The Drop Times: Giving Back to Grow

Dear Readers,

I have been involved with the Drupal Community for almost one and a half years now but it still gives me a little bit of goosebumps every time Dries shares one of my interviews or articles. Recently, I had the honor to interview Owen Lansbury, Chair of the Drupal Association and the Co-founder of PreviousNext. Owen quoted and Dries shared,

“The simplest question any agency leader needs to ask themselves is, “Does my business rely on Drupal?” If the answer is yes, then you need to put the policies in place to qualify as a Drupal Certified Partner or your business will become irrelevant in the Drupal ecosystem.” 

The Drupal ecosystem thrives on innovation, but its long-term sustainability depends on a crucial factor—ensuring that those who benefit from Drupal also contribute back to its growth. While the open-source model has always encouraged collaboration, a persistent challenge remains: too few organizations actively invest in the development and promotion of the platform. The Drupal Certified Partner program has made significant strides in addressing this by recognizing and encouraging businesses that contribute, but there is still a long way to go in shifting more organizations toward active participation.

The numbers tell a stark story—Drupal-related projects generate billions in revenue annually, yet only a small fraction of that is reinvested into the Drupal Association. This imbalance raises critical questions about how we sustain and scale an open-source project in an increasingly competitive CMS landscape. Without broader financial and development contributions, Drupal risks losing the momentum needed to drive innovation, maintain its infrastructure, and expand its reach. The challenge is not just about raising funds but about shifting mindsets—contribution should be seen as an essential part of doing business with Drupal, not an optional act of goodwill.  

As the ecosystem evolves, organizations that actively support Drupal’s growth will find themselves in a stronger position—both in terms of influence within the community and long-term business stability. All of us are responsible for ensuring that Drupal remains a thriving, innovative platform. By investing in contribution, we aren’t just supporting an open-source project; we’re securing the future of the businesses and communities that rely on it.

With that, let's move on to the important stories from the past week.

Interviews

Discover Drupal

Events

Organization News

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Alka Elizabeth 
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

DXPR: The History of Drupal: From a Drop of Inspiration, to AI Digital Experience Platform

The History of Drupal: From a Drop of Inspiration, to AI Digital Experience Platform Jurriaan Mon, 02/10/2025 - 15:19

2001: Birth of Drupal

In 2001, Dries Buytaert laid the foundation for what would become one of the world's leading content management systems. Initially conceived as a simple message board named Drop.org, this platform served primarily as a digital space for friends to connect and share ideas. However, its potential quickly became apparent, and it evolved beyond a mere forum into a robust framework designed for comprehensive web development.

The transition from Drop.org to Drupal was profound. The name Drupal derives from the Dutch word druppel, meaning "drop," symbolizing its humble beginnings. The involvement of early community members was instrumental, setting the stage for future growth. Contributors from diverse backgrounds participated in refining and expanding the platform's capabilities, laying the groundwork for an open-source project that thrives on collaboration and shared expertise.

2003: Drupal as an Open-Source Project

The year 2003 marked a pivotal transformation for Drupal as it embraced the principles of open-source development. This strategic shift was vital, as it opened doors for a global community to engage collaboratively in enhancing the platform. Open-source software thrives on collective engagement, which fosters innovation, encourages rapid iterations, and speeds up development cycles.

In the aftermath of this transition, a wave of organizations began adopting Drupal, recognizing its flexible architecture and the advantages of community-driven improvements. Notably, prominent institutions such as NBC and the European Commission were among the trailblazers in leveraging Drupal's capabilities, significantly impacting the content management landscape and contributing to its growing popularity.

2004-2008: Expanding Features and Reach

Between 2004 and 2008, Drupal underwent remarkable enhancements, particularly through the introduction of various modules and themes that significantly broadened its functionality. Key releases during this period included Drupal 5 in 2007, which introduced essential features such as improved taxonomy and an enhanced user permissions system. Following that, Drupal 6 debuted in 2008, bringing improvements in usability and a streamlined installation process.

