Drupal CMS 1.0 is the impressive first step in a challenging journey to make Drupal a better CMS product. A CMS that is ready to use without any configuration.
This first version was officially released on January 15th as part of a worldwide launch party.
What is Drupal CMS and who is it suitable for?
The Wikipedia (DE) definition of Drupal is:
Drupal is a content management system (CMS) and framework.
As soon as a system tries to fulfill several roles at the same time, challenges can arise. To improve the situation, Dries Buytaert, together with the Drupal community, has initiated the Drupal CMS project.
The Drupal CMS is ideal for small to medium-sized marketing, blog and product websites. It also supports the evaluation of Drupal.
"Drupal Core" can now officially focus on the framework aspect. "Drupal Core" is the optimal tool for creating a CMS. Drupal CMS is a possible manifestation of this, but does not claim to meet all possible requirements.
Background and scope of Drupal CMS 1.0
Dries Buytaert announced in June 2024, at DrupalCon Portland 2024, the Drupal Starshot project announced. In eight months, a new project team including a governance structure was formed and over a dozen different "tracks" were defined. Together with the rest of the community, those responsible created this new product as the first iteration.
The tracks can be roughly divided into two different groups:
General needs, such as:
- Privacy
- SEO
- Search
- Forms
- Accessibility tools
- AI Assistant
Specific, exemplary types of content/features:
- News
- Blog
- Projects
- Case Studies
- Profiles
Drupal CMS consists of "Drupal Core", various additional modules maintained by the community and so-called recipes, which allow these modules to be set up together with predefined configuration and sample content.
Modules that are maintained by MD Systems are also part of Drupal CMS - we would particularly like to emphasize the trio Token, Pathauto and Redirect, which make up an important part of the basic functionality of Drupal CMS.
Limitations
The promise to release this first version of Drupal CMS on Drupal's 24th birthday was successfully kept. However, some important aspects had to be postponed.
Primary this is the creation of complex content, currently the exemplary content types are limited to a simple text field with WYSIWYG. In the future, Drupal CMS will rely on the new Experience Builder project, but this still requires active development.
Also, this first version focuses on the English language area and does not yet offer specific recipes to support the configuration of non-English and multilingual websites.
Impact on us and our customers
Many agencies have existing distributions (predefined CMS configurations) that form the basis of their projects, as does MD Systems with Primer. These still have clear unique selling points and are often better geared towards a specific target group. For Primer, for example, this is our paragraph-based solution for content creation and multilingual web projects.
In the medium term, and to some extent already in the short term, Drupal CMS with its new recipes and the associated new possibilities will have a direct and indirect influence on Primer and other distributions:
- We are already in the process of evaluating the "Klaro!" data protection solution selected by Drupal CMS to replace our current integration
- Also in other areas, where there are currently various different modules, some will become more established through integration with Drupal CMS
- We are in the process of converting the Paragraphs demo module into recipes, with the idea of creating a library of reusable standard components
- We are following the development of Experience Builder and will assess what this means for the future of Paragraphs
Drupal CMS differs from previous distributions in that it is deliberately only a starting point and can be continued and updated independently after installation. This means there are no dependencies and the Drupal CMS can continue to develop in a more agile way. It is important to note that the recipes of a website created with Drupal CMS are not updated automatically.
Primer takes the approach that we regularly update all our customer projects and introduce new features and improvements, from which all existing projects benefit from. We will continue to do so.
