David Slack - Web developer

The third feature release of Drupal 11 is here with the biggest performance boost in a decade. Serve 26-33% more requests with the same database load. New native HTMX support enables rich UX with up to 71% less JavaScript. Plus, enjoy the new stable Navigation module, improved CKEditor content editing, native content export, and cleaner OOP hooks for themes.

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.

Read more about performance improvements in Drupal 11.3.0.

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.

Read more about HTMX support in Drupal 11.3.0.

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.

Want to get involved?

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.

You would be more than welcome to join us at DrupalCon Chicago in March 2026 to attend sessions, network, and enjoy mentorship for your first contributions.

The Core Leadership Team is always looking for new contributors to help steward the project. As recently various new opportunities have opened up. If you are looking to deepen your Drupal skill set, we encourage you to read more about the open subsystem and topic maintainer roles and consider stepping up to contribute your expertise.

Drupal 10.6 is also available

The next maintenance minor release of Drupal 10 has also been released, and will be supported until December 9, 2026, after the release of Drupal 12. Long-term support for Drupal 10 gives more flexibility for sites to move to Drupal 11 when they are ready while staying up-to-date with Drupal's dependencies.

This release schedule also allows sites to move from one long-term support 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.

For years, Drupal has been the platform of choice for organizations that need serious digital capabilities—think universities managing millions of pages, government agencies with complex workflows, and Fortune 500 companies running mission-critical websites. The power is undeniable, but there's always been a catch: you needed technical expertise to unlock it.

That’s why one of the most exciting areas of Drupal’s journey has been the work underway on more intuitive, visual building experiences. The community has spent years exploring how to make Drupal feel more accessible to site builders and content teams without sacrificing the flexibility and robustness that define Drupal.

Drupal Canvas is the next step in that journey.

More than a “new feature drop,” Drupal Canvas represents an ongoing, community-driven effort to modernize how we build with Drupal. Canvas adds a more visual, flexible way to arrange and adjust page components, helping non-developers work more independently while providing developers space for deeper technical work.

No More Trade-offs 

As Lauri Timmanee, Drupal Canvas's product lead, explained: "There's a trade-off that exists in Drupal - either you're forced into building sort of a cookie cutter website...or you go into complex coding. We want to break that trade-off by providing better tools so that you can actually build websites that are custom to your brand without having to know complex code."

What's Included in Drupal Canvas 1.0

Drupal Canvas provides the foundation for a more intuitive page-building workflow in Drupal. Built with React on the frontend and integrated with Drupal's core APIs on the backend, it focuses on helping site builders arrange and adjust content more easily, with features such as:

• Component based visual page building with a drag-and-drop interface
• In-browser code components that allow you to add new building blocks
• Create and preview multiple pages before publication with multi-step undo

Try It Out and Get Involved

Drupal Canvas represents the Drupal community's collaborative innovation at its best—open and with a foundation of real-world use cases. As work continues, community feedback will continue to play a large role in shaping the next phases.

• Check out the Drupal Canvas demo with the Drupal brand. Local installation instructions at https://github.com/phenaproxima/canvas-demo
• Join the #drupal-canvas channel in Slack for active community discussion.

Your feedback and involvement will directly shape the future of content management in Drupal.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

In my DrupalCon Vienna keynote, I talk about how Drupal is adapting to an AI-driven web through AI-enabled visual editing, site templates, autonomous agents, and workflow orchestration.

The web is changing fast. AI now writes content, builds web pages, and answers questions directly, often bypassing websites entirely.

People often wonder what this means for Drupal, so at DrupalCon Vienna, I tackled this head-on. My message was simple: AI is the storm, but it's also the way through it. Instead of fighting AI, we're leaning into it.

My keynote focused on how Drupal is evolving across four product areas. We're making it easier to get started with Site Templates, enabling visual site building through Drupal Canvas, accelerating development with AI assistance, and exploring complex workflows with new orchestration tools.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below, or download my slides (62 MB).

Vienna felt like a turning point. People could see the pieces coming together. Drupal is finding its footing in the AI era, leading in AI innovation, and ready to help shape what comes next for the web.

Growing Drupal with Site Templates

One of the most important ways to grow Drupal is to make it easier and faster to build new sites. We began that work with Recipes, a way to quickly add common features to a site. Recipes help people go from idea to a website in hours instead of days.

At DrupalCon Vienna, I talked about the next step in that journey: our first Site Template. Site Templates build on Recipes and also include a complete design with layouts, visual style, and sample content. The result is that you can go from a new Drupal install to a fully working website in minutes. It will be the easiest way yet to get started with Drupal.

Next, we plan to introduce more Site Templates and launch a Site Template Marketplace where anyone can discover, share, and build on templates for different use cases.

A new visual editing experience

At DrupalCon Vienna, the energy around Drupal Canvas was infectious. Some even called it "CanvasCon". Drupal Canvas sessions were often standing room only, just like the Drupal AI sessions.

I first showed an early version of Drupal Canvas at DrupalCon Barcelona in September 2024, when we launched Drupal's Starshot initiative. The progress we've made in just one year is remarkable. My keynote showed parts of Drupal Canvas in action, but for a deeper dive, I recommend watching this breakout session.

