⚠️ Please note that an official announcement will follow shortly — this information is shared in advance for your awareness, so we kindly ask that you keep it confidential for now.

Drupal core will adopt the Gin admin theme to replace Claro. 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 of Drupal CMS to use it as their default admin theme. 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.

Over the past three years, it's been challenging to attract new maintainers and sustain sponsorship support, which has gradually declined. By bringing Gin into Core, we aim to distribute the maintainer workload more evenly, encourage broader community contribution, and ideally create new opportunities for funded work for those involved.

This change brings a refined administrative experience by default, reducing the need for custom UI modifications or additional modules.

The current Gin maintainers will join the Drupal Core maintainer team. As noted earlier, we're actively working to expand the team to better distribute responsibilities — particularly during the initial phase focused on refactoring Gin to meet Core standards and ensure a smooth integration.

A core-ready version of Gin will be developed outside of Core in a 6.x branch of Gin. We'll 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.

If there's anyone on your team who'd be interested in contributing to this effort and potentially growing into a future maintainer role, please don't hesitate to reach out!

Thank you for your continued financial support – it means a lot to us. We value your partnership and look forward to having you with us as we move into the next phase 💙

Best wishes from the Gin maintainers,
Sascha & Jürgen