Drupal 11.4.0 Adds Performance Gains, Native CLI, and Default Admin Theme

Version 11.4.0 of Drupal core became available on 1 July 2026 as the fourth feature release of Drupal 11. In the release announcement, Gábor Hojtsy says the version cuts database queries by half compared with Drupal 11.3 across a wide range of requests. On a completely cold cache, the announcement says Drupal 11.4 uses just over one-third of the database and cache lookups required by Drupal 11.0 or 10.6 for the same requests.

The performance work reaches several core paths that affect site installation, entity loading, entity listing, translation handling, and rendered navigation. Recipe-based site installation, including Drupal CMS setup, is now twice as fast, according to the announcement. Translation handling has also been modernised, with a test site using 66 projects and 38 languages showing translation update checks running 87% faster than in Drupal 11.3. All .inc files and several APIs in locale.module have been deprecated as part of that move toward object-oriented APIs.

Drupal 11.4.0 adds Brotli compression for aggregated CSS and JavaScript files alongside gzip. The announcement says Brotli typically provides 15% to 25% better compression ratios than gzip for browsers that support it, with the feature relying on the PHP Brotli extension, ext-brotli. The drupal/core-recommended package also no longer pins minor versions for dependencies such as Guzzle, Twig, and Symfony Polyfills, allowing sites to apply key dependency security updates sooner, subject to site-level quality assurance before production deployment. A separate TDT context story explains how dependency security updates and off-schedule patch work affected the Drupal 11.4.0 release window.

The release introduces an experimental extensible native command line interface at ./vendor/bin/dr. Drupal already includes a CLI script with hardcoded commands, but the new interface is designed to be extensible. The announcement says the interface was built with input from maintainers of Drush and begins a transition period in which Drush is gradually replaced by the core dr CLI over time.

The default installation and administrative interface also change in this release. The Standard profile no longer includes the Article and Page content types, and commenting is disabled by default. The Navigation module is now enabled in the standard administrative interface, while the legacy Toolbar module remains available but is scheduled for removal in Drupal 12. A new overview page under the Manage display tab lists display modes for content entity bundles, supporting better integration with display builders such as Drupal Canvas.

Other developer-facing changes include configurable password hashing with a new argon2id option, support for route definitions through PHP attributes on controllers, and bundle classes through Drupal\Core\Entity\Attribute\Bundle. Drupal 11.4.0 also moves all .theme and .theme-settings.php files in core to PHP classes, integrates the Symfony Runtime component, and adds HttpKernelUiHelperTrait for faster kernel-test workflows. The Gin administrative theme has also been added to core as the experimental Default Admin theme with a dark mode option, although it is not yet the default admin theme.

The announcement also lists core maintainer updates since Drupal 11.3, including Andrei Mateescu being appointed as a provisional general core committer and Edward Wu being appointed as provisional release manager. The release notes say Drupal 11.4.x will receive security support until June 2027, while Drupal 11.3.x will continue to receive security support until December 2026. The announcement also says Drupal 12 is planned for the week of 7 December 2026 alongside Drupal 11.5, which is expected to be a Long Term Support release with Drupal 11 support expected until the end of 2028.