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Drupal CMS: A New Way To Drupal

  • 9 minute read

What is Drupal CMS?

Drupal CMS is the next phase of Drupal Innovation. 💥💥 Drupal CMS is the go-to-market name of the open source project created by the Starshot Initiative. It’s a fast-moving open source project that enables site builders with or without Drupal experience to quickly and easily create a new Drupal site and extend it with pre-packaged Recipes, all using only their browser.

From an initial installation, Drupal CMS intuitively guides site builders to apply Recipes for common business use cases and innovative capabilities that are immediately available for providing default configuration and functionality instantly. The goal of Drupal CMS is not only to get people from install to launch quickly, but also with a more full-featured, robust, and user-friendly experience out of the box. It’s also a great opportunity to bring new people and contributors into the Drupal community specifically and into the much larger open web community in general.

Dries announced the Experience Builder and Drupal CMS (“Starshot”) initiatives at DrupalCon Portland in May 2024 and we already have a solid first release to try out. If you're in the market for a content management system that combines power with simplicity, Drupal CMS is set to transform how we think about website building and management right in your favorite web browser. 

Designed with both technical and non-technical users in mind, Drupal CMS offers a suite of innovative features aimed at reducing setup time and enhancing usability—all while keeping Drupal’s renowned flexibility and scalability intact. There are many breakthrough benefits which make this release a must-try.

Why Drupal CMS?

Drupal CMS is more than just a new iteration of Drupal Core—it’s a solution tailored to the evolving needs of today’s website builders. By combining quick setup tools, AI-driven features, and an enhanced user interface, this release ensures that creating and managing a website is not only fast and efficient but also enjoyable.

Available on January 15, 2025, Drupal CMS is a testament to the Drupal community’s commitment to innovation and accessibility. Whether you’re a seasoned developer, site builder, or marketing leader for your organization, Drupal CMS is ready to meet you where you are today.

Drupal CMS is the next phase of innovation and the next generation of the powerful, stable, feature-rich leading enterprise CMS that powers 12.8% of the top 10,000 websites and nearly 3.5% of the top 1 million web sites*. This 1/15/25 1.0 release is only the beginning of this next iteration of Drupal community-driven innovation.

How To Get It

Right now you can locally set up the most recent release of Drupal CMS with a few easy steps. Assuming you’ve got DDEV installed with a Docker provider like Rancher, Orbstack, or Colima, the full command sequence is:

composer create-project drupal/cms:^1
cd cms
ddev launch

Also see: new.drupal.org/download

Alternatively, you can also use the zip file approach, which Dries wrote about in a recent article.

That’s it! And you are up and running with a new local installation of Drupal CMS.

What You Can Do With It

Here is a highlight reel of some of the great features of Drupal CMS.

Quick Site Setup with Recipes

One of the standout features of Drupal CMS is its quick site setup process. With Recipes, users can jumpstart their website with pre-packaged configurations tailored to specific needs. Whether you’re launching a new blog, an e-commerce platform, news and events sites, or a corporate web presence, Recipes bundle together the modules, themes, and settings required for a fast, streamlined setup. Prep your site for SEO and accessibility. Drupal CMS will even walk you through the quick setup steps. This means you spend less time configuring and more time creating.

 

A Facelift for the Admin UI

Drupal CMS introduces a clean and polished, modernized Admin UI, making site management more intuitive than ever. Built with usability in mind, the new interface streamlines navigation and offers a clean, polished look. Drupal CMS also comes with an administrative dashboard for fast, easy orchestration of your application. Customize the interface of this dashboard, moving modals around the screen to fit your workflow, and even create your own custom dashboards quickly and easily. Whether you're adding content, updating configurations, or managing users, the Admin UI ensures a smooth and efficient experience for all.

Discover the Project Browser

Finding, enabling, and adding new modules and themes, and managing your Recipes in Drupal has never been easier thanks to the Project Browser. This user-friendly tool simplifies the module discovery process, allowing users to search, review, and install extensions directly within the admin interface. Forget about switching between websites and dashboards—the Project Browser brings everything you need right to your Drupal ui with a few clicks.

 

Automatic Updates: Click and Let Drupal Do the Work

For busy site administrators, managing updates can be a chore. Drupal CMS eliminates the hassle with its Automatic Updates feature. Now, you can keep your website secure and up-to-date with ease and convenience. With seamless updates applied automatically, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your site is always running the latest and most secure version of Drupal core, modules, and themes.

 

AI Features for Smarter Site Building

The forward-focused Drupal CMS is embracing the future with integrated AI-powered tools. These features bring intelligence to your workflows, offering cutting-edge capabilities like:

  • Pluggable AI backend to integrate with top AI providers like Open AI, Claude, and Amazon Bedrock
  • AI Chatbot that understands your site's context and can either explain what to do or do site building tasks automatically for you
  • AI Agents tailored to specific site builder needs like creating new content types, field creation and management based only on the simple prompts you write
  • Leveraging open source services that use machine learning to extract your data into usable text and images for creating and editing content types
  • AI to suggest improved content elements like title, tone, readability, suggested taxonomy tags, AI content policy moderation, and clean HTML code in CKEditor 

By integrating AI into its core functionality, Drupal CMS helps users work smarter, not harder.

 

Get Ready for the Future of CMS

The sky is the limit for the newest iteration of the powerful, enterprise-ready open source content management system we know and love, Drupal: Drupal CMS. With its powerful features and user-friendly approach, it’s poised to make website building and management accessible to everyone. Stay tuned for many more innovative updates and start planning how you’ll take advantage of this exciting new way to Drupal.

At DrupalCon Singapore in December 2024, Dries updated the Drupal community with a status update and a progress report on what’s been complete, what's in the works, and what's coming next in Drupal CMS. Some powerful and exciting new Recipes are on the roadmap, more AI integrations, great features with modern search, important inclusions for security and privacy, the latest modern features with Experience Builder, media management, accessibility, and analytics implementation. Be sure to check out Dries' article for further details, inspiration, and quick video clips of each of these innovative tracks. 

Learn More & Get Involved

No matter what your skill level and experience are, there are so many ways to learn more and get involved in Drupal CMS. What are you waiting for?

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*TechJury, Drupal usage statistics, 2024.

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