Help us reach Drupal 12's second release window in August

By gábor hojtsy on

Many great improvements landed recently. The main branch is on Symfony 8 and most deprecated modules are removed already. With only a few days remaining until the March deadline of the first release option though, we are confident that not all critical requirements will be completed by March 27. Therefore, we are officially announcing that our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is the week of August 10, 2026, and the beta deadline for critical requirements is May 15, 2026.

Introducing the main branch for Drupal core

By gábor hojtsy on

We are excited to announce that the main branch is now the official Drupal core development branch. Using a main branch aligns Drupal core with the best practices of industry and major open-source projects. This move is the final step of infrastructure changes that began in 2023.

Going forward, main is the new, primary development trunk for Drupal core. Most active work and outstanding issues currently filed against 11.x should now be targeted at main. The 11.x branch will remain for Drupal-11-specific issues, while Drupal 12 development will happen in the main branch.

Announcing Drupal 12.0.0 platform requirements

By gábor hojtsy on

Drupal 12 development has reached a point where the system requirements may be raised in the development branch. To prepare core developers for this and to inform the community at large, we are announcing the following requirements for Drupal 12.

Drupal 11.3.0: Biggest performance boost in a decade

By catch on

Drupal 11.3 includes a number of significant performance improvements, altogether making it the most significant step forward for Drupal performance in the last 10 years (since the Drupal 8.0.0 release).

These improvements have been driven by enhancements to Drupal's render and caching layers in 11.2.x, notably taking advantage of Fibers, a new PHP feature added in PHP 8.1. By rendering more parts of the page in placeholders, we have enabled similar database and cache operations that used to occur individually to be combined, with particular improvements in path alias and entity loading. We have also learned from Drupal's automated performance testing framework, allowing us to identify and execute several optimizations during Drupal's hook and field discovery processes, to significantly reduce database and cache i/o, and memory usage on cold caches.

On the front end we have converted Drupal's BigPipe implementation to use HTMX, reducing JavaScript weight significantly. We also intercept placeholders with warm render caches prior to BigPipe replacement, so that BigPipe's JavaScript is not loaded at all on requests that will be served quickly without it, allowing BigPipe to be used more widely for the requests that do need it. These changes may also allow us to enable BigPipe for anonymous site visitors in a future release.

 

Native HTMX in Drupal 11.3.0: Rich UX with up to 71% less JavaScript

By fathershawn on

Drupal developers always face the dilemma of building classic multi-page applications or headless solutions with a modern JavaScript stack. Especially when they need to build UIs that feel fast and are highly reactive. While there were some Drupal specific solutions for parts of this need (Form State API, AJAX API and BigPipe), these were dated, only solving very specific use cases and comparatively heavy in implementation.

HTMX is a tiny, dependency-free, and extensible JavaScript library that allows you to access modern browser features directly from HTML, rather than using extensive amounts of JavaScript. It essentially enables you to use HTML to make AJAX requests, CSS transitions, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events (SSE) directly.

As a replacement for Drupal's mostly home grown solutions, this reduced the loaded JavaScript size by up to 71% for browser-server interactions, including HTML streaming with BigPipe. While enabling a whole set of new functionality at the same time!

 

Seeking Subsystem and Topic Maintainers for Open Positions

By griffynh on

The 2025 Annual Maintainer Check-In is now complete, a huge thank you to everyone who responded and to all the maintainers who continue to keep Drupal core moving forward.

As part of this process, we’ve confirmed that a number of Drupal Core subsystems and topic areas are currently without an active maintainer.

If you’ve ever thought about stepping into a maintainer role, or co-maintaining alongside others, now is the perfect time to get involved.

Drupal 11.3.x alpha phase begins Oct 29

By quietone on

In preparation for the minor release, Drupal 11.3.x will enter the alpha phase the week of October 27, 2025. Core developers should plan to complete changes that are only allowed in minor releases prior to the alpha release.

The 11.3.0-alpha1 deadline for most core patches is October 29, 2025.

  • Developers and site owners can begin testing the alpha after its release.

Disruptive deprecations should now be scheduled for removal in Drupal 13.0.0

By quietone on

From Drupal 10 on, Drupal core has a new major release schedule with a long-term support phase, so that two major versions are supported at a time. We previously announced that Drupal 10 would be supported until mid- to late 2026, depending on when Drupal 12 was released.

We are updating the release schedule and have agreed that Drupal 10 will officially be supported until December 2026, regardless of whether Drupal 12 is released in June, August, or December. This fixed end-of-life date should provide more certainty for the ecosystem and make planning site upgrades easier.

Drupal core will adopt Gin admin theme to replace Claro

By gábor hojtsy on

Drupal effectively has two default administration themes: Claro for core, and Gin for Drupal CMS. This causes difficulty for UX designers and product managers, because new features must work well with both themes.

Gin is no longer an experimental fork of Claro to experiment with new ideas. It has matured into a state-of-the-art admin theme, while Claro has fallen behind, as evident by the decision to use Gin as the admin theme for Drupal CMS. As a result, we feel it is time for Gin to become the default theme for Drupal core.

UX as a first-class citizen in Drupal core

By ckrina on

We’re excited to announce a big step forward for user experience in Drupal Core: the creation of the new UX Manager role within the core leads team. This is a foundational move toward UX-driven development, where user experience is embedded from the start, not added at the end.

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