Drupal CMS: changing the game for ambitious marketers & site builders

January 15th 2025 marked the release of version 1.0 of the new Drupal CMS, a product of the Drupal Starshot initiative which was started in May 2024. That’s right – it only took the community 8 months to roll out the initial version of this game-changing product!

The core aim of the Starshot initiative is to better promote Drupal and increase its adoption through a refreshed brand that showcases the platform’s evolution throughout the years, with the end goal of Drupal CMS becoming the open source digital experience platform, on par with the likes of Adobe, Sitecore and Optimizely.

Let’s take a look at what you get in this initial release and what you can still expect from future releases of the new Drupal CMS.

Community-driven

The 8-month development of Drupal CMS 1.0 was driven largely by volunteer contributors from the global Drupal community. As the Drupal CMS UX Lead Cristina Chumillas points out, this resulted in several challenges, such as keeping everyone aligned on the project deadline(s) despite people’s limited availability and time zone differences.

An interesting feature of the creation of Drupal CMS is that the work takes place in specific “tracks” – more focused parts of the project which facilitate targeted development and contributions. Each key Drupal CMS feature gets its own track, e.g. AI, Privacy, Advanced search, Accessibility, etc.

What Drupal CMS brings to the table

Since Drupal CMS is primarily intended for marketers and other non-developer users (i.e. ambitious marketers / site builders), its key features are mostly centered around improving the site building & content editing experience.

Fast & easy setup

The tried and tested Drupal Core remains the top option to build with Drupal for developers and other expert/technical users, giving them more control and flexibility in their website projects.

Meanwhile, the new Drupal CMS is geared towards non-technical users that need to set up a website with key capabilities quickly, efficiently and without needing to use something like Git or an IDE. Based on the latest version of Drupal 11, it provides a ready-made platform for marketers, content creators and site builders.

Recipes

The main magic of the first version of Drupal CMS lies in Recipes, pre-configured packages of features that enable ambitious site builders to quickly and easily set up customized and performant websites.

Drupal CMS 1.0 comes with almost 30 recipes, some of which provide essential site functionality and are thus applied by default, while others can be selected as optional add-ons for specific site purposes, either during initial site set up, or later on in the site building process through another key Drupal CMS feature, Project Browser.

AI site building

Drupal was one of the first content management systems to start experimenting with and integrating generative AI capabilities into the site building process. The team at Velir started developing the Drupal AI module as early as January 2023 to allow Drupal users to tap into the power of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools right from their Drupal setup.

Drupal CMS now features AI as one of the core tracks. Its AI agents are designed to ease the site building experience. Rather than simply creating content, they go the extra mile of being able to take care of more advanced cases such as creating custom content types and configuring taxonomies.

Privacy

In recent years, online privacy has become a more and more important concern, and marketers have to now make sure to cater to more privacy-conscious users, as well as comply with regulatory requirements of GDPR, CCPA, and other existing and future privacy laws.

As a proponent of the Open Web, Drupal greatly prioritizes privacy features. One of the key Recipes that come out of the box with Drupal CMS 1.0 is thus Data privacy / compliance, based on the open-source consent manager tool Klaro.

Future plans

While the initial Drupal CMS release is already packed full of great features for marketers and site builders, there are still a lot of important updates ahead on its roadmap. The biggest feature of Drupal CMS coming later this year is the Experience Builder, a streamlined version of the Drupal Layout Builder.

With the groundbreaking Experience Builder, Drupal CMS will truly earn its place among the leading low-code/no-code site building platforms.

How Drupal CMS changes the game

So, what does all this mean for companies and individuals using Drupal? What practical/tangible benefits will you get from the new Drupal CMS?

Scalability & maintainability

Thanks to the ease of spinning up websites without any additional pressure on the development team, Drupal CMS brings even more scalability than already scalable traditional Drupal setups.

It facilitates and speeds up the roll-out of customized campaigns and/or marketing websites, as well as enabling the creation of custom content at scale.

This user-friendliness also makes it easier to maintain websites built using Drupal CMS without having to rely on the development team for everything.

Lower development costs

While the development ROI does increase with time in a traditional Drupal setup, the initial investment for more complex and/or enterprise cases tends to be pretty high.

In contrast, Drupal CMS drastically reduces these initial development costs without the risk of these increasing further down the line thanks to the scalability it provides. This makes it a great fit for both smaller and more complex websites.

More freedom to individual teams

More power to non-technical users means more freedom to both the development team and the marketing/creative teams. This greatly reduces the typical fiction between development and marketing, enabling each to focus even more on what they do best.

More user-friendly

One of the key goals of the Starshot initiative and Drupal CMS is to bring Drupal closer to newcomers, especially marketers and other non-developers, while also optimizing the developer experience.

A typical issue these newcomers have had with Drupal is how difficult it is to get started and getting quick value with the core platform (even for developers due to Drupal’s steep initial learning curve).

Too much initial frustration with a technology, and people tend to abandon it for a more intuitive and user-friendly solution, with the former leaving a negative impression that’s difficult to turn around.

This is why the ready-made nature of the new Drupal CMS is so key. The fast start it enables brings Drupal much closer to low-code/no-code platforms such as Wix and Webflow, making it much more attractive and much easier to drive value.

The new Experience Builder coming later this year will bring the platform even closer to ambitious marketers and site builders, giving them even more control over their content production and making it even easier to start creating compelling digital experiences with Drupal.

A new era for Drupal

Drupal has been at the forefront of innovation ever since its earliest days. Drupal 7 was already a groundbreaking technology when it was first released, with many features that would be dubbed “low-code/no-code” today.

Since then, however, the web and the digital in general have evolved to empower more and more people to create online content and experiences with less and less reliance on developers.

Tons of businesses have invested heavily in user-friendly SaaS technologies, causing developer-focused open-source platforms to fall behind more and more .

This is why Drupal CMS is one of, if not the most important innovation coming from the Drupal community; it brings the power of Drupal closer to everyone, in the same way that the top SaaS tools facilitate site building and content creation, yet all the while keeping its open source status and all the benefits that come with it.

You can start getting value with Drupal CMS today. In case you need any help with it and/or have more complex needs for your Drupal sites, check out how Agiledrop works with Drupal, and feel free to reach out to us directly to learn more about how we can help you out.