drupal

Three months ago, we launched Drupal CMS 1.0, our biggest step forward in years. Our goal is ambitious: to reimagine Drupal as both radically easier to use and a platform for faster innovation.

In my DrupalCon Atlanta keynote last week, I reflected on the journey so far, but mostly talked about the work ahead. If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below, or download my slides (56 MB).

If you want to try Drupal CMS, you can explore the trial experience, use the new desktop launcher, or install it with DDEV. If you're curious about what we're working on next, keep reading.

1. Experience Builder

Some of the most common requests from Drupal users and digital agencies is a better page-building experience, simpler theming, and high-quality themes out of the box.

At DrupalCon Atlanta, I shared our progress on Experience Builder. The keynote recording includes two demos: one highlighting new site building features, and another showing how to create and design components directly in the browser.

I also demonstrated how Drupal's AI agents can generate Experience Builder components. While this was an early design experiment, it offered a glimpse into how AI could make site building faster and more intuitive. You can watch that demo in the keynote video as well.

We still have work to do, but we're aiming to release Experience Builder 1.0, the first stable version, by DrupalCon Vienna. In the meantime, try our demo release.

2. Drupal Site Templates

One of the biggest opportunities for Drupal CMS is making it faster and easier to launch a complete website. The introduction of Recipes was a big step forward. I covered Recipes in detail in my DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 keynote. But there is still more we can do.

Imagine quickly creating a campaign or fundraising site for a nonprofit, a departmental website for a university, a portfolio site for a creative agency, or even a travel-focused ecommerce site selling tours, like the one Sarah needed in the DrupalCon Barcelona demo.

This is why we are introducing Site Templates: ready-made starting points for common use cases. They help users go from a fresh install to a fully functional site with minimal setup or configuration.

Site Templates are made possible by Recipes and Experience Builder. Recipes provide higher-level building blocks, while Experience Builder introduces a new way to design and create themes. Site Templates will bring everything together into more complete, ready-to-use solutions.

If successful, Site Templates could replace Drupal distributions, a concept that has been part of Drupal for nearly 20 years. The key advantage is that Site Templates are much easier to build and maintain.

3. A marketplace discussion

The first Site Templates may be included directly in Drupal CMS 2.0 itself. Over time, we hope to offer hundreds of site templates through a marketplace on Drupal.org.

At DrupalCon Atlanta, I announced that we'll be exploring a marketplace for Site Templates, including the option for Commercial Site Templates. We believe it's an idea worth evaluating because it could bring several benefits to the Drupal project:

1. Help new users launch a professional-looking site instantly
2. Showcase Drupal's full potential through high-quality examples
3. Generate new revenue opportunities for Drupal agencies and developers
4. Support Drupal's sustainability through a revenue-sharing model with the Drupal Association

You can watch the keynote recording to learn more. I also plan to publish a detailed blog post in the next few days. If you're interested, consider subscribing to my blog.

Looking ahead

Drupal CMS has brought a lot of fresh momentum to the Drupal project, but we're not done yet! The rest of this year, we'll keep building on this foundation with a clear set of priorities:

• Launching Experience Builder 1.0
• Releasing our first Site Templates
• Expanding our marketing efforts
• Exploring the launch of a Site Template marketplace
• Building out our AI framework and AI agents

If you have time and interest, please consider getting involved. Every contribution makes a difference. Not sure where to begin? Join us on Drupal Slack. We're always happy to welcome new faces. Key channels include #drupal-cms-development, #ai, #experience-builder, #drupal-cms-templates, and #drupal-cms-marketplace.

As I said in the keynote: We have all the pieces, now we just need to bring them together!

In our previous article, I described the arguments for Drupal for business and finance. I also showed what decision-making groups can influence an organization's choice of CMS. In this post, I’ll focus on the technology and software areas. Learn thirteen reasons why IT people and developers should consider implementing Drupal. I invite you to read the article or watch an episode of the “Nowoczesny Drupal” series.

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.