Metatag 2.2.4 Follows Drupal 12 Support Release and Regression Fixes

Metatag maintainers released Metatag 2.2.1 on 24 October 2026, adding Drupal 12 compatibility and resolving 31 issues. The contributed module allows Drupal site administrators to manage page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs and metadata used by search engines and social platforms. The release supports Drupal 10.3 and later within the Drupal 10 branch, Drupal 11 and Drupal 12. Three further maintenance releases followed between 27 and 29 October after regressions were identified.

Among the fixes is a correction to canonical and shortlink tag handling. Previously, Drupal core could continue outputting these tags even when Metatag's <none> setting was configured to suppress them. Version 2.2.1 addresses this behaviour, alongside fixes for empty values in multi-value metadata and a missing trait in the Metatag Views cache manager. The canonical correction concerns suppressing default tags rather than changing canonical URL generation generally.

The release also introduces caching for tag and group sorting operations through the module's sortedTags() and sortedGroups() methods. This avoids repeatedly sorting the same definitions within a single request. The change addresses an issue in which a contributor documented excessive sorting operations and slower content-editing forms in a particular Drupal setup. Its performance impact has not been independently established across different installations.

The maintainers acknowledged that 2.2.1 had introduced serious bugs when they issued Metatag 2.2.2 on 27 October. Its nine resolved issues included restoring API compatibility for MetaNameBase::label() and description(), fixing missing tag and group descriptions, and adding a missing MetatagRoutesHelperInterface service alias. It also addressed canonical tags on 403 and 404 error pages and added an update hook intended to force a cache rebuild.

Later on 27 October, version 2.2.3 corrected a bug in the 2.2.2 post-update script: a list of configuration items had not been converted to a string. On 29 October, version 2.2.4 resolved four more issues involving deprecated services, a requirement for Token 8.x-1.17, the Shortlink URL meta tag label, and a PHP version limit in package metadata. These follow-up releases make the original 2.2.1-only update guidance outdated.

The 2.2.1 changelog also records PHP 8.5 deprecation fixes, object-oriented hook conversion and test updates. None of these release notes classifies the sequence as a security advisory. Site maintainers should review the current Metatag release and its dependencies, then test metadata output, custom integrations and database updates before deploying changes to production. The sorting-cache change is documented, but its performance impact has not been independently established across different installations.