’s more!
Image-rich sites running on D9 will load faster thanks to "lazy loading" which prioritizes the display of images in the browser's current view.
In addition to the D9 upgrade, our team is releasing three new features:
Drop-down menus
The new drop-down menus offer “split button” functionality so users can access both the landing page and the drop-down menu through the main site navigation. This allows content authors to develop high-impact landing pages while also providing direct access to nested content.
Image galleries
Content authors can embed up to 30 images with the Image Gallery Paragraph that pops open a shadow box to click through all of the images at full scale. It includes an option for captions.
Publications content type
List books, journal articles, news and magazine articles, and thesis dissertations for faculty, students, and postdocs. This includes the ability to link out to an external URL or to a detail page for each publication entry. The ability to display a list of publications will be available in future updates.
We’re continually developing and releasing updates. You can follow our Stanford Sites Drupal roadmap to find out what’s available on the platform and when.
Learn more
DISCLAIMER: UIT Blog is accurate on the publication date. We do not update information in past blog entries. We do make every effort to keep our service information pages up-to-date. Please search our service pages at uit.stanford.edu/search.
