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We’re bringing you our monthly overview of top Drupal articles and news. We hope you enjoy the June selection!
Drupal 11.2.0 is now available
The first piece of news we need to cover in this month’s overview is the release of Drupal 11.2.0, the second feature release of Drupal 11, announced by Gábor Hojtsy.
One of the biggest improvements of the 11.2.0 release is a three to four times faster extension and site installation compared to Drupal 11.1.0, which is especially noticeable when using Drush.
Other new features include built-in JSON Schema generation for content entities, native variant support for Single-Directory Components, AVIF image support with fallback to WebP, navigation and cache efficiency improvements, support for PHPUnit 11, and more.
Accelerating AI innovation in Drupal
Moving on, we have an important article from Dries himself who announced the launch of the Drupal AI Initiative with over $100,000 in funding and a dedicated team of experts from the community. The AI Initiative is closely aligned with the overall strategy and vision of Drupal CMS – making site building faster and easier, for any kind of user.
As Dries points out, since Drupal was an early adopter of AI functionality, it has a headstart on AI compared to other similar content management systems. The idea for the AI Initiative was born at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 with the key goal of better organization and accelerating progress.
Read more about the Drupal AI Initiative
Drupal AI 1.1.0 is out and brings major new features!
The next innovation from June that we need to highlight is the release of Drupal AI version 1.1.0, which was a stable release with 10 modules updated to the latest version. It included over 200 issues fixed across AI Core, AI Agents and AI Providers, with 90 unique contributors to AI Core.
The two key new features of this release are function calling and the new Agentic framework, which provides a no-code way for any user to build AI agents which are stored as configurations for easy reuse. There are also a host of other new features, such as Custom Operation Types and the implementation of standards-based tooling.
Read more about what’s new in Drupal AI 1.1.0
SEO for Drupal Users: What You Need to Know
We continue with an article by Amber Matz of Drupalize.Me, who breaks down some essential concepts and best practices of SEO in Drupal. She starts off with an overview of search engine optimization and the SEO principles that Drupal supports out of the box, e.g. its smart use of meta tags.
In addition to setting up meta tags for Drupal with the Metatag module, Amber also shows other best practices such as using structured headings with meaningful text, and using URL aliases to create keyword-rich web addresses. She recommends also using the Drupal SEO Checklist module to make sure that other SEO best practices are followed as well.
Read more about SEO for Drupal users
The challenges of launching the Drupal IXP program at this moment in time
Another important article we wanted to include comes from Mike Anello / ultimike of DrupalEasy, who discusses the reasons for the launch of the Drupal IXP program despite the challenges brought by this particular moment in time.
The two main challenges Mike identifies are the current economic landscape, with many experienced Drupal developers seeking new employment (which might end up being in a non-Drupal field); and the fact that the Drupal developer community seems to be getting older, with fewer and fewer new developers joining.
The IXP program aims to address the long-term need for securing new Drupal talent. It is hugely supported by the community and the Drupal Association itself, with 250 contribution credits awared to companies that join the program.
Read more about the launch of the Drupal IXP program
Drupal deployment confidence part 2: Composer validate
Next up on this month’s overview, we have part two of Eirik Morland’s series of articles about deploying Drupal sites and apps with confidence. This particular article focuses on a seemingly insignificant but actually very useful Composer command – composer validate.
The problem that composer validate solves is a common and frustrating one: the lock file being out of sync with composer.json. If this mismatch is found, it prevents developers from merging code, which ensures you avoid any unexpected and/or outdated dependencies, as well as any misleading advice.
Read more about composer validate
A Step-by-Step Walkthrough of Drupal CMS
In the next June article, Nadiia Nykolaichuk of ImageX Media provides a step-by-step walkthrough of Drupal CMS, beginning with the installation and other getting started steps. These include the different ways of installing Drupal CMS, and choosing the right feature sets (Recipes) for your Drupal website.
The next section of Nadiia’s article focuses on the modern admin experiences of Drupal CMS, which include the Gin admin theme, a new navigation menu, the Coffee module, and more. She also shows to add new Recipes, before diving into the details of content creation with Drupal CMS. In closing, she takes a look at some specific useful modules such as ECA and Webform, as well as Drupal’s AI capabilities.
Drupal core will adopt Gin admin theme to replace Claro
Rounding off our overview for June, we have another important announcement, this one coming from Gábor Hojtsy. Namely, the Gin admin theme (which started off as a fork of the default theme Claro, but has matured to the point of becoming the default theme for Drupal CMS) will become the default admin theme for Drupal Core as well.
The plan is to have this work completed by November 2025, so that the change is implemented in the release of Drupal 11.3.0 in December. The key step here will be removing Claro as a dependency of Gin, since the latter will end up replacing the former as the default.
