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.
It is usually challenging when a system tries to fulfill several roles at the same time. To address this, Dries Buytaert has initiated the Drupal CMS project together with the Drupal community.
It is specifically suited for small to medium-sized marketing, blog and product websites, as well as for evaluating Drupal.
Conversely, this allows "Drupal Core" to officially focus on the framework aspect: a tool to create a CMS. Drupal CMS is a possible manifestation of this, but does not claim to meet all possible requirements.
The term "Drupal" can in turn be interpreted as the sum of all possible CMS systems.
Background and scope of Drupal CMS 1.0
Dries Buytaert announced the Drupal Starshot project 8 months ago at DrupalCon Portland 2024. In this short time frame, a board built a whole project team and defined over a dozen tracks, whose leaders, together with the rest of the community, created the first iteration of this new product.
These 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 - in particular 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 on Drupal's 24th birthday was successfully kept. However, some important aspects had to be postponed.
Most notably, Drupal CMS does not yet support complex content, and the example 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 is still under active development.
Multilingual support, which is important for Switzerland, has also not yet been specifically taken into account. In principle, the familiar functions of Drupal Core are available, but the language selection during installation, for example, is hidden and set to English, and the standard recipes do not yet take into account the necessary adaptations to be able to create multilingual content.
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 their 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.
However, in the medium term, and to some extent already in the short term, Drupal CMS and the underlying new possibilities will directly and indirectly influence Primer and other distributions:
- We are already evaluating Drupal CMS's chosen privacy solution "Klaro!" to replace our current integration
- In some use cases, there are currently several module for the same task, the ones that will be selected by Drupal CMS will become better established
- We are in the process of converting the Paragraphs demo module to 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 is continued and updated independently after installation. This means that there is no dependency and Drupal CMS can continue to develop in a more agile way. Conversely, however, this also means that existing websites created with Drupal CMS do not automatically benefit from these improvements.
Primer's approach is that we regularly update all our customer projects and introduce new features and improvements from which all existing projects also benefit. We will continue to do so.
