Today is a big day for Drupal as we officially released Drupal 11!

In recent years, we've seen an uptick in innovation in Drupal. Drupal 11 continues this trend with many new and exciting features. You can see an overview of these improvements in the video below:

Drupal 11 has been out for less than six hours, and updating my personal site was my first order of business this morning. I couldn't wait! Dri.es is now running on Drupal 11.

I'm particularly excited about two key features in this release, which I believe are transformative and will likely reshape Drupal in the years ahead:

1. Recipes (experimental): This feature allows you to add new features to your website by applying a set of predefined configurations.
2. Single-Directory Components: SDCs simplify front-end development by providing a component-based workflow where all necessary code for each component lives in a single, self-contained directory.

These two new features represent a major shift in how developers and site builders will work with Drupal, setting the stage for even greater improvements in future releases. For example, we'll rely heavily on them in Drupal Starshot.

Drupal 11 is the result of contributions from 1,858 individuals across 590 organizations. These numbers show how strong and healthy Drupal is. Community involvement remains one of Drupal's greatest strengths. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 11!

Drupal 11 is now available! Check out the announcement video at https://youtu.be/Dw6_fBZ6D5Y

Improved scalability and functionality are two promises of the anticipated Drupal 11, which is expected to be a dynamic and innovative release. Even before the release of Drupal 10, anticipation was built around Drupal 11 making it one of the most hyped versions in the history of Drupal.
Drupal 11 discussions and plans were already ongoing as Drupal 10 reached its final stages, showing how forward-thinking this community is. This proactive stance shows that Drupal 11 has a stride ahead towards progressiveness.
Yet, as it is not yet known when exactly Drupal 10 will reach its End-of-Life, one should note though that PHP 8.1, one of its dependencies become obsolete by the year 2024. Therefore, PHP versions starting from PHP 8.2 will have to be provided for compatibility purposes for Drupal 11.

PORTLAND, Ore., 1 August 2024—Drupal, the most powerful open source content management system for everyone from Fortune 500 enterprise companies to mission-driven nonprofits and entrepreneurial small businesses, is launching the latest upgrade to its popular software.

Drupal 11 continues enhancing the strengths of the platform. It makes structured content, workflows, and content governance more flexible and easier for ambitious builders.

Drupal 11 is designed to empower ambitious site builders to build exceptional websites and to accelerate Drupal's innovation,” says Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead of Drupal.  “With Drupal 11, we've made Drupal more intuitive, powerful, and flexible, ensuring it continues to lead in web development and digital experience creation."

This latest version of Drupal brings together code and design for a refreshed CMS navigation experience, with an updated toolbar and a collapsible left-hand menu, all designed to ensure a seamless development experience.

With new Recipes functionality, you can add new features to your website instantly by applying a set of predefined configuration. A recipe can provide anything that can be configured in Drupal, from a simple content type to a full suite of features. You can create your own recipes to share or reuse, or apply recipes created by other Drupal users. Recipes are experimental in this release but already usable and expected to be stable in 11.1.

Single-Directory Components simplify front-end development by consolidating all necessary code into a single directory, making components self-contained and effortlessly reusable.

Drupal’s high performance means it runs fast by default with swift page loading, and Drupal 11 is even faster than previous versions, running up to 50% faster on PHP 8.3. 

Accessible for every user

Drupal’s core strengths include its accessibility, security, multilingual capabilities, and flexible features. 

Thousands of developers worldwide contribute their expertise to ensure that Drupal is continuously pioneering the industry in these strengths. Supported by a global community of domain experts, it offers multilingual support with over 100 languages. 

Drupal 11 improves upon these core strengths with various features suitable for developing simple websites or complex web applications. 

Accessibility is a key strength of Drupal,” says Tim Doyle, CEO of the Drupal Association. “The Open Web is for everyone, and our continual focus on accessibility, multilingual capabilities, and flexibility is intended to ensure that Drupal is a beacon of inclusiveness in an online world where many try to build walls and barriers to entry.”

With more features coming soon

Automatic Updates and Project Browser are two key features slated for a future release of Drupal 11 and are currently under development as contributed modules. 

Drupal’s open source innovation keeps pressing ahead with the release of Drupal 11, including milestone features like Automatic Updates and Project Browser. These features will be key to the success of the new Drupal Starshot project, which will see Drupal become even easier to use for anyone wanting to unleash the power of the world’s leading enterprise CMS.” - Owen Lansbury, Drupal Association Board Chair

Automatic Updates module will apply patch-level updates to Drupal core in a separate, sandboxed copy of your site to keep you up and running without any interruptions. It can detect and report problems at every stage of the update process, so you don't have to discover them after an update is live. It automatically detects database updates and helps you run them during the process.

