Drupal 12.0.0-alpha1: the countdown has started
Drupal 12.0.0-alpha1 was released on September 2. The countdown has officially started — and it ends at the same time as Drupal 10's life.
📅 The timeline
- September 2, 2026 — 12.0.0-alpha1 (do not use in production)
- Week of September 14 — 12.0.0-beta1 and 11.5.0-beta1
- Week of November 9 — release candidates
- Week of December 7 — Drupal 12.0.0 stable + Drupal 11.5.0, and end of security support for 11.3.x and 10.6.x
- December 9, 2026 — Drupal 10 end of life
⚠️ The point many migration plans have missed
There is no direct jump to Drupal 12. All database updates prior to 11.4.0 have been removed from the codebase: a site on 11.3.x or earlier must first upgrade to at least 11.4.0, and core strongly recommends 11.5.0 or later.
If you are still on Drupal 10 in December, that means two consecutive major upgrades, under pressure, during the holidays.
🔧 The big changes
Platform
- PHP 8.5 required
- argon2id becomes the default password hashing algorithm (falling back to bcrypt is possible via kernel parameters if argon2 is not available)
- MySQL 8.0 · MariaDB 10.11 · PostgreSQL 19 · SQLite 3.45 with the json1 extension
- Hosting Drupal directly on Windows in production is deprecated
Dependencies
- Symfony 8.1
- Guzzle 8.0
- PHPUnit 12.5
Extensions moved from core to contrib
Ban, Contact, Field Layout, History, Settings Tray, Shortcut, Telephone, Stable 9.
Check this now: if your site needs them, add the contrib version to composer.json BEFORE upgrading. Do not uninstall the module — you would destroy its configuration. And be careful, Drush can hide the update.php warnings about missing extensions.
Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI
Removed from core, with no contrib version. A D6/D7 migration must target Drupal 11 and then continue as a regular update to Drupal 12. The Migrate API itself stays in core.
Still under discussion for beta1
Search, Toolbar, Claro and Olivero are proposed for removal but are still present in alpha1. HTMX will move to v4.
An SEO detail not to miss
The shipped robots.txt now blocks search result pages with URL parameters. If you have customized yours, add the matching rules: search engines were indexing endless facet combinations, at the expense of performance and rankings.
My recommendation as a tech lead: the contrib inventory and the 11.4/11.5 stepping stone happen in October. December is for acceptance testing, not for discovery.
Which version are you on today?
🔗 Release notes: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/12.0.0-alpha1