Every software project eventually has that one relative who shows up, quietly throws out the expired stuff in your fridge, and leaves the kitchen cleaner than they found it. For Drupal, that relative is Drupal 12, and beta1 just walked through the door.

A Spring Clean, Not a Renovation

Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 and 11.5.0-beta1 are set to land the week of September 14, 2026, with release candidates following in November and the full 12.0.0 launch scheduled for the week of December 7. True to Drupal's major-version tradition, 12.0 isn't a reinvention — it's essentially 11.5 with the deprecated code, legacy modules, and dependency cruft finally swept out the door.

The requirements bump is the headline: Drupal 12 needs PHP 8.5 minimum, plus MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.11, PostgreSQL 18, or SQLite 3.45. Recent 11.x releases have already quietly picked up nice-to-haves like Brotli-compressed CSS/JS assets and a robots.txt tweak that stops search engines from indexing junk query-parameter search-result pages.

Why "Boring" Is a Compliment Here

A predictable, incremental major version is exactly what you want from the CMS running your business's front door — no surprise architecture rewrites, no "well, we'll fix the migration path eventually." It also means the procrastination clock on legacy PHP versions is now ticking loudly, and hosting stacks stuck on older PHP or database versions need a plan before December.

The part teams underestimate: "just a cleanup release" still breaks things if your site depends on a module that's about to be deprecated out of existence. Beta season is exactly when you want to find that out — on a staging site, not in production the week before Black Friday.

Drupal keeps proving that "stable" and "still evolving" aren't opposites — they're the whole point.

If you're running Drupal and want someone to actually test the upgrade path before December instead of finding out the hard way, that's the kind of unglamorous work we live for — let's talk.

Source: Drupal.org