New in Drupal 11.2
PHPUnit 11 can now be used for testing. While the default version remains PHPUnit 10, it’s possible to update to PHPUnit with the command composer update phpunit/phpunit --with-dependencies. Drupal core testing on PHP 8.4 requires PHPUnit 11 as a minimum.
Extension and site installation is three to four times as fast as Drupal 11.1.0
Griffyn Heels joined as a provisional Core Leadership Team Facilitator. Juraj Nemec and Drew Webber were added as general core committers, and Pierre Dureau was added as a provisional Frontend Framework Manager. Check out their announcement.
.module files are not needed anymore!
Thanks to various optimizations to container rebuilding and the installer, installing Drupal itself or extensions is now three to four times as fast. There are similar improvements when using the user interface, but it is more apparent when using Drush. In this video, we show Drupal 11.2 installing 60 modules in 5.7 seconds while Drupal 11.1 takes four times as much to do the same:
Built-in JSON Schema generation for content entities
Drupal core can now generate JSON Schemas for content entity types. The typed data, serialization and field APIs have been enhanced to allow field-level schemas to be generated based on their storage configuration.
When working with Drupal entities over an API, it is important for developer experience to have a schema for the data structure of a particular entity. This allows clients to know, for instance, what acceptable values may be sent or received for the value and format properties of a formatted text field.
The modern Navigation module now automatically enables the built-in top bar functionality as well. An “overview” link is now shown when a menu item is a container for child items, making it easier to find the right page. Numerous other blockers have also been resolved, and this experimental module is close to becoming stable in a future minor release.
Native variant support added to Single-Directory Components
Starting with Drupal 11.2, the last APIs that needed .module files can be implemented as object-oriented hooks too! Developers can make use of [#RemoveHook] attributes to remove hooks, [#ReOrderHook] to change hook ordering and #[Hook('preprocess')] attributes to declare object-oriented preprocess hooks. Now there is no need for a .module file if all of the hooks are on classes in the Hook namespace.
Drupal core has long supported component-based CSS organization and conditional loading that depends on page elements. Using this system, the default CSS added to every page by Drupal core has been reduced from around 7 KB to 1 KB. This will improve bandwidth requirements and page rendering times for all but the most highly customized sites running on 11.2.
CSS page weight improvements
Update Status now checks the status of uninstalled extensions, making your site even more secure.
Updating themes and modules in the Update Status module with authorize.php was not Composer-aware. This could cause various serious problems for sites and site deployment workflows. Therefore, this legacy feature has now been removed. Projects should generally be updated on the command line with Composer. The experimental Update Manager (Automatic Updates) will also be used for this in the future.
Navigation improvements
Six people stepped up to become subsystem maintainers! Nic Laflin became a maintainer of the Extension API, Lee Rowlands became a co-maintainer of the Form and Render APIs, Adam Bramley became maintainer of Node module, Jean Valverde became a co-maintainer of Single-Directory Components. Mark Conroy became the maintainer of the Stable 9 theme and Brad Jones became a co-maintainer of Serialization. Many of the improvements above are thanks to leadership from these new maintainers!
Recipe dependencies are now unpacked
Three subsystem maintainers stepped back. We thank Claudiu Cristea, Christian Fritsch, and Daniel Wehner for their immense contributions.
Changes to Update Status module to better support modern workflows
If you are looking to make the leap from Drupal user to Drupal contributor, or you want to share resources with your team as part of their professional development, there are many opportunities to deepen your Drupal skill set and give back to the community. Check out the Drupal contributor guide. Join us at DrupalCon Vienna in October 2025 or DrupalCon Nara in November 2025 to attend sessions, network, and enjoy mentorship for your first contributions.
Cache efficiency improvements
In design systems, a variant allows grouping multiple component properties into a predefined set. The variant can then be used as a shortcut to render a component. Front-end developers could previously define a variant as a prop, but this approach did not support custom titles or descriptions to convey the variant’s purpose.
Now, you can use variants as a property at the root of your component declaration:
PHPUnit 11 support added
Finally, there have also been changes in the mentoring coordinator team: James Shields joined, while Mauricio Dinarte, AmyJune Hineline and Tara King stepped back from the role. Many Drupal contributors are thankful to have been mentored by them!
Core maintainer team updates
Drupal recipes are special Composer packages designed to bootstrap Drupal projects with necessary dependencies. When a recipe is required, a new Composer plugin “unpacks” it by moving the recipe’s dependencies directly into your project’s root composer.json, and removes the recipe as a project dependency. This makes it possible to update those dependencies later and to not have the recipe as an active dependency of the site anymore.
The next maintenance minor release of Drupal 10 has also been released. Drupal 10 will be supported until December 9, 2026, after the release of Drupal 12. Long-term support for Drupal 10 is managed with a new maintenance minor release every 6 months that receives twelve months of support. This allows the maintenance minor to adapt to evolving dependencies. It also gives more flexibility for sites to move to Drupal 11 when they are ready.
All field types shipped by core now provide JSON Schemas out of the box through their default normalizers. In addition, all the core typed data plugins provide JSON Schemas as well. This means that all core fields can generate JSON Schemas for their properties out of the box. Additionally, most field types provided by contributed projects or custom modules will generate JSON Schemas automatically so long as they do not provide a custom normalizer or depend on non-core typed data plugins.
Since Drupal 11.1, Emma Horrel and Cristina Chumillas were announced as UX Managers.
This release schedule allows sites to move from one LTS version to the next if that is the best strategy for their needs. For more information on maintenance minors, read the previous post on the new major release schedule.
Drupal 10.5 is also available
name: Card
variants:
primary:
title: Primary
description: ...
secondary:
title: Secondary
description: ...
props: {}
slots: {}
AVIF support added with fallback to WebP
Significant improvements have been made to Drupal’s render cache performance due to optimizations in placeholder processing and cache tag invalidation checks. This results in smaller cache entries with fewer cache dependencies in the dynamic page cache, leading to higher cache hit rates and reduced cache storage requirements. The reduction in cache tag lookups reduces round trips to persistent cache storage backends on every HTML response. This applies whether the cache tag backend is using database, memcache, or redis, and leads to slightly faster page rendering performance on both dynamic page cache hits and misses. There is also a significant reduction in queries per second (QPS) for high-traffic sites, which should allow caching servers to handle more traffic with lower hardware requirements.
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The second feature release of Drupal 11 improves backend and frontend performance and scalability, completes the introduction of OOP support of hooks, adds JSON Schema support, includes AVIF image format capability, supports SDC variants, and more.
