Drupal Deprecation Dashboard Relaunched with Drupal 12 Readiness Data

Why the Dashboard Matters Now

Drupal 12 is expected by mid-2026, and with Drupal 11.2 having already defined most deprecated APIs, now is a key moment for the community to assess compatibility. The dashboard offers visibility into which projects are ready and which still require updates.

Beyond being a status checker, the dashboard also reflects a major shift in how deprecations are being handled for this release cycle, especially through a new policy affecting what will and won't be removed in Drupal 12.

Policy Shift: Most Disruptive Deprecations Deferred to Drupal 13

To make it easier for contributed modules to support both Drupal 11.2.x and 12.0.0 without requiring separate branches, core maintainers introduced a policy to defer most disruptive deprecations from Drupal 11.3 onward to Drupal 13.

The policy states:

• If the deprecated code is internal (e.g., constructors, plugins), it can still be removed in Drupal 12.0.
• If the deprecated code affects widely-used public APIs (e.g., base classes, interfaces), it will be deferred for removal until Drupal 13.

This approach is meant to keep the public API surface between 11.2 and 12.0 as consistent as possible, making it easier for contrib maintainers to adopt Drupal 12 early, such as at the beta release, while continuing support for earlier versions like 11.2.x and 10.5.x.

This policy is outlined in core issue #3417226 and is currently informing how deprecations are handled, although it is tagged [policy, no patch].

What Powers the Dashboard: Upgrade Status + Project Analysis

The dashboard is backed by updated Project Analysis scripts created by Björn Brala, CTO of SWIS, which run checks against Drupal 11 codebases to evaluate Drupal 12 readiness. These scripts depend on the Upgrade Status module, a key utility in the Drupal upgrade process.

Upgrade Status helps developers:

• Check if their site is eligible for a major version upgrade.
• Run compatibility checks using phpstan and other static tools.
• Identify deprecated code, libraries, and dependencies.
• Get project-specific upgrade checklists.
• Integrate checks into CI pipelines via Drush.

These checks must be run on your current version (e.g., Drupal 11 for Drupal 12 compatibility). Once you upgrade, the deprecated APIs are no longer present, making it impossible to detect issues after the fact.

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Skipping major versions is not supported (e.g., Drupal 9 → 11 is not allowed).

Early Dashboard Findings

So far, dashboard data shows:

• About 70% of the contributed projects only need updates to info.yml or composer.json files to be Drupal 12-compatible.
• Roughly 80% of errors flagged are related to those metadata files, not PHP-level API breaks.

These numbers highlight a relatively smooth upgrade path, largely enabled by the deprecation deferral policy introduced for this cycle.

New Location, Same Purpose

The dashboard is now hosted on docs.acquia.com, Acquia's centralised documentation platform for products, features, and tools. This move brings the dashboard closer to other technical resources, including Upgrade Status documentation and broader upgrade guides, while improving performance and accessibility.

Community Feedback

Gábor invites contributors to test the dashboard and report issues or missing data in the #d12readiness channel on Drupal Slack.