Help us reach Drupal 12's second release window in August

Recap of Drupal 12 release windows

Our release schedule includes three potential release dates for Drupal 12.0.0, depending on when critical requirements are completed:

1. Week of June 15, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by March 27
2. Week of August 10, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by May 15
3. Week of December 07, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by September 11

Our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is the week of August 10, 2026

Many great improvements landed recently. The main branch is on Symfony 8 and most deprecated modules are removed already. With only a few days remaining until the March deadline of the first release option though, we are confident that not all critical requirements will be completed by March 27. Therefore, we are officially announcing that our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is August 10, 2026, and the beta deadline for critical requirements is May 15, 2026.

We need your help to complete requirements by May 15!

While there are other pending improvements that are not hard requirements for Drupal 12's release, these are the most urgent needs:

1. PHPUnit 12 support

   While our ultimate goal is to support PHPUnit 13 in Drupal 12, there are significant API changes in PHPUnit 12 that we first need to adopt. See #3527936: Introduce support for PHPUnit 12

2. Import maps API

   CKEditor 5 is changing their installation method in the near future. See #3527914: [PP-1] Use New installation methods for CKEditor5

   To support this, we need a JavaScript import maps API in core. See #3398525: Add an API for importmaps

3. Update path related changes

   To test update paths from Drupal 11.3.0, we need to generate new database dumps. See #3569127: Add new 11.3.x database dump fixtures, without modules deprecated for removal in 12.x

   Remove older upgrade paths. See #3580877: [PP-1] Remove updates added prior to 11.3.0 from 12.x

4. Remove tests from release packages

   To reduce the size of core, we are excluding tests from core release packages, and offering them via a different namespace. This is a disruptive change and should only be done in a major release.
   See #3067979: Exclude test files from release packages.

5. Deprecate and remove libraries, modules, themes and dependencies

   The Toolbar Module needs to be removed from core now that the Navigation module is stable and in the standard profile. See #3484850: [PP-1] [meta] Deprecate Toolbar module

   There are more dependencies, modules and themes that are still possible to remove. See #3466088: [meta] Deprecate dependencies, libraries, modules, and themes that will be removed from Drupal 12 core

6. Move from Claro to Gin as admin theme

   Gin is in core as an alpha experimental extension. Help make it stable and so it can replace Claro.
   See #3576488: [meta] Admin theme: path to stable.

7. Update to ESLint 9

   The coding standard checks are using the unsupported ESLint 8. We need to update to version 9. See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.
   See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.

The above list are the current highest priorities. We'll keep identifying and tagging Drupal 12 release priority issues. The up to date list can be found using the Drupal 12.0.0 release priority tag.