Drupal 11 Features: What Makes It A Top Choice For Complex Websites?

# Drupal 11 Features: What Makes It A Top Choice For Complex Websites? Drupal has varied usage in web development. You might use it as a CMS, a website builder, an app framework, or integrate all of the above. It is well-known for its developer-centric approach, and the launch of its latest version, Drupal 11, only reinforces this. Released early this year, Drupal 11 offered quite an improvement to Drupal 10. So, what does this latest version mean to a Drupal web development agency? How can it leverage the new features to improve web development for complex websites and make it more client-focused? We will attempt to answer these queries by elaborating more on the Drupal 11 changes that were recently launched. ## Changes Between Drupal 10 And Drupal 11 While Drupal 11 offers certain standard features present in Drupal 10, it also provides new out-of-the-box features. Most of these changes are developer-focused, but certain critical changes will also impact the Drupal website content administrators. Some prominent implementations in Drupal 11 include: - Improved CKEditor integration - Field UI revamp - Performance improvements - Taxonomy term revisions, etc. Let us explore these changes in detail to understand how they make this latest Drupal version a better website-building tool. ### Drupal Recipes Announced as a flagship Drupal CMS solution, Recipes are pre-configured thematic packages integrated within Drupal’s core. They consist of modules and settings. You can automate their installation on your website with a single command, making them immensely useful when revamping an existing web page or creating a new one. Additionally, you can add recipes throughout your website’s life cycle and use them to quickly deliver required functionalities like advanced SEO tools, multilingual support, or other ecommerce features. Recipes enhance Drupal web development by ensuring all features are properly configured, reducing setup time, and facilitating their immediate use. You can select them from ready-made configurations published on Drupal.org or create your own. They can be shared, used in combination with other recipes, or uninstalled based on need. With Recipes becoming a popular feature, Drupal expanded its scope further in its Drupal 11.1.0 version, released recently on December 16th, 2024. Now, it can also accept data from different user touchpoints, making it easy to perform tasks like integrating with external websites using third-party APIs. Additionally, some new configuration actions were also added to extend its functionalities. For example, you can add new blocks easily, use the layout wizard for different content types, and even clone configurations. ### Drupal Workspaces What makes Drupal 11 so appropriate for building complex websites? Its Workspace. This new addition functions precisely like a production website copy, making it easy to carry out and control content updates easily. While the Drupal Workspace is a part of the Drupal core, it works independently of the main site. As a result you can edit, test, and manage the Workspace without letting these changes impact the website version visible to your end users. After you test these changes and the results meet your expectations, you can always implement them from the Workspace into the main website version. It is important to mention that the newly released Drupal 11.1.0 moved the Workspace user interface to a separate module named the Workspace UI. This was essential to maintain system modularity and allow users greater flexibility in their test environment management. ### Single Directory Components(SDCs) Currently a Drupal 11 stable, SDCs help you simplify and modernize your Drupal 11 custom themes. Before we talk about the importance of SDCs, we must define what is a component. According to the Drupal documentation, components are generic, modular, and reusable pieces of your web page. Generally made up of codes written in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, these Drupal components are highly customizable. They can also be reused and transferred across diverse web pages and applications. Common components examples include navigation menus, sliders, buttons, and forms. These components significantly improve the website frontend. Single Directory Components are Drupal’s way of implementing these components. The SDC helps in the seamless rendering of a component by organizing all the required files within a folder or a directory. Further, following the naming conventions will ensure Drupal automatically generates a library to combine these for you. Since these libraries are independently testable as isolated elements, they make error detection easy and more accurate. Adding an SDC to a web page will empower Drupal to load the JavaScript and the CSS for the components automatically. ### Administrative UI Improvements You will find the navigation menus of Drupal 11 to be more customizable and convenient. The ease with which the UI can add and manage menu blocks using the Layout Builder makes the navigation menu one of the key Drupal 11 features. This has considerably improved [Drupal website development](https://www.unifiedinfotech.net/technology/drupal-development/) by making menu configuration easy and more user-friendly. While this is still an experimental module associated with the Drupal core, much user testing and research has gone into making this Navigation Module. It makes the Drupal Admin UI feel modern and friendly. Further, navigation blocks make it easy to expand, collapse, and customize the new vertical menu. With more admin UI improvements slated to come up, like the dynamic Top Bar, websites made using Drupal will provide a much better user experience. ### Access Policy APIs Drupal 11 features a new Access Policy API that defines policies as services and provides complete control over rules that determine and grant permissions. Hence, developers have more flexibility in creating access policies and can also assign permissions based on factors like current URL, the taxonomic term of the content, time of day, etc. Simply speaking, this API allows you, as a Drupal web development company, to assign roles to users, and the user automatically gets all the permissions associated with that role. ## Drupal 10 vs Drupal 11: What Has Changed? To shrink the maintenance burden and make the Drupal core smaller, several modules present in Drupal 10 were removed from Drupal 11. These included: - Actions UI - Tracker - Book - Statistics - Forum - Tour However, these modules are still installable and might come back in future versions. Also, Drupal 11 is a much more advanced version. Hence, to install this, you must make certain system changes. The basic requirements for upgrading from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11 include: - PHP 8.3 - jQuery 4 - Composer 2.7.7 - Symfony 7 Ensuring the above requirements will make migrating from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11 easy and seamless. ### Conclusion Drupal 11 has several other features in store that have yet to be released, like the Project Browser, Automatic Updates, Experience Builder module, etc. With so many improvements due to come, it is no wonder that Drupal web development services are in high demand.