Drupal Core to Adopt Gin Admin Theme, Replacing Claro by 2025

Gábor Hojtsy has announced that Drupal core will officially adopt the Gin admin theme, replacing Claro as the default administration interface. The decision reflects Gin’s growing maturity and widespread adoption, including its current use as the default theme for Drupal CMS.

For years, Drupal has maintained two parallel admin themes—Claro in core and Gin in the contributed space. This dual-theme setup has caused friction for designers and product teams, who must ensure compatibility across both interfaces. The upcoming transition aims to streamline that experience and consolidate admin UI efforts around a single, modern solution.

Gin, originally an experimental fork of Claro, has evolved significantly and now offers a more advanced and polished user interface. In contrast, Claro has seen less development momentum, prompting the core team to make the switch.

The goal is to have Gin included in Drupal 11.3, scheduled for release in December 2025. To meet this timeline, development work is already underway in a new 6.x branch of Gin outside of core. This branch will be refined through collaboration with Drupal’s product, UX, release, and frontend framework teams.

A key milestone for merging Gin into the core is removing its current dependency on Claro. Additional work will involve stripping out non-core features, simplifying the codebase, and ensuring robust test coverage.

Once Gin becomes the default, Claro will no longer be used for new sites but will remain available in Drupal 11 for backwards compatibility. It is expected to be removed from the next major Drupal version, potentially continuing as a contributed theme for users who need it.

The initiative is open to community contributions, and the team encourages developers, testers, and sponsors to get involved. Coordination is taking place via two meta issues—#3530849 (Gin 6.x) and #3530852 (Admin theme modernisation)—as well as through the #admin-ui channel on Drupal Slack.