The Drupal CMS is undergoing a profound transformation, announced at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025. With the arrival of Drupal CMS, the Experience Builder, Recipes, and Site Templates, the platform is entering a new era: more accessible, faster to deploy, and more intuitive. At bluedrop.fr, we didn’t wait for these announcements to anticipate this strategic shift. Here’s an analysis of the main announcements and a look at them in light of our current approach.
Drupal CMS: a new strategic beginning
Officially launched in January 2024, the initiative first known as “Starshot” is now called Drupal CMS. This version aims to radically simplify the creation, launch, and maintenance of websites. The target audience? Marketers, content creators, and mid-sized organizations looking for a high-performing solution that's also easier to use.
The goal is twofold: increase Drupal’s marketing visibility and accelerate the pace of innovation within the platform.
To ease adoption, the focus is on user experience (UX) right from installation. A new desktop installer (Mac OS, Windows) allows users to get started without complex technical prerequisites, as Gábor Hojtsy, Product Manager at Drupal, explains: “It’s an application that contains everything needed to run Drupal CMS... you don’t need to know Composer.” An online trial version is also available.
The Experience Builder (XB): Contributors’ autonomy in the spotlight
Announced as a major shift, the Experience Builder (XB) promises to transform the way Drupal sites are built. It is designed to allow teams, especially marketing, to manage theming and structure their site directly from the browser, without needing developers’ intervention beyond the basics of HTML/CSS and initial templates.
Content creators will be able to compose pages independently, assembling sections and even managing global areas (header, footer) without depending on back-end developers. Multi-page editing and the saving of reusable sections are also part of the offering.
On the front-end development side, XB will rely on Single Directory Components (SDCs) based on Twig, an already well-established method. More experimentally, it will integrate the ability to create JavaScript components (React, Tailwind CSS) directly in the browser via a built-in code editor. Balint Clear, Experience Builder Software Engineer, emphasizes the simplicity: “To create my component, I didn’t have to set up a development environment. No setup, no code deployment. There’s a built-in code editor with a real-time preview ready to use at any moment.”
Currently in alpha phase, the Experience Builder aims for a 1.0 release at DrupalCon Vienna, coinciding with the launch of Drupal CMS 2.0.
Recipes: Accelerate and standardize construction
At the heart of the Drupal CMS initiative, Recipes are designed to speed up the implementation of common features. They allow you to package predefined configurations (modules, content types, settings) to quickly meet specific needs, whether for a new installation or an existing site.
This Recipes approach is perfectly aligned with what we are already doing in our Drupal Starter, where we have encapsulated our best practices as ready-to-use, preconfigured features for our clients.
Towards Site Templates: ready-to-use Drupal sites
The next logical step after Recipes is the emergence of Site Templates (site templates). The idea is to combine several Recipes, a theme based on the Experience Builder (with its specific components), and relevant demo content to offer an almost “turnkey” experience.
Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, summed it up as follows: "With Drupal, for 24 years, we have been making building blocks (modules). Then, more recently with Recipes, we started to go even further. This time, we are going to combine recipes, add a theme, a visual aspect, and relevant demo content by default. We call these elements site templates."
A marketplace for templates? The idea is on the table.
To distribute and explore these Site Templates, the idea of a dedicated Marketplace is currently under evaluation. It would allow users to browse and choose preconfigured templates.
The key question is whether this marketplace should include commercial templates alongside free open source options. Dries Buytaert outlines the issues: “One of the advantages is that it could encourage people to create site templates. It could generate revenue for template creators and, through a revenue-sharing model, it could also provide income for the Drupal association… On the other hand, we’ve also questioned how this could impact our contributors. Does it change our culture? Is it ethical for us, as an open source community, to have commercial templates?”
A decision is expected by DrupalCon Vienna, after consulting the community.
Our Drupal Starter: Already Aligned with the Drupal Vision
The ambitions of Drupal CMS (industrializing, simplifying) strongly resonate with our approach. For over 15 years, we have been building solid and reusable foundations to accelerate the creation of Drupal projects. Our Starter Drupal already embodies this “Recipes + Site Template” philosophy, with ready-to-use optimizations, proven components, and a modern technical base:
- Optimizations for GDPR, RGAA, SEO, and RGESN compliance;
- Advanced media management;
- A library of the most commonly used blocks/paragraphs (columns, text and images, carousels, highlights, quotes, tables, etc.);
- Predefined user roles and permissions for everyday use;
- Integration of the Drupal site builder Layout Builder to allow contributors to freely build their user interface without coding.
Today, for our clients' projects, this starter allows us to deploy essential features more quickly so we can focus our energy and attention on the specific high value-added aspects of the project.
A modern starter theme designed for contribution
In parallel, we have developed our own theme engine on a modern basis (TailwindCSS, AlpineJS, Webpack), responsive and atomic (component-based design) documented in a Storybook.
It reflects a set of best practices accumulated over recent years: it makes graphic customization easier while ensuring accessibility and maintainability.
It also comes with a set of common components compatible with current contribution modes (Paragraphs or Layout Builder): rich text, multi-column text, text and image, videos, tables, carousels/sliders, quotes, highlights, call to action, etc.
Example of adding a block with the bluedrop.fr starter
A promising future is fast approaching
With Drupal CMS, the Experience Builder, and Site Templates, the Drupal community is making a shift toward greater simplicity, accessibility, and standardization. There’s good reason to be excited! At bluedrop.fr, this transformation doesn’t surprise us: it confirms the choices we’ve made with our Drupal Starter and our Starter Theme. In other words, these are industrialized solutions that guarantee quality, rapid deployment, and autonomy for Drupal contributors.
Our goal remains the same: to deliver robust Drupal projects, quick to deploy, and perfectly suited to our clients’ needs. Do you share this vision? Would you like to try our starters or launch a Drupal project that leverages these innovations? Let’s talk about it!
Some sources:
- Dries Buytaert’s keynote, DrupalCon Atlanta 2025.
- Sessions and blog posts related to the Starshot/Drupal CMS Initiative, Experience Builder, Recipes, and AI within the Drupal community (contributions from Gábor Hojtsy, Balint Clear, and other key members).
- Community discussions around the evolution of Drupal and the potential Marketplace.