Additionally, the CivicSpace project showcased Drupal's versatility for political campaigns and social movements, exemplifying its adaptability across different applications. An increasing number of organizations, including the European Commission and various non-profits, transitioned to Drupal during this era, citing its inherent flexibility and robust community support as pivotal factors in their adoption decisions.

2011: Drupal 7 - A Major Leap

The release of Drupal 7 on January 5, 2011, represented a transformative milestone for the platform, introducing a plethora of substantial enhancements tailored to both developers and end-users. Among the most notable features was an improved administrative interface, which streamlined site management and rendered it more intuitive for users, regardless of their technical expertise. Additionally, enhanced user permissions enabled fine-grained control over various roles, significantly elevating security and customizability for site administrators.

The acclaim surrounding Drupal 7 was extensive and widespread, earning it multiple industry awards and solidifying its standing within the CMS community. Post-launch feedback indicated a strong appreciation for the advancements made, with usage statistics reflecting a sharp increase in site transitions to the new version, underscoring its pivotal role in Drupal's ongoing evolution.

2015-2019: The Rise of Headless CMS and Drupal 8

The period from 2015 to 2019 was characterized by a significant evolution in Drupal’s architectural framework, culminating in the release of Drupal 8. This version introduced the revolutionary concept of a headless CMS, enabling the separation of front-end and back-end functionalities. By utilizing APIs, developers gained the flexibility to interact with data efficiently, facilitating seamless integration with a variety of front-end frameworks.

Drupal 8 also featured major enhancements such as improved multilingual support, the incorporation of a RESTful API, and an enriched authoring experience. Organizations harnessed these capabilities to build customized, scalable solutions that met the ever-evolving demands of the digital landscape. As enterprises began to adopt a headless approach, they experienced enhanced agility in delivering content across multiple platforms, firmly establishing Drupal’s position within the competitive CMS ecosystem.

2020: Drupal 9 - A Cleaner Foundation and Transition

In June 2020, the release of Drupal 9 marked a consequential upgrade focused on usability and streamlined performance. This version emphasized backward compatibility, ensuring users transitioning from Drupal 7 and 8 could do so with minimal disruptions. Among the crucial enhancements were a refined user interface and improved administrative tools, which significantly accelerated site management operations for both novice users and experienced administrators alike.

The response from the community was overwhelmingly positive, with many users commending the simplified upgrade process. Success stories emerged from organizations that seamlessly transitioned to the new version, highlighting how the latest features substantially improved their content management workflows. Overall, Drupal 9 laid a stronger foundation for future developments, setting the stage for innovations in versions to come.

2024: The Transition to Drupal 11

The highly anticipated release of Drupal 11 in 2024 marked yet another significant evolution within the platform, focusing on enhancing user experience and expanding capabilities. This version introduced functionalities such as structured content workflows and improved content governance, making site management more intuitive and accessible for users of all skill levels.

Early feedback from adopters conveyed a strong appreciation for these advancements, although some challenges surfaced during the transition period. It became apparent that continuous innovation, coupled with active developer engagement, was crucial to refining features and addressing transitional hurdles. The successful launch of Drupal 11 exemplified the ongoing commitment to enhancing accessibility and scalability within the ever-evolving CMS landscape.

2025: The Launch of Drupal CMS 1.0

On January 15, 2025, the debut of Drupal CMS 1.0 represented a transformative moment in Drupal's evolution, specifically designed to empower marketers and non-technical users. This version streamlined the website creation process through innovative features such as AI agents and pre-configured Recipes, enabling users to implement complex functionalities effortlessly, even without extensive coding knowledge.

This user-centric approach is poised to expand Drupal's market reach, attracting users who previously found the platform daunting or challenging to navigate. The community's active involvement in the development of Drupal CMS promises an exciting future, ensuring a pathway for ongoing innovations and enhancements aimed at improving the overall user experience.

2025 and Beyond: AI Integration in Drupal

The AI initiative in Drupal is centered around the AI module, which provides a cohesive framework for integrating various AI technologies into Drupal sites. This module allows developers to easily connect with multiple AI providers, such as OpenAI and Hugging Face, and offers tools for generating content, images, and performing content analysis. Its architecture includes foundational tools that cater to developers, site builders, and administrators, making AI integration accessible and efficient.

