Drupal 11: improvements and new features you should be aware of

With the release of Drupal 11, several outdated modules were removed from the system’s core: Book, Forum, Statistics, Tour, Actions UI, and Activity Tracker. Some of them were part of Drupal since the earliest versions, but have not been used for a long time. Now they are available only through the contrib section — that is, they can be installed manually through the repository, but they are no longer supported in the core. This was done to make the core lighter: less code, and less load on support. It also frees up resources for developing relevant functionality rather than wasting time on outdated solutions.

In addition, Drupal 11 finally stopped supporting IIS (Internet Information Services). This means that sites on IIS need to be transferred to another server, for example, Apache or Nginx — these are now officially supported.

Drupal 11 doesn’t completely change how access control works, but it makes it smoother and faster. The new Access Policy API already came in Drupal 10.3, letting developers create flexible rules — like giving API access only to users with two‑factor authentication or blocking someone who makes too many requests.

In Drupal 11, this system is cleaned up and optimized. Old, slow parts of the code are removed, and caching works better, so access checks happen faster and with less load on the server. For developers, it feels easier to maintain and more reliable, and for businesses, it means better security with less risk.

Drupal 11 has dramatically improved the content experience for both editors and administrators. When you create or customize content types, it’s easier to reuse existing fields. This helps you quickly assemble a single, logical content model without sacrificing quality or structure, especially in large projects with active editing.

Content versioning experience has also been updated — it works the same for pages, blocks, or other elements. This saves time and reduces confusion when rolling back changes and checking for changes.

Another convenient innovation is the floating action panel, which is always at hand. It allows you to easily launch mass actions, for instance, delete several records at once or apply the same setting without scrolling up or down the page.

Drupal 11 improves the content management system with the Workspaces module. Now you can create and customize sections of your site that will only be visible after you manually publish them. Developers can test changes and work in different environments, while non-technical users can easily switch between environments, such as Test, Stage, and Live, right from the admin interface.

Content managers can manually customize changes in advance, see how they will look using the Preview option, and publish everything at once with a single click. This is especially useful for larger sites and situations where you must prepare for different scenarios, such as news stories or events with multiple outcomes.

The new Navigation module has a cleaner layout, faster clicks, and a smoother day-to-day experience for anyone working in the Drupal admin panel. It comes as an experimental module — you need to enable it first. Still, despite its status, the module is already in active use and offers significant improvements to the navigation of the admin panel.

It is a vertical, left-hand menu that makes it easier to access the various sections of site management: from adding content to managing the structure or configuration. You can expand it to see the full names or collapse it to save space. In addition, the Navigation module is integrated with the Layout Builder, allowing you to customize the menu using blocks and tailor the interface to your specific needs. So, you get like the pieces of a puzzle finally fell into place.

Drupal 11 finally makes Single‑Directory Components (SDC) a stable, core feature. It first showed up in Drupal 10.3 as an experiment, but now it’s ready for real‑world projects. With it, everything needed for a user interface (UI) component — templates, styles, scripts, configuration — is in a single directory. This is convenient: you don’t need to search the project for the necessary files. Everything is at hand.

This approach simplifies the work and makes the components clearer and reusable. SDC makes it easier for even a non-super-experienced Drupal developer to understand how the interface is structured. For teams, this is also a way to tidy up the code and speed up the frontend development.

Drupal 11 simplifies one of the important aspects of headless development  — working with menus. Previously, to set up navigation in the frontend, developers had to manually write code, define routes, and add menu entries in code. It was long, inconvenient, and did not scale well.

Now everything has become much simpler, thanks to the support of the Linkset standard. This special format creates clear and structured endpoints from which the frontend can receive a menu. Frontend developers can quickly connect navigation without unnecessary code, and editors can edit the menu directly from the admin panel without writing any code.

This is especially useful in decoupled projects, where the frontend and backend work separately. Now, all navigation can be managed centrally through Drupal and used anywhere: in mobile applications, on the React/Vue frontend, or in other external interfaces.

Drupal 11 core boasts powerful APIs for Drupal Recipes. These are ready-made sets of ready-made configurations and components that allow you to add new functionality to your site easily. For example, you can choose a recipe for a blog, gallery, or store — and immediately get a working structure.

What makes Recipes stand out from traditional Drupal distributions is their flexibility. You don’t have to decide everything up front — you can add Recipes later, combine them, and build your site step by step. It’s a much more modular approach. Recipes are part of the Drupal Starshot initiative, which is all about making Drupal easier to pick up and quicker to get real results with.