Drupal domain management can become surprisingly complicated when a developer or small web agency manages dozens or hundreds of client websites. Domains, DNS records, SSL certificates, renewals, expiration dates, payments, and different registrars all have to be tracked and maintained.

I have a practical question for Drupal developers and small web agencies.

If you build and maintain websites for clients, sooner or later you face a task that is not directly related to Drupal development: managing domains, DNS, SSL certificates, and renewals.

Drupal 11.5 introduces an important change for module developers and maintainers of installation profiles, recipes, and distributions: system actions for adding and removing roles are no longer automatically created through hook_user_role_insert().

The affected actions are:

Drupal 11.5 introduces an important change for theme developers: the .theme file extension has been deprecated.

Themes have traditionally placed procedural hooks and helper functions in a file such as:

Drupal 11.5 introduces Drupal 11.5 library ordering, a new feature that allows libraries to be loaded before or after another library without declaring a dependency. The new before and after keys make asset ordering cleaner, reduce unnecessary dependencies, and provide a more maintainable way to control JavaScript and CSS loading.

Drupal 12 introduces one of the biggest improvements to the Database Schema API in years. The traditional nested array structure used to define database schemas is being replaced with a modern, object-oriented API built around immutable value objects.

This change makes schema definitions easier to validate, safer to extend, and opens the door for future database-specific capabilities without sacrificing Drupal's database abstraction.

The Drupal 11.5 Route title property introduces a small but welcome improvement to the routing system. Route attributes now support a top-level title property, making route definitions cleaner and allowing simple dynamic page titles to be defined directly alongside the route.

Drupal 11.4 brings one of the most significant developer experience improvements in recent years: a built-in command-line interface that can discover commands provided by Drupal modules.

Until now, Drupal Core included a limited CLI (core/scripts/drupal) that only supported a handful of core commands. Most developers relied entirely on Drush for command-line workflows.

Drupal 11.5 introduces another significant step toward modern PHP development by allowing form routes to be defined directly on form classes using PHP attributes.

Until now, every custom form required a corresponding entry in a module's .routing.yml file. With this new feature, many of those YAML definitions can be eliminated, making code easier to maintain and keeping route configuration close to the class it belongs to.

With the release of Drupal, an important rendering behavior has changed for block content render arrays. If your custom modules or themes rely on #attributes in block render arrays, this update may affect your frontend output.

The change was introduced in the Drupal core issue:

“Attributes of a block content are applied to block itself” (#2486267)

This article explains what changed, why it matters, and how to update your code correctly.

Drupal Core Adopts the main Branch: A Technical Deep Dive into the New Workflow

In January 2026, the Drupal project officially announced that the main branch is now the primary development branch for Drupal core. This change completes a series of infrastructure updates that began back in 2023 and brings Drupal’s development workflow in line with modern Git best practices used across the open-source ecosystem.

This article explains: