Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

DrupalCon Global 2020 is in a couple weeks and there are a lot of amazing sessions. Hope you can make it! While preparing my own DrupalCon Global session, I reviewed the other sessions and made a list of ones you might want to watch to help you prepare for upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 or 8 to Drupal 9.

In some cases, it was very hard to choose just one on a particular topic. For example, there are 3 great layout builder talks! So, while these are some of my top picks, don't forget to check out all the DrupalCon Global sessions and add your favorites to your schedule.

If you are upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and don't need to make any website improvements, then you can focus on the Drupal 9 sessions. If you will be doing a redesign and/or upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 9, check sessions for dreaming up your new site, planning your new site architecture, and implementing your new site.

As you may have heard, Drupal 9 porting day a couple weeks ago was a huge success! Gábor Hojtsy wrote up a great summary on the event including all the money that was raised for the Drupal Association. And, you can read my porting day recap as well. Thanks again to all who helped out.

The April porting day was so successful that Surabhi Gokte and Gabriele Maira (gambry) encouraged Gábor to organize a repeat performance and, like magic, we have Drupal 9 porting weekend coming May 22 and 23. This is scheduled during the time we had hoped to contribute at DrupalCon Minneapolis. Now we'll join each other virtually in a few days to make Drupal even better.

The goal for Drupal 9 porting weekend is to make more Drupal 8 contributed projects (modules, themes, and distributions) compatible with Drupal 9. As of May 16, 2020, there are 1,617 out of 8,982 projects that already work on Drupal 9. So, during the porting weekend, we'll work on the 7,365 that don't. While that might seem like a daunting number, about half of those (3,405) likely only need a one-line change to make the project Drupal 9 compatible!

There is a wonderful effort underway right now to automate Drupal 9 compatibility issue and patch creation for contributed projects. Even with this effort, we still need your help during porting weekend. We hope you can participate!

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

I've listed some useful Drupal 9 porting resources you can review and information about collaborating in Slack during the event. I've also added specific sections for preparation depending on the type of contribution you are hoping to do:

• I don't have time to prepare
• I'd just like to watch
• I'd like to mentor others
• I'd like to find and create issues
• I'd like to create and update patches
• I'd like to review patches
• I'd like to test patches