Drupal Core Development

We are excited to announce that the main branch is now the official Drupal core development branch. Using a main branch aligns Drupal core with the best practices of industry and major open-source projects. This move is the final step of infrastructure changes that began in 2023.

Going forward, main is the new, primary development trunk for Drupal core. Most active work and outstanding issues currently filed against 11.x should now be targeted at main. The 11.x branch will remain for Drupal-11-specific issues, while Drupal 12 development will happen in the main branch.

Drupal 11.3 includes a number of significant performance improvements, altogether making it the most significant step forward for Drupal performance in the last 10 years (since the Drupal 8.0.0 release).

These improvements have been driven by enhancements to Drupal's render and caching layers in 11.2.x, notably taking advantage of Fibers, a new PHP feature added in PHP 8.1. By rendering more parts of the page in placeholders, we have enabled similar database and cache operations that used to occur individually to be combined, with particular improvements in path alias and entity loading. We have also learned from Drupal's automated performance testing framework, allowing us to identify and execute several optimizations during Drupal's hook and field discovery processes, to significantly reduce database and cache i/o, and memory usage on cold caches.

On the front end we have converted Drupal's BigPipe implementation to use HTMX, reducing JavaScript weight significantly. We also intercept placeholders with warm render caches prior to BigPipe replacement, so that BigPipe's JavaScript is not loaded at all on requests that will be served quickly without it, allowing BigPipe to be used more widely for the requests that do need it. These changes may also allow us to enable BigPipe for anonymous site visitors in a future release.

The 2025 Annual Maintainer Check-In is now complete, a huge thank you to everyone who responded and to all the maintainers who continue to keep Drupal core moving forward.

As part of this process, we’ve confirmed that a number of Drupal Core subsystems and topic areas are currently without an active maintainer.

If you’ve ever thought about stepping into a maintainer role, or co-maintaining alongside others, now is the perfect time to get involved.

From Drupal 10 on, Drupal core has a new major release schedule with a long-term support phase, so that two major versions are supported at a time. We previously announced that Drupal 10 would be supported until mid- to late 2026, depending on when Drupal 12 was released.

We are updating the release schedule and have agreed that Drupal 10 will officially be supported until December 2026, regardless of whether Drupal 12 is released in June, August, or December. This fixed end-of-life date should provide more certainty for the ecosystem and make planning site upgrades easier.