Moreover, the AI Agents module expands on this capability by enabling the creation of intelligent agents that can manipulate site content and configurations based on natural language instructions. Through the implementation of this framework, users can create agents tailored to specific tasks, such as adding fields or adjusting content types, enhancing overall site management and user experience. As this project evolves, future updates are expected to include additional functionalities and integrations that will further streamline AI usage within Drupal.

drunomics: Lupus Decoupled Drupal brings Inertia.js-Style Development to Drupal

Lupus Decoupled Drupal brings Inertia.js-Style Development to Drupal rocket-launch.jpg wolfgang.ziegler Mon, 02/10/2025 - 03:54 Lupus Decoupled Drupal 1.0 brings modern frontend development to Drupal CMS, offering Inertia.js-style architecture with React and Vue.js support. Build dynamic web applications with low-code configuration while maintaining Drupal's powerful editorial and CMS features through seamless integration. Body

When building web applications, developers typically choose between a decoupled architecture with modern frontend frameworks or a traditional monolithic approach using template engines like Twig or Blade. Inertia.js revolutionized Laravel development by enabling developers to maintain their server-side workflow while adopting modern frontend frameworks like Vue and React - without having to completely change their development approach.

Inertia.js has proven tremendously successful in the Laravel ecosystem, showing that developers appreciate the flexibility to gradually adopt modern frontend practices while leveraging their existing server-side expertise. Today, we are excited to bring the same powerful approach to the Drupal ecosystem.

Announcing Lupus Decoupled Drupal 1.0

Like Inertia.js, Lupus Decoupled Drupal lets you build modern web applications without sacrificing the benefits of server-side rendering. You maintain full control over routing and data flow on the server while delivering dynamic, interactive experiences through JavaScript components. At its core, Lupus Decoupled Drupal follows the same simple but powerful model - pages + components. Drupal defines pages and provides data - either via code or configuration - while JavaScript components handle the presentation and interactivity. This gives you the best of both worlds: server-side control with rich client-side interactions.

We are happy that as of today, Lupus Decoupled is officially considered complete and ready for production use. In fact, the building blocks of Lupus Decoupled are stable for a long time. They are already powering this site, as you can see by inspecting the API output of this post.

With version 1.0, Lupus Decoupled Drupal provides:

  • A stable, production-ready API for building decoupled Drupal applications
  • Full editorial control over pages, paths or metatags
  • Low-code approach - customize API output through Drupal's configuration system
  • Comprehensive documentation with guides and examples
  • Development tools for rapid iteration and debugging
  • Production-ready performance optimizations

Keeping the Power of Drupal

Beyond these core features, Lupus Decoupled Drupal maintains deep integration with Drupal, ensuring that Drupal's powerful tools work seamlessly with your modern frontend:

  • Native Drupal authentication in the frontend - access control, edit buttons, editorial previews, and Drupal messages all just work
  • Metatags, URL aliases, and Drupal redirects work out of the box
  • Support for using Drupal forms in the modern frontend, including webforms
  • Views and Layout Builder support

Multi-frontend Approach

Similar to Inertia.js, the backend (Drupal) renders into a tree of high-level components (custom elements), making it easy for any frontend framework to render the output. By default, we provide a Nuxt-powered frontend that makes it simple to get started, thanks to its web-standard focused approach. Nuxt is a versatile and beginner-friendly framework supporting various rendering modes. Additionally, we offer a proof-of-concept React implementation with Next.js for those who prefer React. Other frontend frameworks, like Astro, can be easily added as well. If you are interested to work on that, get in touch!

What's Next?

We are currently working on adding better support for the Drupal CMS and leveraging recipes as part of the installation process, making it easy to pick your desired features. Next, we plan to integrate with the upcoming experience builder, enabling server-rendered modern experiences. When Drupal CMS and the experience builder empower the Drupal site-builder, Lupus Decoupled Drupal will be ready to connect it with a modern frontend development toolbox.

