The new Drupal 11 version offers an array of significant improvements in editing, content rendering, Recipes, component-based development and much more.
As of August 2 2024, Drupal 11 has been released. Drupal 11 is the result of contributions from 1,858 individuals across 590 organisations (source: Dries' blog)! From the Drupal Association's official announcement:
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."
Drupal 11 Features
The new version of Drupal offers a new powerful combination of revamped navigation, a refreshed admin toolbar and a collapsible left-hand menu to elevate the development process.
Drupal Recipes (experimental)
Recipes is another big chapter in the latest Drupal release, bringing in quick and easy ways to install new functionality. Recipes can be almost anything; a new webform/content type/plugin - that is, everything that can be put into configuration!
Single-Directory Components
SDCs make components self-contained and substantially improve the front-end development by enabling component-based development.
Additional important features
Drupal 11 additionally offers:
- Improved page performance, interface previews and enhanced lazy loading
- Improved accessibility, for all users
- Support for decoupled menus with Linkset support out of the box
- Automatic content formatting and more sophisticated content management functions, for improved content editing experience
- Easier management for menus, taxonomy vocabularies and user permissions
- Easier upgrades to future Drupal versions
- The new version of Symfony; Version 7 is replacing the previous Drupal 10 Symfony version (6)
You can find even more features and a detailed guide on Drupal 11 in this excellent article from Acquia's Greg O'Toole: https://dev.acquia.com/blog/power-drupal-11
How to prepare for/upgrade to Drupal 11
System Requirements
To upgrade your Drupal 10 website to Drupal 11, you'll first need to review the latest version's system requirements and ensure that your hosting provider ticks all the boxes.
Latest 10.x version
Your Drupal 10 website must be on the latest 10.x version i.e. 10.3 at the time of writing.
Scaffold file changes
Some scaffold files will be changed so make sure you've first saved any custom amendments in files such as .htaccess, default PHP files etc. After the upgrade, you'll have to re-apply the same changes to ensure your bespoke settings are maintained.
Deprecated modules and themes
Some Drupal Core modules and themes are no longer available for Drupal 11. As a result, some dependencies will have to be replaced or abandoned (see https://www.drupal.org/docs/core-modules-and-themes/deprecated-and-obsolete for more).
Upgrade Status Review
Install the Upgrade Status module to review the upgrade readiness of the environment and components of your website. The module outputs a detailed view of available updates, obsolete module and theme versions, suggested upgrade steps for assets and many more.
Custom Modules and Themes
If you are using custom modules and themes on your website, you must replace deprecated code and convert it to Drupal 11-compatible code. You can update custom modules and themes using Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector before attempting to upgrade.
Upgrade to Drupal 11
This drupal.org guide offers good guidance on the sequence of steps to perform in order to complete your Drupal 11 upgrade. Some slight variations might be present on your specific instance of Drupal but the community has tested and verified different combinations of modules and themes so make sure that you search the Drupal issue queue in case you find yourself stuck.
Post-Upgrade Tasks
Following completion of the Drupal 11 upgrade, make sure that you've freshly exported the configuration of your website and also that your code is still clean and tested by running PHPCS and any tests you have in place (PHPUnit/Behat etc.).
Keep your eyes on the Drupal watchdog queue for any new notices or errors that might come up. If everything is clean and works without issues, your website is now on Drupal 11 - well done!