Project Browser will make it easy for site builders to extend the functionality, look and feel of Drupal. It provides a search interface in the Extend section of the Admin UI to find contributed modules and themes and research their capabilities. Once an extension is selected, instructions are provided on installing it on your site, all without leaving your website. 

Next steps

To start using Drupal 11, visit the Drupal 11 landing page. If you have questions about upgrading to Drupal 11, check out the FAQ page. 

To get help onboarding to Drupal 11 or creating a digital experience from the ground up, connect with one of our Drupal Certified Partners located around the world.

About Drupal and the Drupal Association

Drupal is the open source content management software trusted by millions of people and organizations worldwide. It’s supported by a network of over 10k professionals and over 100 Drupal Certified Partners. The Drupal Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Drupal innovation and supporting the growth of the open source community. This work delivers value to businesses, the digital community, and users of Drupal, in alignment with Drupal’s commitment to the Open Web.

If you haven’t heard of it already, Backdrop CMS has a direct upgrade path from Drupal 7 - making it a viable and affordable option for sites lingering on Drupal 7. Backdrop’s recent 1.28.0 release brought a number of new features, including the ability to choose where your configuration is stored: in the file system or in the database. This can be very helpful, depending on where you are hosting your site. If you are hosting on a server with a writable directory on a solid-state drive (SSD), the default of storing active configuration files on the filesystem can be a very fast and efficient option. On some more specialized hosting where writable directories are on a distributed filesystem in which repeated reading and writing is slower than a SSD (Pantheon, for example), it can now be more efficient to keep the active configuration in the database. This is more in line with the way that modern Drupal handles configuration (with some notable exceptions between the two, such as the format that configuration is imported and exported in – JSON in Backdrop, YAML in Drupal).

Active and Staging Configuration States

When discussing a Backdrop site’s configuration, there are generally two configuration states under discussion: active and staging. The active configuration is the collection of configuration settings that are currently in use for the site, and the staging configuration is composed of any new changes that you are preparing to synchronize with the active settings.

When you run the configuration synchronization process, the staging configuration overwrites the active configuration and any necessary database modifications (e.g. new database schemas for new fields) will be run so that the database state matches what the configuration is describing.

Backdrop will by default store both active and staging configuration files as JSON files directly in the filesystem, in directories that are defined in your settings.php file. Directories that are known to be writable are selected by default, but often these will be adjusted during the site creation process – to allow the staging directory to be kept in your version controlled repository for example. (Note that if you are going to keep your staging configuration in your repository, there is an additional setting in the settings.php file to tell Backdrop not to empty the staging folder after a synchronization action occurs.)

Configuration Storage on Pantheon

Previously, in order to run a Backdrop site on Pantheon, the active configuration would typically be in the writable files directory, which, as was mentioned, can run slowly when reading or writing multiple times in succession. One other strategy for Pantheon was to keep the active configuration in the repository itself, in a non-writable directory. This provided the benefit of extremely fast loading of the configuration files, but had a significant downside in that you could not do any actions that required saving configuration. In fact, if you tried, you would get an error and run the risk of having a database that was out of sync with the configuration settings.

With the new config storage option, you can define where in the repository your staging folder will be, and keep the active configuration in the database. Periodically when you’re making changes locally, you’ll want to export the configuration from the live site into your staging folder and commit those changes to make sure you have saved the most recent configuration. As you make changes locally and commit changes into the configuration staging folder, you’ll be able to synchronize the configuration with each deployment to get the latest configuration changes added to your current database content.

Database Configuration Storage for Developing Locally

When developing locally, it can also be beneficial to store active configuration in the database because it makes it very easy to save snapshots of the site’s content and configuration in one step. This means you can do a “save game” at various points, test out various things to see if they work, and simply reload the saved database snapshot if you want to go back to the earlier version, without needing to worry about multiple moving parts – database plus active configuration files. (If you use DDEV, look into the built-in “snapshot” functionality.)

Typically the configuration storage setting will not be changed regularly, but a new module is in development that can make it much easier to switch between the two. If you are using storage on the file system in one environment and in the database on another (e.g. hosted vs. local installations), the Config Mover module could be a useful development tool. 

Backdrop's Flexibility

This is another case where Backdrop shines with its flexibility: you pick which configuration storage option works best for your current hosting environment.

Read more about this change in the official change record and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Here's what I've been working on for my LocalGov Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Big Blue Door for sponsoring the time to work on these.

Here's a short video outlining the features of the LocalGov Drupal KeyNav module.