What do you need to know?

Drupal 9 is a cleaned-up version of Drupal 8 and will be the same as the last Drupal 8 minor version release.

One of the main features of Drupal 9 is the easy update process. Drupal 9 is the easiest major version update in Drupal’s history and Drupal 9.0.0 is the same release as Drupal 8.9.0. So, the update process is treated like a minor release update which simplifies the process.

Another feature is backwards compatibility. Drupal 9 is backwards compatible with Drupal 8.

Drupal 9 will include support for newer PHP Libraries and the latest versions of Symfony and Twig.

Contributed modules may now declare compatibility with multiple major versions of core (so the same module codebase can be compatible with Drupal 8 and 9 at the same time.

What happens to Drupal 8 once Drupal 9 is released?

Drupal 8 support will end in November 2021

Drupal 9 has made it easy to migrate from Drupal 8 as it is backwards compatible.

Upgrading to Drupal 9 will be a matter of running update.php so long as your codebase does not use deprecated APIs.

What happens to Drupal 7 once Drupal 9 is released?

Drupal 7 community support is provided until November 2021

A large number of sites might still be using Drupal 7 in 2020, so we have decided to extend community support of Drupal 7 until November 2021.

This means Drupal 7 will be supported for 1-1.5 years after the release of Drupal 9. Stable migration support for core modules is a requirement of Drupal 9, and that even includes a supported migration path from Drupal 6.