Now is the perfect time to get started: Try one of the Gitpod-powered web-based development environments and take your first steps. Join us in Drupal slack at #lupus-decoupled to share your feedback or get help!

Web Wash: Create Quizzes Directly in Drupal CMS

The video above explores two different methods for creating engaging quizzes in Drupal CMS. Whether you want to test user knowledge or boost engagement, Drupal provides flexible solutions for quiz creation.

The guide below explains the Quiz module and Webform Quiz Elements, their key differences, and step-by-step instructions for implementing each option.

What are Drupal Quiz Solutions?

Drupal provides two primary methods for creating quizzes:

  • Quiz Module: A robust solution featuring various question types and advanced capabilities.
  • Webform Quiz Elements: A simpler option integrated with Drupal’s Webform system.

DDEV Blog: DDEV February 2025 Newsletter

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Happy February!

DDEV v1.24.2 was released with MySQL 8.4 support and improved ddev composer create making it nearly compatible with composer create-project.

DDEV Notes and News

Ongoing DDEV Work

  • Node.js improved support: People have asked for some time for Node.js to be the primary web server (instead of Nginx+php-fpm, etc), and now it can be done in a number of ways. This is now in DDEV HEAD and there are Quickstarts for Simple Node.js and SvelteKit. Incidentally, this also provides experimental support for FrankenPHP and provides a Quickstart for it as a demonstration of the "generic" web server type.
  • Web-based Add-on Registry: As add-ons have become so very popular it's hard to sort them out and understand which ones are meaningful for a particular need. This long-term goal is nearing completion as Stas has a proof of concept and now has to push it through to a maintained production status.
  • Automated Tests for Quickstarts: You won't see these, but it's a big step for us. Because our Quickstarts are so dependent on the behavior of the upstream projects, it's always been hard for us to know when the target project has had a change that invalidates them. Now we have automated tests for the quickstarts of number of project types, and will add others as maintenance is done. Thanks to Ralf Koller for extensive work on the Drupal, WordPress, and TYPO3 quickstarts.
  • Funding situation data feed: Aiming for ever-increasing transparency in the DDEV funding situation, we now have an automatically-updated feed showing our funding situation from all sources. You can see the exact situation at any time. We expect to use this feed in the message-of-the-day on DDEV, as well as ddev.com and the DDEV README.
  • New contributors and maintainers: As DDEV's community grows, we always need new contributors and maintainers. We love to get contributors trained and get privileges to maintainers as needed! We already have lots of Contributor Training material, and docs on how to contribute but we'll do anything you ask for! Need help with something? Need updates? Join us in Discord or make an appointment with me.

Funding DDEV and especially to help both maintainers go full-time on DDEV: We need your help and your organization's help! Let me know if you need help getting this into your 2025 budget! Our key financial goal is to fully fund @stasadev so he can work exclusively on DDEV. We've slipped back in recent months. We need about $3700/month in increased pledges from organizations and individuals. See Full information about supporting DDEV. We’re happy to invoice you, happy to do a call discussing this, and would love it if you’d include DDEV in your 2025 budgeting process. (Our current status: We receive about $3000/month, have been spending about $3000-$4000/month. Bank balance is about $6,000, down from $8,600 last month.)

THANKS to all of you who are supporting DDEV’s path to sustainability and who have gotten your organizations to do so.

Want to keep up as the month goes along? Follow on

Happy February from Randy Fay, DDEV Project Lead. It's a delight to collaborate with you!

DDEV Blog: DDEV 2025 Plans

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Every year we try to clarify goals early, and here we go for 2025! We'd love to have your thoughts and opinions! Some of the things we planned in 2024 aren't quite done yet, but we're working and planning and responding to your needs.

At the DDEV Advisory Group's 2-hour annual review/planning meeting on March 4, 2025, we'll talk about plans and priorities for 2025. You are invited!

We'd love to have your input as daily users as we work through these this month.

(I expect to edit this blog post several times as people express their opinions.)

