The 'Headless' Drupal 10, And How The Open-Source CMS Becomes More Powerful

Drupal is considered the Content Management System (CMS) that competes with the likes of WordPress and Joomla!. And this time, it's becoming even more powerful.

Among the reasons, is because Drupal 10 is "headless." What this means, the popular CMS has finally uncoupled the backend of its system, which manages content, from the frontend, which is responsible for displaying content.

In Drupal's words on its web page, this is called a "Decoupled Drupal."

By decoupling, Drupal 10 essentially saves content in a headless CMS, by sending the content to various front-end technology endpoints, which could be anywhere, providing much more flexibility on how that content is presented.

Unlike WordPress that is almost synonymous with blogs and small and mid-sized businesses, Drupal has become the modern object-oriented enterprise-level CMS that can help business organizations in their digital transformation initiatives.

Drupal 9 was built upon Drupal 8, using the latter's deprecations and optional updated dependency support. This makes Drupal 9 not a reinvention of Drupal.

Drupal 10 is a different thing.

The version is the result of two and a half years of development.

Drupal 10 has many of its predecessor's codes revised and changed.

On top of that, it comes with a built-in CKEditor 5, a modernized JavaScript components to replace some uses of jQuery, Symfony 6 under the hood replacing Symfony 4, PHP 8.1 required to keep the system secure, and more.

Beside the enhanced user experience, Drupal 10 managed to keep its upgrade tools and processes similar to previous major release, Drupal 9, in order to make upgrade easier, and not alienating developers.

What this means, the version also streamlines its core system, with focus on flexibility and modularity.

These two traits have always been Drupal's key strengths.

As an open-source project, Drupal 10 is a result of the Drupal Community, which developer head count has grown in numbers, thanks to the popularity of the CMS.

This allows the CMS to have three times as many contributed extensions available at launch time as with the last major update.

What this means, with Drupal 10, developers should be able to build a more versatile, structurized website, with relative ease.

And to keep up with the trends, Drupal 10 also comes with a modernized look-and-feel, which should in turn make it relevant for years to come.

According to Dries Buytaert, founder and Project Lead of Drupal:

On his own blog post, Buytaert added that:

And according to Baddý Sonja Breidert, Chair of the Board of the Drupal Association: