Drupal is a powerful new suite of tools, and the strongest link in your new content supply chain. Interact with countless applications, thanks to REST-first native web services. Use progressive decoupling to break free from back-end restrictions without sacrificing security and accessibility. Deliver faster, with enhanced entity caching and better integration with CDNs and reverse proxies. With Drupal, you can build almost any integrated experience you can imagine.
Features
Simplicity for editors
Turn great ideas into great experiences. Leave your desktop behind and create compelling content on more modern devices than ever. Work efficiently with better previews and drag-and-drop image uploads. And when you need to make quick changes, choose in-context editing and use only the tools you need.
Power for administrators
It's easier to customize components---views, lists, blocks, admin tools, and more---than ever before. Control how data is displayed without using a single line of code. Structure content with more field types, and add SEO-friendly meaning with native Schema.org markup. Make creating and managing content a great experience too.
Accessibility for everyone
Drupal ships with extensive support for accessibility standards, and not only for color contrast and font sizes. Semantic HTML5 helps you create interactions---even ones with dynamic content---that are more usable. Plus, Drupal now adopts more WAI-ARIA practices. You can make content structures easier to understand for people with disabilities.
Harmony in deployment
Fine-tune your configuration management with an all-new system. It's now much easier to move configuration changes between environments. That means better deployments and more sophisticated maintenance are at your fingertips. Build with precise control over the integrity of views, content types, user roles, and more. Store configuration data consistently, in a central place. The power to unleash it all is now a standard Drupal feature.
Proudly found elsewhere
Maximize Drupal's flexibility with object-oriented code and the latest PHP standards. Some of the best-known technologies are now part of Drupal. It depends on dozens of external libraries---like Composer, Guzzle, and Symfony2---so you can write and debug code faster, with more confidence. Say goodbye to PHPTemplate; rely on much more readable code when theming with Twig. And use simpler, more unified APIs to add power to your modules and themes.
What's New
New in Drupal 11.3
Biggest performance boost in a decade
Database query and cache operations on both cold and warm caches have been significantly reduced. Our automated tests show that the new optimization for cold caches is about one third and on partially-warm cache requests by up to one fourth. Independent testing shows even bigger improvements on complex sites.
The render and caching layers now combine database and cache operations, notably in path alias and entity loading. BigPipe also now uses HTMX on the frontend, leading to a significant reduction in JavaScript weight.
Native HTMX: Rich UX with up to 71% less JavaScript
Drupal 11.3.0 now natively integrates HTMX, a powerful, dependency-free JavaScript library. HTMX dramatically enhances how developers build fast, interactive user interfaces. It enables modern browser features directly in HTML attributes, significantly reducing the need for extensive custom JavaScript.
Navigation module is now stable
The Navigation module is now stable, offering a superior and more modern experience than the old Toolbar. While it is an experience worth installing on all sites, it is most useful for sites with complex administration structures. While not yet the default, we strongly encourage users to switch and benefit from its improvements.
Improved content editing
CKEditor now natively supports linking content on the site by selecting it from an autocomplete or dropdown (using entity references).. CKEditor also has new, user-friendly options for formatting list bullets and numbering.. Finally, a dedicated Administer node published status permission is introduced to manage publication status of content (which does not require Administer nodes anymore).
Object-oriented hooks in themes
Themes can now use the same #[Hook()] attribute system as modules, with theme namespaces registered in the container for easier integration. This change allows themers to write cleaner, more structured code. Themes' OOP hook implementations are placed in the src/Hook/ directory, similarly to modules'. Themes support a defined subset of both normal and alter hooks.
Native support for content export
Drupal core now includes a command-line tool to export content in the format previously introduced by the contributed Default Content module. Drupal can export a single entity at a time, but it is also possible to export the dependencies of the entity automatically (for example, images or taxonomy terms it references).To use the export tool, run the following from the Drupal site's root:
- php core/scripts/drupal content:export ENTITY_TYPE_ID ENTITY_ID
PHP 8.5 support
PHP 8.5 itself was released last month. Drupal 11.3.0 not only ensures full compatibility and support for PHP 8.5, but made core testing also run on it. PHP 8.5 is expected to become the minimum required version for Drupal 12, planned to be released in 2026.
New experimental database driver for MySQL/MariaDB for parallel queries
A new, experimental MySQLi database driver has been added for MySQL and MariaDB. It is not yet fully supported and is hidden from the user interface.
While the current default drivers use PDO to connect to MySQL or MariaDB, this new database driver instead uses the mysqli PHP extension. MySQLi is more modern and allows database queries to be run in parallel instead of sequentially as with PDO. We plan to add asynchronous database query support in a future Drupal release.
Core maintainer team updates
Since Drupal 11.2, we reached out to all subsystem and topic maintainers to confirm whether they wished to continue in their roles. Several long-term contributors stepped back and opened up roles for new contributors. We would like to thank them for their contributions.
Additionally, Roy Scholten stepped back from his Usability maintainership and Drupal core product manager role. He has been inactive for a while, but his impact on Drupal since 2007 has been profound. We thank him for his involvement!
Mohit Aghera joined as a maintainer for the File subsystem. Shawn Duncan is a new maintainer for the Ajax subsystem. David Cameron was added as a maintainer of the Link Field module. Pierre Dureau and Florent Torregrosa are now the maintainers for the Asset Library API. Finally, codebymikey is the new maintainer for Basic Auth.
Going forward, we plan to review core maintainer appointments annually. We hope this will reduce the burden on maintainers when transitioning between roles or stepping down, and also provide more opportunities for new contributors.
