Drupal Core 11.3 Highlights

Today we are talking about AI Marketing,Marketing Trends, and The caber toss with guest Hayden Baillio. We'll also cover Drupal core 11.3 as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/532

• AI in Marketing: Hayden's Insights
• The Role of AI in Content Creation
• Challenges and Ethical Considerations of AI
• AI Training Data and Bias
• AI in Security Testing
• AI Replacing Jobs
• The Future of Marketing with AI
• Highland Games and Personal Hobbies

• Drupal core 11.3 release highlights
• Carsinisation

Hayden Baillio - hounder.co hgbaillio

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Fei Lauren - feilauren

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you been wanting a version of Drupal core that moves away from the hooks system, has PHP 8.5 support, or has better support for asynchronous queries? The newly released Drupal core 11.3 has all these and more.
• Module name/project name:
  • Drupal core 11.3
• Brief history
  • Created in the last few days (hopefully) by the time this episode is released
• Changes
  • Performance improvements
  • New MYSQLi database driver. In combination with the PHP Fibers support added in Drupal 10.2, this should allow Drupal sites to run much faster. Not all hosting environments will have PHP configured to work with the new driver, so for now the new driver is in an experimental core module you will need to install to try the new driver
  • Drupal can now lazy load multiple entities at a time using Fibers
  • PHP 8.5 support should also improve performance, as will a number of caching improvements
  • Some early testing in the community indicates some significant improvements for pages loaded from cold cache, anywhere from 30 to 40% fewer queries
  • One of the significant changes in Drupal core 11.2 was the addition of HTMX as the intended successor to Drupal's older AJAX system. Drupal core 11.3 includes some significant steps on the path to replacing all the places that AJAX system in core
  • There's a new HTMX factory object with methods to abstract the specifics of the attributes and headers needed to implement HTMX
  • HTMX is now used for the Form Builder and ConfigSingleExportForm
  • BigPipe no longer uses the older AJAX API, which itself uses jQuery
  • New Workspace Provider concept, will be interesting to see what new possibilities this creates
  • New administer node published status permission, previously required the much broader "administer nodes" permission
  • Drupal core 11.3 also includes some capabilities that previously required contrib modules
  • Links created within CKEditor5 now dynamically link to the entity and when rendered will automatically point to the most recent alias. Previously Drupal sites needed the Linkit module, which has been part of Drupal CMS since its release at the start of the year
  • Drupal CMS is also heavily based on Drupal's recipe system, which includes the ability to automatically import content included within a recipe. Until now you still needed the default_content module to export content as YAML for inclusion in a recipe. With Drupal 11.3 you can export all entities of a particular type, optionally filtered by bundle, and optionally including all dependencies
  • Many of Drupal's remaining hooks, particularly those for themes, now have OOP class replacements, so we're now very close to being able to deprecate .module and .theme files
  • Listeners may remember that the Navigation module was added as an experimental module in Drupal core 10.3. In 11.3, the module is now officially stable, so the rethought admin menu that originally debuted as part of the Gin admin theme is now fully realized in Drupal core
  • SDCs can now be marked to be excluded from the UI, for example if they are meant to only be nested within other components
  • Drupal core 11.3 also introduces some new deprecations:
  • Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI officially deprecated now that Drupal 7 is EOL
  • Also field_layout, which was ultimately superseded by Layout Builder
  • Promoted and Sticky fields are now hidden by default (an issue created more than 20 years ago! A five digit issue ID) - the user who created it had a drop.org username lol
  • Another issue that sets the "Promoted" default value to FALSE for new content types was also resolved, but only 15 years old. It had a six-digit issue ID - barely!
  • Theme engines have been deprecated!
  • This may be the last feature release of Drupal core before version 12, which could drop as early as June 2026
  • We'll include a link to the release highlights, but by the time you hear this there should also be an official announcement from Gabor and the DA with additional details