Drupal 12 Beta Release Week Ends Without 12.0.0-beta1

After the scheduled beta release week ended on 20 September, Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 and Drupal 11.5.0-beta1 remained unpublished. Drupal's core release schedule still listed both releases for the week of 14 September, while the Drupal 12 release listing showed 12.0.0-alpha1 as the latest Drupal 12 release on 21 September. No revised beta date had been published.

For contributed-project maintainers and teams already testing Drupal 12, the missing beta matters more than the missed calendar entry itself. The first beta is the firm deadline for feature and public API additions under Drupal core's release-cycle policy, making it a more dependable compatibility target than an alpha build. The delay therefore postpones that testing baseline, although it does not establish that the later Drupal 12 milestones have moved.

Core release work was still active as the scheduled week ended. The Drupal 12 beta requirements issue continued to list work involving JavaScript dependencies, Nightwatch, deprecated extensions, and the beta release notes. Its summary was not fully synchronised with every child issue, however, so the number of unchecked entries did not provide a reliable count of remaining blockers.

The underlying issues give a clearer view of the remaining work. Issue #3621277, covering final JavaScript dependency updates, carried the Drupal 12.0.0 beta blocker tag and received further work on 20 September. The deprecated-extensions meta issue was updated that day with remaining stable-release and manual upgrade-path testing work, while the Nightwatch update had reached Reviewed & tested by the community but had not been committed. The separate Composer dependency update had already been committed and marked Fixed on 7 September.

Those statuses show release preparation continuing across several areas, but they do not identify one cause for the missed beta window. Tracker summaries also lagged some child-issue changes: issue #3553503, covering removal of deprecated code outside deprecated modules, was marked Fixed on 20 September while its corresponding requirement had not yet been reflected as complete in the parent summary. The available evidence therefore supports saying that several release-engineering tasks were still being closed out, rather than attributing the missed window to a single blocker.

Previous Drupal major releases show that an initial beta target can move without automatically moving the stable release. For Drupal 11, core maintainers announced on 26 April 2024 that PHPUnit 10 work would not be ready for the planned beta period and released an alpha instead; Drupal 11.0.0-beta1 followed on 17 May, with Drupal 11.0.0 released on 2 August. Drupal 9 likewise missed its first beta target in the week of 2 March 2020, with release managers publishing revised guidance on 3 March before Drupal 9.0.0-beta1 arrived on 20 March. Drupal 9.0.0 was still released on 3 June.

The main information gap in the Drupal 12 cycle is now the revised beta timing. The published schedule still places Drupal 12.0.0-rc1 and Drupal 11.5.0-rc1 in the week of 9 November, followed by the stable releases in the week of 7 December, while Drupal 10 is scheduled to reach end of life on 9 December. A later beta1 does not by itself establish a delay to those milestones, but an unchanged November RC window would shorten the interval available for beta-phase compatibility testing and final ecosystem adjustments. Until beta1 is tagged, Drupal 12.0.0-alpha1 remains the current Drupal 12 release for early compatibility work rather than the more stable baseline expected from the beta phase.