Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 Opens Upgrade Testing With PHP 8.5 and Core Removals

After the scheduled beta window passed without a release, Drupal core release managers tagged Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 on 30 September 2026. The release notes on Drupal.org describe it as a release for site owners and module and theme authors to test Drupal 12 compatibility and upgrade paths. Beta releases are not intended for production use.

The release gives maintainers a defined Drupal 12 target after the planned beta week of 14 September ended without a tag. The DropTimes reported on 21 September that the scheduled window had passed. Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 arrived 16 days after that week began, while sites built on 12.0.0-alpha1 cannot update directly because the alpha release notes stated that no upgrade path would be provided from alpha releases to beta1.

Drupal 12 requires PHP 8.5 and changes the default password hashing algorithm from bcrypt to Argon2id. Sites where Argon2 is unavailable can switch back to PHP's default bcrypt algorithm through kernel parameters. Database minimums are MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.11, SQLite 3.45 with the json1 extension and PostgreSQL 19. The PostgreSQL roadmap lists PostgreSQL 19 for release in October 2026, so Drupal 12 beta testing against that database depends on a version that had not yet reached stable release when beta1 was published.

Support for hosting Drupal directly on Windows in production is also deprecated, while Windows development environments remain supported. Drupal's update system will refuse upgrades from Drupal 11.2 or earlier because update functions added before Drupal 11.3.0 have been removed. The release notes recommend reaching at least Drupal 11.4, or Drupal 11.5 once it is available, before testing the Drupal 12 upgrade.

The core release schedule placed Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 and Drupal 11.5.0-beta1 in the same week beginning 14 September. The schedule still places the first release candidates in the week of 9 November and the stable Drupal 12.0.0 and 11.5.0 releases in the week of 7 December.

Nine modules and three themes listed in the beta release notes have moved out of Drupal core: Ban, Contact, Field Layout, History, Search, Settings Tray, Shortcut, Telephone and Toolbar, together with Claro, Olivero and Stable 9. Sites should either uninstall extensions they no longer need or add the contributed replacements to their Composer requirements before upgrading. Extensions that remain necessary should not be uninstalled because doing so removes their configuration and data.

The release notes also warn that Drush can bypass warnings from update.php about missing extensions. Those missing dependencies can then appear as errors in the status report after the update. Drupal.org recommends checking the individual contributed project pages for available versions and Composer instructions before replacing removed core extensions.

Drupal.org's deprecated and obsolete extensions documentation identifies another Drupal 12 transition beyond the release notes' list of nine modules and three themes. The Text (formatted, long, with summary) field type moves from the Text module into a separate Text With Summary core module in Drupal 11.5.0, and that module is removed from core in Drupal 12. Sites using the field type must install the contributed Text With Summary module, and Drupal.org recommends updating through Drupal 11.5.0 and running database updates before moving to Drupal 12.

The Default Admin theme, introduced experimentally in Drupal 11.4, is stable in Drupal 12 and replaces Claro as the administration theme. Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI have also been removed without contributed successors. Sites migrating from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 must first move to Drupal 11 and then use the normal update path to Drupal 12, while the Migrate API remains in core.

Developers also face several dependency changes. PHPUnit moves from 11.5 to 12.5, with PHPUnit attributes required instead of annotations, while Guzzle moves to 8.0 and htmx from 2.0 to 4.0. Coder moves to version nine, and the minimum Node.js version becomes 24. Backbone and Underscore have been removed, so custom JavaScript that still depends on them must manage those libraries separately.

The remaining Drupal 12 release calendar has not changed. The schedule still places release candidates in the week of 9 November 2026 and Drupal 12.0.0 in the week of 7 December. With beta1 arriving on 30 September, the interval before the planned release-candidate week is now about 40 days rather than the 56 days allowed by the original schedule. Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026, during the same week Drupal 12 is scheduled for release.