Drupal 11 was released on August 2nd, 2024. A lot has changed since Drupal 10, and a lot of preliminary work has been done that will help with Drupal Starshot. Besides improvements made to CKEditor integration, a revamp of the Field UI, performance improvements, and revisions for taxonomy terms, several big changes have been included to help the ambitious site builder.
Administration UI improvements with new Navigation
The new navigation is now an experimental module in Drupal core. It represents the summation of much user testing and research. The new vertical menu can be expanded, collapsed, and customized with navigation blocks. More improvements are coming, including a dynamic Top Bar, which will have a huge impact on the UI.
Single Directory Components are now stable
Single Directory Components (SDC) will help simplify and modernize your Drupal themes. What is a component? From the documentation:
Components are made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code and can be easily customized and reused across multiple pages or applications. Examples of components include navigation menus, forms, sliders, and buttons.
And SDC is Drupal’s implementation of components. Everything required to render a component is contained within a single directory. Components help with organization, reusability, consistency, scalability, testing, and collaboration. This implementation also makes it easier to integrate with tools like Storybook.
Rich front-ends that are easier to maintain and customize? Yes, please.
We’ve been big proponents of SDC since its inception and have helped usher the initiative to this important milestone.
And if you’d like to learn more about the benefits of SDC and how to migrate to them, register for our webinar.
Test and stage content with Workspaces
Workspaces is stable as of Drupal 11. This module lets you stage configuration and content changes together and then publish them all at once. There are situations where some content depends on other pieces of content that still need to be created, or it depends on another piece of content to be updated first. You can now make all the required changes in a single workspace, and once it’s ready, push everything live.
Recipes is included as an experimental module
A Drupal Recipe automates module installation and configuration. You can group things like user roles, content types, settings, and other modules into a bundle that can be applied all at once. Recipes can be uninstalled, shared, and mixed with other recipes. This functionality will replace the paradigm of install profiles and distributions.
Recipes will be critical for Drupal Starshot, which seeks to provide Drupal users a quickstart for new websites, installing advanced functionality for common use cases using nothing but the browser.
In addition, you’ll find a new Standard recipe that replaces the old Standard install profile. It replicates all of the same functionality but has sixteen different component recipes, each of which can be reused in other recipes.
Flexible access policies
The new Access Policy API takes Drupal beyond just roles and permissions to manage what users can do. If a user had a role, the user automatically had all the permissions assigned to that role. Now, Drupal sites have more control over different contexts. Access to something can now depend upon the time of day, the URL, the taxonomy term on the content, or any other environment variable.
Custom access policies require custom code, but that code should be simpler than doing the same thing on earlier versions of Drupal.
What was removed?
Several modules were moved from Drupal core to the contribution space to make Core smaller and help shrink the maintenance burden. Some of these have been around for a while. You can still install and use them if you want.
You never know. Some might gain new life in the contribution space, untethered from Drupal core development.
Upgrading from Drupal 10
Drupal 10 will likely reach its end of life in the latter half of 2026. You’ve got some time, but you don’t want to sit on your hands waiting around. Once you’ve upgraded to Drupal 10.3, you’re already most of the way there. 10.3 still has deprecated functionality, but other than that, it is identical to Drupal 11.
- Check the contribution modules you are using. If they aren’t ready yet, consider helping the maintainers with testing or submit your own patches. Follow Acquia’s running list of modules and their Drupal 11 readiness status.
- Remove deprecated functionality from your custom modules. Follow the tips and instructions at Drupal.org on upgrading custom modules.
- Make sure your hosting infrastructure supports PHP 8.3. In addition, Drupal 11 no longer supports Microsoft IIS. If your websites run on IIS, start planning to migrate to another webserver like Apache or Nginx.
What’s coming next?
Lots of updates are currently in the works for Drupal 11.1. Expect improvements on Recipes, Project Browser and Automatic Updates making big strides forward, and the first version of Experience Builder.
All of these will roll up into the big goal for the end of the year: an MVP for Drupal Starshot. We’re excited about the future of Drupal and are busy investing in it. There’s a lot to look forward to.