fidzu : Drupal

At the end of November I had the privilege of going to the first ever Oaisys AI Practitioners conference in Pune, India. I wanted to share some of the memories and moments from that event.

Jamie Abrahams and I were invited to both hold sessions and lead the contribution day. It was my first time in India and since the event itself was new as well, it was hard to know what to expect. But whatever my expectations could have been, it would have surpassed it.

We arrived two days early to get over jetlag and also meet some people before the event. On the first evening when we arrived we went to dinner with Dipen Chaudhary, CEO and Piyuesh Kumar, Director of technology, both from QED42. QED42 were the main organisers of the event and had done a fantastic job putting it all together. It was great to meet them a bit before the event started and let me tell you - Indian food in Germany is not the same thing as Indian food in India. It was absolutely delicious.

The next day we met up with Pritam Prasun, founder of OpenSense Labs and CEO of RAIL. We discussed a lot about the Drupal ecosystem, about Indian culture vs western culture, but also about the RAIL project and how it can be integrated with the AI module to make the ecosystem more secure.

We also got to visit the offices of QED42 which was a great experience. The team there was super friendly and it was nice to see some faces that you had seen on video calls or Slack channels in real life.

The conference itself started on the 29th of November in the ICC Trade Tower in Pune. When I walked in the first day, I was greeted right away by people I knew from the Drupal community, but also people that had worked with the AI module or were interested in AI in general. It was a great feeling to be surrounded by so many like-minded people.

It was a great feeling to be surrounded by so many like-minded people.

Because of managing the contribution room, I only attended two sessions during the conference - Jamie's introductory session, which was always great and very well received and the end session by Piyush about How LLMs learn, which I learned myself from as well.

Meeting prominent contributors to the Drupal AI ecosystem

The highlight of the conference was to meet some of the most prominent contributors to the AI ecosystem. Specifically Prabhavathi Vanipenta and Anjali Prasannan that both have been doing amazing work on the AI module, and Akhil Babu, who has been working on the agents system in Drupal, and built many of the agents you see in Canvas. It was truly a blessing to meet them in person and thank them for all their contributions.

Prashant Chauhan, wasn't there in person, but Prabha and Anjali made sure that I got to thank him over a video call. The four of them have worked and finished over 200 issues on the AI module, which is just mind-blowing.

Well thought through ideas of how AI can be used to improve their workflows, businesses and lives

Another thing that was mind-blowing was the level of interest, energy and enthusiasm around AI in general in the contribution room. People were building the craziest things and had really thought through what and how AI can be used to improve their workflows, businesses and lives. It was inspiring to see so many people passionate about the same thing as you. I have never seen anything like it before, in the events I have attended.

Another thing that was mind-blowing was the level of interest, energy and enthusiasm around AI in general in the contribution room

The Browser AI CKEditor for instance is a project that was thought through and built during the contribution day.

A lot of discussion led directly to new issues in the Drupal AI module issue queue, that some of the people attending are working on now.

Because of family commitments I couldn't stay longer than four days, but those four days were really great. I want to thank Dipen, Piyuesh and the whole QED42 team for organising such a fantastic event and being such great hosts. A special thanks as well to Priyanka Jeph, who organized a lot of the event.

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

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.

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.

Combined, these changes reduce database query and cache operations on cold cache requests by around one third, with smaller but still significant improvements when caches become warmer, up to and including dynamic and internal page cache hits.

Drupal's automated performance tests show many of these improvements, and will ensure that we continue to build and maintain on these gains over time.

Drupal Umami demo's anonymous cold cache front page request

Let's look at an example. These are the changes in Drupal core's included Umami demo's anonymous cold cache front page request performance test between 11.2.x and 11.3.x.

Particularly notable is the benefit for requests to pages with partially warmed caches, where site-wide caches are full, but page-specific caches are invalid or empty. In core's performance test for this scenario, we saw an almost 50% reduction in database queries. Requests like this make up a large percentage of the slowest responses from real Drupal sites, and core now provides a much lower baseline to work against. Medium to large sites often hit constraints with the database first, because it is harder to scale than simply adding webservers, and these improvements reduce load when it is at its most constrained.

Drupal Umami demo's anonymous node page with partially-warmed cache

While different sites, and even different pages on the same site, will show different results, we would expect all Drupal sites to see a significant reduction in database and cache i/o per request once they've updated to Drupal 11.3.

Independent testing and further improvements with Paragraphs

Independent testing by MD Systems on their internal Primer Drupal distribution shows even better improvements with Drupal 11.3, especially for complex pages. This is also thanks to further improvements enabled and inspired by Drupal 11.3 in the Entity Reference Revisions module which resulted in considerable performance improvements for Paragraphs. Their results show a dramatic reduction in database and cache operations across different cache states. Their cold cache total query count dropped by 62% (from 1097 to 420), and total cache lookups decreased by 47% (from 991 to 522) compared to Drupal 11.2. At the same time their partially-warm cache total query count dropped by 61% (from 696 to 274) and total cache lookups decreased by 34% (from 562 to 373).

Even more technical details

For further details on how these improvements happened, check out some of the core issues that introduced them, or watch Nathaniel Catchpole's DrupalCon Vienna presentation.

#1237636: Lazy load multiple entities at a time using fibers
#2620980: Add static and persistent caching to ContentEntityStorageBase::loadRevision()
#3496369: Multiple load path aliases without the preload cache
#3537863: Optimize field module's hook_entity_bundle_info() implementation
#3538006: Optimize EntityFieldManager::buildBundleFieldDefinitions()
#3526080: Reduce write contention to the fast and consistent backend in ChainedFastBackend
#3493911: Add a CachedPlaceholderStrategy to optimize render cache hits and reduce layout shift from big pipe
#3526267: Remove core/drupal.ajax dependency from big_pipe/big_pipe
#3506930: Separate hooks from events
#3505248: Ability to preload frequently used cache tags (11.2.x)

There is more to do for Drupal 11.4!

If you'd like to help 11.4 become even faster yet, check out core issues tagged with 'performance' and try to help us get them done. We have multiple issues in progress that didn't quite make it into 11.3.0 but could form the basis of another significant set of improvements in 11.4.0.