Lessons Learned from the NIDCR Drupal 11 Upgrade
I’m excited to share that we have deployed another Drupal 11 website.
This particular upgrade was for the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), and while the process had some challenges, overall it went surprisingly smoothly considering the complexity of the platform.
We actually started preparing for this upgrade about six months ago. The first phase focused heavily on contributed modules. As many in the Drupal community already know, not every contributed module was Drupal 11 ready when we began. That forced us to evaluate each module individually and decide whether to:
- Apply existing patches
- Create or update custom patches
- Upgrade to a newer major version (for example, moving from 1.x to 2.x)
- Replace the module entirely with a different approach
Some modules already had community patches available within the Drupal issue queues, while others required significantly more effort and testing.
While keeping up with the contributed modules, we gradually shifted focus to custom modules, themes, integrations, and deployment workflows.
To make things even more interesting, we also decided to upgrade the platform to PHP 8.4 before deploying Drupal 11 — even though Drupal 11 itself did not require it yet.
Historically, most PHP 8.x upgrades have been relatively straightforward. However, PHP 8.4 introduced several additional deprecation warnings and compatibility issues that affected contributed modules and some custom implementations. A number of modules required patching before the environment was stable enough for deployment.
One of the biggest takeaways from projects like this is that successful Drupal upgrades are rarely just “core upgrades.” They are ecosystem upgrades.
You have to evaluate:
- Contributed module readiness
- Composer dependency conflicts
- PHP compatibility
- Deployment pipelines
- CI/CD workflows
- Front-end build tooling
- Custom integrations
- Infrastructure considerations
The good news is that once those pieces are addressed, Drupal 11 feels incredibly solid.
Performance improvements, modernization efforts, cleaner dependencies, and continued investment from the Drupal community make these upgrades worthwhile — especially for organizations that rely on security, governance, accessibility, workflows, and long-term platform stability.
Projects like this are also a reminder that the Drupal community continues to do an incredible amount of work behind the scenes to move complex enterprise platforms forward.
Excited to see another large Drupal platform successfully move into the Drupal 11 era.