Last November the Drupal project announced that Drupal 10 will receive long term support until mid-late 2026. That is when Drupal 12 will be released, so this long term support does not mean that Drupal 11 will not be released as well in the meantime. And by meantime, I mean Drupal 11 will be released this year, in 2024, in June or July or December. Let's dive into where things stand now.
Why do we release Drupal 11 in 2024?
The main motivation in releasing Drupal 11 is similar to previous major versions, to get on modern dependencies for the base system. Innovation will continue in Drupal 11 after its relase, but fixes related to supporting upgrades will be backported to Drupal 10. Here are some key dependencies being updated:
- Symfony is expected to be raised from 6.4 to 7.1 or 7.2 depending on release date.
- PHPUnit is expected to be raised from 9 to 11.
- jQuery is expected to be raised from 3 to 4.
- Composer is expected to be raised from 2.3.6 to 2.7.
Platform requirements are also being raised. Some of the key ones:
- Required PHP version is expected to be 8.3
- Required MySQL version is expected to be 8.0.
- Compatible Drush version will be at least 12, but this is still to be determined.
What does it take to get it done?
To help assess the extent of what needs to be done, I generated a mind map of the issue tree that currently exists to make Drupal 11 a reality. This is of course not the final set of issues, but it gives a good visual into where tasks are already identified.
The left side of the mindmap points to issues that need to get done first in Drupal 10 to prepare for Drupal 11. Those are mostly compatibility layers for new dependencies, so contributed projects can be cross-compatible with Drupal 10 and 11. This is especially important with the long term support timeline for Drupal 10. These are the areas that people can help with the most right now.
- Compatibility with the latest Symfony version had various external dependencies, but it is now fully on us to implement the outstanding Symfony 7 issues.
- @mondrake, @neclimdul and @longwave are already deeply involved in working on PHPUnit 10 compatibility which is the first step between 9 and 11. A key change is that PHPUnit 10 does not support test suites anymore, that was is close to landing.
- jQuery 4 beta was released last week, @catch started to experiment with what it would mean to update to jQuery 4. It looks like most things work fine, except the third party jquery-form plugin we use. Since it is unmaintained, we need to fork that and fix it in our copy.
These are the biggest areas that need to have fixes land in Drupal 10 before we can start a real Drupal 11 branch.
When will actual 11.x development open?
For now the 11.x branch (Drupal's main development branch) is used to build Drupal 10.3. Once there are enough changes that are unique to Drupal 11 lined up, 10.3.x will be opened and 11.x will be used exclusively for the new major version. The above compatibility issues need to get done in 10.3 either way.
Kicking off initiative meetings today
To help coordinate work on Drupal 11, I'm kicking off initiative meetings today at 8pm CET (check what this means in your timezone). Join to discuss the above issues, tooling, timelines, etc. Meetings will recur every other week for now.
Learn more at DrupalCon Portland 2024
While I'll keep blogging about this initiative, I'm also presenting the full picture in "Drupal 11 deep dive: what's new, how to prepare" at DrupalCon Portland between May 6-9 2024. Early bird tickets are on sale now and various discounts are available!