Community

  • Continue outstanding user support even with growth of our user base. This remains a key priority from last year, but we still need to involve the entire community (meaning you!) in all the places.
  • Begin formal governance for the DDEV Foundation. We've been talking about this in the Advisory Group for years, but this year I'll propose a 3-person board for the DDEV Foundation, where I retain operational control, but we have at least one other board member fully enabled on financial controls and payments. Future years can bring future refinements.

Sustainability and Finance

  • Improve our Marketing CTA and information: The ddev.com "Support DDEV" page says lots of things, but the financial CTA gets lost there. We need to make it completely clear that for the project to be sustainable, the community will need to support the two developers who are working full-time on it, and make clear the many ways that this can be done.
  • Continue to develop contributors and maintainers: As the project grows, we need more skilled contributors and maintainers. (The only difference between those is that maintainers typically have a higher level of direct access to project resources, but as a wide-open source project, almost all interested contributors can accomplish almost anything without enhanced privileges.) In the last two years, we've had quite a lot of contributor trainings, and anecdotes indicate that people are using those recordings and blogs for training, but the actual attendance at them was not impressive. I'm thinking that this year these topics should probably be addressed with screenshare recordings and updated blogs instead of calendar-scheduled events. Given the financial struggles in our contributors' world, I doubt that we'll be able to add paid maintainers in 2025, I'm most interested right now in the reasonable goal of retaining and paying the two amazing maintainers we currently have.

Features and Initiatives

Funded and Work-In-Progress Initiatives

Proposed Features and Initiatives

  1. Implement mDNS as an alternate name resolution technique in addition to DNS and hosts file manipulation. Our traditional use of DNS and hosts-file manipulation have been successful, but mDNS might allow avoiding hosts-file manipulation, especially with non-ddev.site URLs and when internet DNS is not available. This has been submitted for funding to the TYPO3 Community Q2 Community Budget Ideas
  2. Allow Add-ons to include other add-ons: Add-ons can already require other add-ons, but they should be able to automatically result in a download.
  3. Go-based Upsun Add-on like ddev-platformsh. (This would pioneer golang-based add-ons; Go is probably a much better language for complicated add-ons of this type.)
  4. Rewrite ddev-platformsh Add-on in Go: Assuming success of the Upsun add-on, it would be great to backport that work to ddev-platformsh. It's even possible that the two add-ons could be combined into one and maintained in one place.
  5. Develop a replacement for "Gitpod Classic", which has EOL in April, 2025. This may not need much more than improved GitHub Codespaces support, but we have loved Gitpod and hope to have something to replace it.
  6. Improve self-diagnose capability . We currently have ddev debug test but it would be great to implement something that was readable and actionable for ordinary mortals.
  7. DDEV's Message-of-the-day and ddev.com should show current funding status and need. We now have an automatically updated JSON feed that can make this possible.
  8. DDEV Windows/WSL2 packaging and installation: The traditional Windows installer needs work, and the WSL2 install scripts are written in hard-to-maintain PowerShell. This work can be consolidated and improved, including improving the Windows hosts-file escalation technique.
  9. Rewrite ddev launch in Golang instead of as script.
  10. Rework configuration system using Viper.

In addition to prioritizing these initiatives, we have applied to the Google Summer of Code, hoping that we can mentor contributors in that program and see work on one or more of these be successful through GSoC. We'll also be looking for community mentors (is that you?), and maybe some of you would like to sign up for being mentees via Google this summer!

Do you see other important things in the issue queue or elsewhere that are important to you? Are there frictions that impact your work that DDEV could fix? Please let us know.

We would dearly love to have your input on these as the planning process goes forward. You can respond so very many ways in all of the support venues.

Want to keep up as the month goes along? Follow us on

Liip: See you at Drupal Mountain Camp 2025

Join us 11 - 13 March 2025 in Davos at Drupal Mountain Camp if you are interested in learning about Drupal CMS and how AI technology will shape the future of the open web.

