The next major Drupal version was just released — laying the foundation for its future.
Drupal 11 was recently released on Drupal’s timeline. Unlike previous major versions, where releases needed to accommodate underlying technologies’ end of life like Symfony, Drupal 11 was released because it was the right time to solidify new features and free us from deprecated code so development can continue to improve functionality and performance.
The initial Drupal 11 release has the same functionality as Drupal 10.3, to which most Drupal sites should have been upgraded in the spring — although Drupal 11 does have a few differences. For example:
- Instead of having deprecated code and modules identified, they are now removed.
- Dependencies and dependency requirements were upgraded. The minimum PHP version for Drupal 11 is 8.3, which brings impressive performance and a better developer experience. jQuery, Symfony, and PHPUnit were also upgraded to allow for code and testing modernization and performance.
As Drupal works to become more performant and valuable as a framework, overly specialized or underutilized modules are continually being removed from core. This includes the Actions UI, Book, Tracker, Forum, Statistics, and Tour modules.
However, they aren’t gone! Instead, they’ve been moved to the Drupal contrib space. If your website relies on any of these modules, a simple command can switch versions. The great news is that with new contrib maintainers, development will continue to improve these modules.
The Tour module, which I presented about at DrupalCon Europe 2021, has already seen several improvements and bug fixes. It has combined my Tour Enhancements module and the Tour UI module in its 2.x release.
New Features in Drupal 11
Drupal 10.3 and 11 include several significant new features and improvements, including:
- The Drupal core Workspace module moved from being experimental to stable. You can create multiple workspaces for development, testing, and staging with Workspaces. Each workspace can have its own set of configurations and content, allowing you to test changes without affecting the live site. Developers have had multidev environments for a while. This is now the content editor’s version!
- Drupal now supports Single-Directory Components in core. SDCs provide a simplified front-end development workflow based on components, where all the files needed for the component are in the same directory. This increases developer productivity and makes components more shareable.
- The new Navigation module, which rewrites the admin toolbar using modern tools. This Navigation toolbar adds a collapsible left-aligned sidebar that organizes the administration menu and allows customization by including other blocks or menus.
- One of the most significant additions is the experimental Recipes API, for which I am a core subsystem maintainer. Recipes allow for the easy sharing of module configuration changes and additions, allowing you to add functionality without rebuilding it every time. An example recipe would add an Event system—and it includes everything you need, including a content type, taxonomies, a calendar view, meta tags, etc.
Recipes are the backbone of the Drupal Starshot initiative which aims to create Drupal CMS, a new preconfigured install of Drupal.
For an in-depth look at Recipes and how Starshot and we are using them, check out our on-demand webinar, Recipes, Starshot, and the Future of Drupal. - The new Access policy API allows developers to create access verification and granting that extend well beyond Drupal’s already robust roles and permissions systems. Imagine you want to limit how many pages a person can make or restrict access to a site to only certain hours. You can now build custom policies to suit an ever-increasing number of options.
These are our favorite new features in Drupal 11. To learn more, visit Drupal.org’s Drupal 11 page.
Upgrading to Drupal 11
If you’re starting a new project today, there isn’t much holding you back from starting on Drupal 11. You may need to patch a couple of contrib module’s core_version_requirements, but more and more updates are happening daily.
Update to the latest version of Drupal 10.3. All sites upgrading from 10 to 11 must be on the latest version, so be sure to update to 10.3 first.
- Update to PHP 8.3. Verify that your host, local development environment, and custom code all work with PHP 8.3, which is required for Drupal 11.
- Run Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.
This will find and fix any modules that need updating and deprecated code.
If you’re a Kanopi client, we run rector on every pull request to ensure we catch and fix deprecations early, as most of the deprecations for Drupal 11 were documented on Drupal 10.2. If you want to learn more about our continuous website improvement services, please contact us.
You have time to upgrade!
Drupal 10 will continue to be supported until Drupal 12 is released in June 2026. This still gives you plenty of time to prepare your site if you have custom code or have contributed modules that need to be upgraded to PHP 8.3.
However, if your site can run on Drupal 10.3 and PHP 8.3, upgrading to 11 should be part of your short-term development plan — in order to stay current and take advantage of the additional performance enhancements and new tools available.
And if you need assistance, we’re here to help, as always.