Version 1.0 of Drupal Canvas is scheduled for November 2025. Starting in January 2026, it will become the default page builder in Drupal CMS 2.0. After more than 15 months of development and countless contributors working to make Drupal easier for everyone, it's hard to believe we're almost there. This marks the beginning of a new chapter for how people create with Drupal.

What excites me most is what this solves. For years, building pages in Drupal required technical expertise. Drupal Canvas gives end-users a visual page builder that is both more powerful and easy to use. Plus, it supports React, which means front-end developers can contribute using skills they already have.

Drupal's accidental AI advantage

Every content management system faces defining moments. For Drupal, one came with the release of Drupal 8. We rebuilt Drupal from the ground up, adopting modern design patterns and improving configuration management, versioning, workflows, and more.

The transition was hard, but here is the surprising part: ten years later those decisions gave Drupal an unexpected advantage in today's AI-driven web. The architecture we created is exactly what AI systems need today. When AI modifies content, you need version control to roll back mistakes. When it builds pages, you need structured data, permissions, and workflows. Drupal already has those capabilities.

For years, Drupal prioritized flexibility and robustness while other platforms focused on ease of use. What once felt like extra complexity now makes perfect sense. Drupal has quietly become one of the most AI-ready platforms available.

AI is the storm, and the way through the storm

As I said in my keynote: "Some days AI terrifies me. An hour later it excites me. By the evening, I'm tired of hearing about it.". Still, we can't ignore AI.

I first introduced AI as part of Starshot. Five months ago, it became its own dedicated track with the launch of the Drupal AI initiative. Since then, twenty two agencies have backed it with funding and contributors, together contributing over one million dollars. This is the largest fundraising effort in Drupal's history.

The initiative is already producing impressive results. At DrupalCon Vienna, we released Drupal AI version 1.2, a major step forward for the initiative.

In my keynote, I also demonstrated three new AI capabilities:

1. AI-powered page building: Drupal AI can now generate complete, designed pages in minutes using a component-based design system in Drupal Canvas. What site builders used to build in hours now happens in minutes while maintaining your site's structure and style.
2. Context Control Center: Teams can define brand voice, target audiences, and key messages from a single UI. All AI agents draw from this source of truth.
3. Autonomous agents: When you update information in the Context Control Center, such as a product price or company statistic, agents automatically find every instance throughout your site and propose updates. You review and approve changes before they go live.

Orchestration as a path to explore

Earlier this year, I wrote about the great digital agency unbundling. As AI automates more technical work, agencies need to evolve their business models and find new ways to create value.

One promising direction is orchestration: building systems and workflows that connect AI agents, content platforms, CRMs, and marketing tools into intelligent, automated workflows. I think of it as DXP 2.0.

Most organizations have complex marketing technology stacks. Connecting all the systems in their stack often requires custom code or repetitive manual tasks. This integration work can be time-consuming and hard to maintain.

Modern orchestration tools solve this by automating how information flows between systems. Instead of writing custom code, you can use no-code tools to define workflows that trigger automatically. When someone fills out a form, the system creates a CRM contact, sends a welcome email, and notifies your team without any manual work.

In my keynote, I showed how ECA and ActivePieces can work together. Jürgen Haas, who created ECA, and I collaborated on this integration. ECA lets you define automations inside Drupal using events, conditions, and actions. ActivePieces is an open source automation platform similar to Zapier or n8n.

This approach allows us to build user experiences that are not only better and smarter, but also positions Drupal to benefit from AI innovation happening across the broader ecosystem. The idea resonated in Vienna. People approached me enthusiastically with related projects and demos, including tools like Flowdrop or Drupal's MCP module.

Between now and DrupalCon Chicago, we're inviting the community to explore and expand on this work. Join us in #orchestration on Drupal Slack, test the new Orchestration module, connect more automation platforms, or help improve ECA. If this direction proves valuable, we'll share what we learned at DrupalCon Chicago.

Building the future together

At DrupalCon Vienna, I felt something shift. Sessions were packed. People were excited about Site Templates and the Marketplace. Drupal Canvas drew huge crowds, and even more agencies signed up to join the Drupal AI initiative. During contribution day, more people than usual showed up looking for ways to help.

That energy in Vienna reflected something bigger. AI is changing how people use the web and how we build for it. It can feel threatening, and it can feel full of possibility, but what became clear in Vienna is that Drupal is well positioned at this inflection point, with both momentum and direction.

What makes this moment special is how the community is responding with focus and collaboration. We are approaching it as a much more coordinated effort, while still leaving room for experimentation.

Vienna showed me that the Drupal community is ready to take this on together. We have navigated uncharted territory before, but this time there is a boldness and unity I have not seen in years. That is the way through the storm. I am proud to be part of it.

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who contributed to making my presentation and demos a success. A special thank you to Adam G-H, Aidan Foster, ASH Sullivan, Bálint Kléri, Cristina Chumillas, Elliott Mower, Emma Horrell, Gábor Hojtsy, Gurwinder Antal, James Abrahams, Jurgen Haas, Kristen Pol, Lauri Eskola, Marcus Johansson, Martin Anderson-Clutz, Pamela Barone, Tiffany Farriss, Tim Lehnen, and Witze Van der Straeten. Many others contributed indirectly to make this possible. If I've inadvertently omitted anyone, please reach out.