Commerce Kickstart has been the fastest way to start building on Drupal Commerce for over 13 years. We grew it from a simple installation profile aimed at developers to the most popular Drupal distribution, reaching over 12,000 sites. We rebuilt it to take full advantage of modern Drupal in 2022, and with this week's 5.0 release we've done it again, creating the first contrib site template.
What is a site template?
Site templates were introduced by Dries Buytaert in his keynote at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 as a combination of recipes and themes that together create an installation of Drupal tailored to a specific purpose. Drupal CMS itself is essentially a site template, using a streamlined installer that lets you toggle on certain features like a blog, events listing, or project portfolio via optional recipes.
Recipes are a relatively new concept born out of Drupal's Starshot initiative. When applied to a site, recipes may install modules, import configuration, execute config actions, and import default content. They are essentially automated tutorials, with Drupal following the steps to configure itself at the click of a button. Recipes are a key part of Starshot's strategic shift toward enabling content creators, marketers, and others to build out pages and full sites without relying on developers.
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