Drupal effectively has two default administration themes: Claro for core, and Gin for Drupal CMS. This causes difficulty for UX designers and product managers, because new features must work well with both themes.
Gin is no longer an experimental fork of Claro to experiment with new ideas. It has matured into a state-of-the-art admin theme, while Claro has fallen behind, as evident by the decision to use Gin as the admin theme for Drupal CMS. As a result, we feel it is time for Gin to become the default theme for Drupal core.
We are aspiring to have this work completed by November 2025 in order to get Gin into core for the release of 11.3 in December.
What’s next?
A core-ready version of Gin will be developed outside of core in a 6.x branch of Gin. Our goal is for the Gin maintainers to collaborate with the Drupal Core Product, UX, Release, and Frontend Framework Managers to identify which issues are blockers for Gin in core.
Once the identified blockers are completed, the result would be merged into core for Drupal 11.3 by the beta deadline in November 2025. The most important step for including Gin in core is to remove its dependency on Claro, since Gin will replace Claro as the default admin theme.
Other work will include removing features that are not needed for core; simplifying the code now that Gin only needs to support the version of core that includes it; and other tasks like adding necessary test coverage to ensure a smooth transition from contrib to core.
What happens to Claro?
Claro will no longer be the default theme for new sites, but it will remain in Drupal 11 for use on existing sites. When Gin becomes the default admin theme of Drupal core, Claro will be removed from the next major version. Claro may then be available as a contributed theme to provide sites an upgrade path.
How can I get involved?
This is a big job with an ambitious timeline, so we will need many contributors to meet it. For contribution, you can get started with the two meta issues (#3530849 Gin 6.x and #3530852: Admin theme modernisation) to track this work, one for core tasks and one for Gin tasks. These will be updated and many new tasks created as the scope of work is clarified.
The Gin maintainers are also seeking sponsors for their time, which is a great way to contribute to this effort if you want to see this happen but are not able to work on tasks directly.
All those interested, please join us in the #admin-ui Drupal Slack channel for collaboration.