Open Source on Top of the World

As a co-organizer I am particularly excited about the keynotes speakers of this year:

The program brings you a good variety of expertise, exchange opportunities and fun in the swiss mountains:

  • (Sunday - Monday: Pre-conference)
  • Tuesday 11th March: Workshops & Contribution, Business Talks, Keynotes, and Splash Awards Night
  • Wednesday 12th March: Keynotes, Sessions & Contribution then Social Event: Fondue & Sledding
  • Thursday 13th March: Keynotes, Sessions, Contribution and then Social Event

Liip is proud to participate in the program in various ways:

We expect more than 100 participants, with a good mix of folks from Switzerland and abroad.

Thanks to sponsors like agiledrop, amazee.io, varnish, Hostpoint, MD Systems, Happy Coding, soul.media, iqual, tag1, the 3 days conference is brought to you at a comparably low price, with tickets available for CHF 100 per ticket.

Celebrating the best Drupal projects in Switzerland

Nominees are just being selected and communicated for the Splash Awards Switzerland. The winning projects will be announced at the award ceremony Tuesday afternoon.

We are excited to be nominated with the following entries:

Drupal Mountain Camp wouldn’t be possible without a team of dedicated volunteers.

See you at drupalmountaincamp.ch.

Wim Leers: XB week 23: PageTemplate

Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri and Jesse Baker fixed a funny bug: the component inputs form was unscrollable, which meant that using Experience Builder (XB) in small viewports (or with complex components that have many inputs), you just couldn’t reach them 😅🙈

Dave “longwave” Long and I simplified the way XB represents Component config entity IDs, a small next step towards supporting multiple component types. It will now feel more familiar for anybody used to dealing with Drupal’s configuration.

Ted “tedbow” Bowman and Dave introduced basic auto-saving (much future work left to be done):

Basic auto-saving in XB: navigating away and back does not lose changes the author made.
Issue #3478299, image by Dave.

The Drupal Association started defaulting to version 1.6.3 of the GitLab CI template on October 15, as they announced in GitLab CI templates will make Drupal 11 the default version to run back in August. Cool! Except … any contrib module with more complex testing needs will have customized the CI, and that was now automatically broken too, because the 1.6.x CI template changed CI job names 😬
Yay for versioning, because Dave fixed this by simply pinning XB’s CI template to extend the 1.5.x one instead.

Some minor bug fixes by Atul “soaratul” Dubey and Travis Carden also landed.

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

This week’s big leap forward was led by yours truly 1 (and reviewed by Dave) to pave the path towards XB product requirement 19. Modify the page template (i.e. global sections), which Lauri “lauriiii” Timmanee captured as:

As a builder, I want to modify the page template (i.e. page.html.twig). When I modify the page template, I can place components globally to global regions like navigation, header, footer, etc.

In other words: the ability to not use Drupal core’s existing “Block Layout” (/admin/structure/block) functionality, but to instead use XB to achieve the same.

That will mean not using Drupal’s default page variant (BlockPageVariant), but an XB-provided one.
Fun fact: I helped a decade ago to finalize exactly this infrastructure ahead of Drupal 8’s release,  created the official Drupal 8 render pipeline diagram, and talked about it! The part XB will be using for this functionality is RenderEvents::SELECT_PAGE_DISPLAY_VARIANT 🤓

XB needs to know what component tree to show in each theme region, so those need to be stored somewhere. For that, I introduced the PageTemplate config entity, which:

  • exists 1:1 per theme (so: one such config entity per installed theme)
  • can store multiple component trees (one per theme region)
  • is thoroughly validated:
    • every region must be have a component tree in the config entity (or be null if it’s empty)
    • every of the 3 special blocks must be present exactly once:
      • a block that implements MainContentBlockPluginInterface — to display the result of the matched route’s controller
      • one that implements TitleBlockPluginInterface — to display the title returned by that same controller
      • and finally, a MessagesBlockPluginInterface one — to display messages
    • plus more details 2
  • is used by XB’s new PageTemplateDisplayVariant to render the stored component trees.

