
In January, we had two important milestones in Drupal: the end of life of the long lasting Drupal 7, and the release of the new Drupal CMS. Find out more in our overview of the top January Drupal news & articles.
Drupal CMS 1.0 released
We’re kicking off this month’s list in style, with Dries’ announcement of the release of Drupal CMS 1.0 on January 15, only 8 months after the official announcement of the Drupal Starshot initiative which is responsible for Drupal CMS.
As Dries highlights, the main focus of Drupal CMS are ambitious marketers and site builders, with the key functionality being Recipes which simplify and speed up site building. Another game changing feature is the addition of AI agents to further aid in the site building process.
He concludes the article with some background into the development of Drupal CMS, its 2025 roadmap, and a thank you to community members who helped with their contributions.
Read more about the Drupal CMS 1.0 release
I gave an AI agent edit access to my website
Next up, we have another article from Dries; while it does focus more on the use of AI agents rather than something Drupal-specific, we still wanted to include it, since he’s showcasing the use of AI agents on his personal Drupal websites. In addition, he plans on recreating this solution with Drupal’s native AI agent functionality which came with 1.0 of the Drupal CMS.
The article includes a video of 2 different AI agents in action on his Drupal website. The first one is responsible for content analysis, and the second one then applies the updates suggested by the first agent. Of course, a human in the loop is still needed for quality assurance.
Read more about AI agents working on a Drupal site
Drupal 11.1 Adds Hooks as Classes: A History, How-To, and Tutorials We've Updated
In the next article from January, Joe Shindelar of Drupalize.me breaks down one of the most important new features of the Drupal 11.1 release, the ability to implement hooks as classes.
He starts off with the history of hooks, one of the most defining features of Drupal, which were function-based for 24 years. Drupal 11.1 now enables object-oriented hooks which come with several benefits, such as improved code organization and readability, better testability, performance optimization, and being future proof.
To this end, Drupalize.me have also updated their tutorials, most notably the “What Are Hooks?” and “Implement Any Hook” tutorials, as well as their Drupal Module Developer Guide.
Read more about OOP hooks in Drupal 11.1
Drupal 7 - The End is Here
We continue with the other major piece of news from January – the end of life of Drupal 7, which happened on January 5. This article from Eli Stone of amazee takes a look into the different options D7 site owners are now faced with after the EOL.
The most obvious one is migrating to the latest Drupal version, Drupal 11. If that’s not feasible, it makes sense to purchase Drupal 7 extended support from one of the vendors in the Extended Security Support Provider Program.
Whatever your decision, it still makes sense to take general practical steps for securing your website(s), such as adding basic authentication requirement for the back end/admin pages, and enabling 2FA for user login pages.
Read more about the options after Drupal 7 EOL
How I switched from Gatsby to Astro (While Keeping Drupal in the Mix)
Another interesting article from January comes from Albert Skibinski, who wrote about how he moved his wife’s company website from Gatsby to Astro while keeping Drupal as the CMS and API.
As Albert states, he chose Astro because it’s very straightforward, has great documentation, and a syntax that feels familiar to those with experience working with React, which ticked all the boxes for him.
He kept Drupal for the back end, prioritizing simplicity due to the small project size. This meant he chose to create custom endpoints in Drupal for the JSON responses over using JSON:API or GraphQL, and he opted for a CKEditor body field with embedded content over Paragraphs or Layout Builder.
Read more about using Drupal with Astro
Drupal CMS 1.0 vs. WordPress 6.7: A Performance Showdown
Moving on, this article from Nathaniel Catchpole, senior architect and technical lead at Tag1 Consulting & Drupal Core Contributor for Third and Grove, compares the performance of the latest version of WordPress with the just released Drupal CMS 1.0. The main goal of this test was making a test that’s reproducible and easy to set up, but can be extrapolated to real-life use cases.
On the front end, both Drupal and WordPress scored a 100 on Lighthouse’s performance report, with Drupal being slightly better in accessibility and SEO. On the back end, Drupal performs even better, especially compared to the out of the box WordPress set up which lacks full page caching functionality.
Read more about the performance of WP 6.7 vs. Drupal CMS 1.0
User-centered Design in Drupal CMS
The next article provides a behind the scenes look into the creation of Drupal CMS, coming from the UX Lead Cristina Chumillas. The first step was a thorough planning process to account for the relatively early deadline of the initial release.
As the UX Lead, Cristina was responsible for defining the strategy, beginning with the project roadmap, while track leads took on the implementation of functionality for their respective tracks.
Some of the main challenges encountered during the work were the collaboration between UX and development, as well as the challenges of a volunteer-driven project, such as differences in people’s availability and onboarding for UX roles.
Read more about the creation of Drupal CMS
Drupal CMS: It's About Time
Rounding off January’s list, we have one final article about Drupal CMS, this one written by Pantheon’s Director of Developer Relations Steve Persch. As he claims, the most meaningful impact of Drupal CMS is that it promises a radically shorter "Time to Value", especially when compared with the similar solution provided by Distributions.
Namely, Recipes bring huge improvements for users, for individual contributors, and for the Drupal community at large. The other key feature which Steve highlights are AI agents, which we already mentioned in the above post from Dries, and which might even replace Recipes once the functionality gets more and more optimized.
Posted by Tim on 04 Feb 2025 in Drupal