I have ran this website of mine on Drupal since 2005 starting with Drupal 4.6. This past week I upgraded bryanruby.com from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. This being a Drupal upgrade, I'm happy to report the experience was an average event for me. After installing countless versions of Drupal over the years since then, the upgrades have not always gone well.
To be fair, any content management system upgrade can present challenges but with Drupal those challenges have often produced some late nights working out the problems. As I have no interesting upgrade stories this time around, this Drupal 10 install is as good as it gets for me. Better yet, since Drupal 8 the upgrade process does seem to me to be getting easier and with much less drama. I suspect, even in my eyes, Drupal's reputation of being difficult to upgrade are numbered.
Although Drupal 10 was released almost a year ago, my experience with this version of Drupal is limited so far. Some of the highlight changes from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 (and 10.1) include easier UI customization, support for decoupled navigation, improves content modeling and editing, improved block management, and performance improvements. This upgrade also deprecated a number of modules and themes from Drupal core. I for one will miss the Aggregator and Quick Edit modules from being officially supported although they don't come as a surprise given past Drupal community comments. Luckily, many of the deprecated modules, themes, and libraries are now being supported as contributed projects.
I'm initially starting on the frontend with the included Drupal default theme, Olivero. I'm not sure how long I'll use this theme but suspect it won't be long before I adopt a third-party theme as one of my own. I've also brought a comment section back to my website but haven't yet committed to keeping comments available. With social media preferred by most visitors, I'm not sure how useful a comment section is on my website. Yet, I'm nostalgic for the good old Web 2.0 days where comments had value before the spammers and trolls ruined it all. If I do keep the comment section, I'll use this time to weigh in the positives and negatives of using Drupal core's own comment module in comparison to the Disqus commenting system.
There are additional new features planned for Drupal that I'm looking forward to. Until then, I'm just happy to have this upgrade behind me so I can now take a look at additional Drupal sites I own in need of a similar Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 upgrade. If you're upgrading to Drupal 10, may it go as well as this one did for me.