It leaps ahead of where the rest of the XB codebase is at, because it assumes there’ll be Block-sourced components, whereas currently XB only supports SDC-sourced components! And that’s where the path that we paved last week (and improved this week) already is being trodden! 🥳

That’s how I was able to write a test that proves in <100 LoC that XB’s page variant works as expected, despite a lot of other infrastructure not yet existing. Hence I was confident that the rest of the team could build all the necessary UI pieces and blocks-as-components infrastructure while I’d be out! 😊

Week 23 was October 14–October 20, 2024.

  • 1

    I was trying to get ahead of the rest of the team in anticipation of my upcoming paternity leave, little did I know it’d already be next week 😅

  • 2

    Full detail in the config schema if you’re interested!

Aten Design Group: Drupal 11 is Here! How to Approach an Upgrade

Drupal 11 is Here! How to Approach an Upgrade Image removed.jenna Thu, 02/06/2025 - 14:23 Drupal

Drupal 11 is here! In part one of this two-part blog series, I walked through its new features that will benefit developers and content editors alike. Now that we know what we have to look forward to, let’s talk about how and when to upgrade to Drupal 11. 

How to prepare for the upgrade process

While every Drupal site is unique and has its own requirements and complexities, I’m going to explain the general steps of a Drupal upgrade. And even though an upgrade from Drupal 10 to 11 is relatively less effort than going from Drupal 6 to 7, you still need to plan it out.

If you have a site that has a lot of contributed modules, modules that aren't well supported, or complicated custom modules, both planning the upgrade and actually doing the upgrade will take longer.

The Upgrade Status module will help with this process. With it you can assess if your modules have D11 versions, identify changes needed in custom code, and make recommendations on what to do with modules that lack D11 support. This is also a really great time to look at the modules you're using and identify any that can be removed or replaced with something newer.

How to perform the upgrades

Then you'll have to perform the upgrades. I wrote upgrades in plural here because I think it works best as a set of at least two upgrades, maybe more in some cases.

The first upgrade is to ensure that the new platform requirements are satisfied. This could mean some extra work if you're responsible for maintaining your web servers. So make sure you are aware of those.

It works well to first update your modules and test to make sure everything is working as expected. Module changes are where regressions or errors are going to come up. Upgrading those to versions that are compatible with both D10 and 11 will give you plenty of time to test and isolate variables. 

And then do a separate deployment to update Drupal core itself. This will depend heavily on the complexity of your code and operations, but I think it's reasonable to expect that the development timeline will be measured in hours to days.

If you have an e-commerce site where the risk and impact of downtime is high, or you have a super complicated custom codebase, it could take days, or even weeks. But if you have a very simple site, it could be done in an afternoon.

When you should upgrade to Drupal 11

The Drupal life cycle

So here we are in early 2025. Drupal 10.4 is out and is in “maintenance support,” which means that select changes from Drupal 11 will be backported down, but at this point Drupal 11 has development priority. Around the end of 2025, Drupal 10 will enter a period where it only receives security updates, and it will reach end of life in mid-2026 when Drupal 12 is released.

Image removed. Drupal 10 Life Cycle


What happens at Drupal end of life 

When any given Drupal version reaches end of life, your site will continue to function. It's not like a license that expires and suddenly your site stops working, but there are no more bug fixes to your installed Drupal core, and most critically there are no more security updates. Contributed module maintainers have focused on newer versions, so they're not really getting regular updates.

All of this means that upgrading later takes more effort because there's more and more that has to be addressed as time goes on.


Looking at Drupal 11

11.0 was released in summer of 2024, and Drupal 11 will be receiving active development support until around 2027, when it goes into maintenance support like I described earlier.

Image removed. Drupal 11 Life Cycle

 

Putting this together and adding in the Drupal 12 cycle, I think the second half of 2025 is going to be the right time for most people to upgrade to Drupal 11 with some caveats.

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For instance, if you have a simpler site and all of your contributed and custom modules are ready to run on Drupal 11, there's no harm in doing it sooner. But I think for most larger sites, it's best to let contributed modules catch up with Drupal 11 development, let some of the kinks get worked out in the community, and then upgrade.

Now that Drupal is on a more steady and predictable release schedule, we can start looking forward to new features in Drupal 12 in 2027.

Image removed.Seth Hill
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