Single Directory Components
One of the first major features we are excited for are Single Directory Components(SDC’s for short). SDC’s allow developers to organize their theme code into individual reusable components, which combine template(twig), style(css) and behavior(js), neatly packaged with a metadata file to describe the UI element(s). From buttons, headings and links, to bigger components like cards, banners, and billboards, SDC’s provide well defined design system components, allowing for consistency across the site(or even entire brands).
We have built one of the first themes fully embracing the SDC approach in the Drupal space, which you can find here. It’s Storybook-ready out of the box, and includes a handful of starter components to help deliver high-quality frontend features, faster.
New Navigation toolbar
The new Navigation finally provides one toolbar to rule them all. Taking hints from the Gin theme(and Gin Toolbar), the new Navigation module lives on the left side of the page, reducing the space taken from valuable vertical page real estate. Benefits include increased customization opportunities, and expandable/collapsible UI conventions. This is part of an ongoing initiative for continued improvement of administrative menus and trays in Drupal core.
Improved performance and lazy loading
Members of the Drupal community worked directly with Google to improve Drupal’s performance. Benefits have included core supported lazy loading of images, videos, iframes and other OEmbed elements. A new performance testing tool called Gander, constantly looking for optimizations and regressions in Drupal core. Optimization for JS/CSS aggregation in Drupal core. Additionally, Drupal 11 now requires PHP 8.3, in which some cases have reported as much as 50% increase in Drupal performance.
Staging content with Workspaces
Workspaces allows editors to create individual spaces for staging content changes that can then be published all at once. This improved editing experience makes it easier to preview changes that impact multiple new or existing pieces of content allowing for more confident content releases.
Same Page Preview
The Same Page Preview modules allow you to instantly see the page preview side by side with the fields you are editing, saving you time and extra clicks. Additionally, previews can be switched to view displays across different device viewports.
Better Access Policy API for developers
While the old access api was primarily focused around user roles and permissions, the new Access Policy API opens up easier handling of more dynamic controls(time of day, SSO and third party parameters, contextual properties, etc.), in combination with associated cache controls for improved performance.
Setting the stage for Drupal Starshot
Behind many of these features is an exciting initiative called Drupal Starshot. Which looks to bring many core improvements and contributed projects to help faster realize the true strength of Drupal for more users. Drupal has long since focused on providing an exceptional set of tools for experienced developers to build high quality CMS experiences, but often at the expense of less experienced developers and down market opportunities. Drupal Starshot aims to unify its many strong foundational components to make it more approachable for new developers, and more feature-rich experiences out of the box for editors and end users.
To learn more about Starshot, check out my other article:
Dream Bigger: Exploring Drupal 11 and Starshot with Elevated Third
Upgrading from Drupal 10
Drupal 10's end of life is not until June 2026. This gives you roughly a two year window to upgrade to the latest release. We think it’s important that you stay current with recommended releases, but you shouldn’t feel an immediate urgency to upgrade either. Typically it does take some time for the contributed community to fully support major new releases and that’s something we’ll work with you to identify when the timing is right. In many cases, we can help port custom and contributed modules to Drupal 11 that your site(s) depend on so that the upgrade path is seamless and smooth.