As we write this on January 15th, 2025, it’s an iconic day for the entire Drupal community and its users. Why? Because Drupal CMS 1.0 has officially launched!

The journey began in May 2024, when Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, announced the initiative at DrupalCon Portland. The goal was clear. To create a simplified version of Drupal that appealed to users of all skill levels. Marketers to web designers.

In this article, we’re diving deep into Drupal CMS, what it is, how to set it up, the features it offers, and how you can make the most of it. Think of it as an exciting unboxing experience!

What is Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS 1.0 is an enhanced version of Drupal Core that incorporates a curated selection of contributed modules and features to provide a more comprehensive and user-friendly experience right out of the box. The project is part of the Drupal Starshot Initiative, aimed at simplifying site creation for new users and lowering the barrier to entry for leveraging Drupal's robust capabilities.

Key improvements include integration with tools like Recipes, Project Browser, and Automatic Updates, enabling site builders to quickly deploy and manage websites without requiring extensive technical expertise. Recipes facilitate pre-configured setups for specific use cases, while the Project Browser simplifies module discovery and installation. Automatic Updates ensure that websites remain secure and up-to-date with minimal manual intervention. These features make Drupal CMS a great option for users seeking a faster, smoother development experience.

Setting up Drupal CMS 1.0

DDEV is the recommended way to set up Drupal CMS (available on the Drupal.org CMS project page) locally to develop and for testing purposes. This setup ensures a fast, reliable, and isolated Drupal development environment.

Download and install DDEV, a Docker-based local development tool. 

To create a new project with Drupal CMS run the following Composer command locally to download the latest pre-packaged zip file.

composer create-project drupal/cms:1-rc1 drupal_cms

This will create a new directory called “drupal_cms” and download all the necessary files and folders required for the project along with other Composer dependencies.

Drupal CMS 1.0 pre-packages a quick-launch script to set up locally. The script will basically check if DDEV is installed locally to spin up the required Docker container to run the application and launch the web-based installer on your default browser for installation and configuration.

cd drupal_cms
./launch-drupal-cms.sh

Once the quick-launch script executes, it will open the web-based installer on your default browser to proceed with the installation and configuration. You will be landed on the Get Started page where you can choose the pre-configured content types based on your need to get started. We will cover all the content types later in the blog.

 

The next steps are to provide some basic information about your new site (like providing the name of the site) and create the super admin account to log in and build the site.

 

It will then display a progress bar under the heading Setting up your site. This will install all the pre-configured modules and configuration that ships with Drupal CMS adhering to the best practices. This will also set up the pre-configured content type that you selected on the Getting Started page.

 

After the installer has completed you will land on the Dashboard page which will serve as a centralized interface to access key information and essential tools after logging into the system.

 

Congratulations, you have successfully installed Drupal CMS 1.0! Now let’s move on with the features that come along with it.

Admin Interface

Drupal CMS Admin UI packages Gin as the default administrative theme. The Gin theme is a modern Drupal admin theme designed for improved usability and accessibility. As a sub-theme of Claro, it features a sleek, responsive UI, customizable toolbar, drag-and-drop functionality, and a built-in dark mode. Gin enhances the content management experience with a clean, modern design, reducing the learning curve for new users while boosting productivity. It’s a popular choice for teams seeking an intuitive and efficient administrative interface without impacting the site’s front end.

Key features

  • Enhanced UI/UX: Gin offers a cleaner, responsive interface optimized for desktop and mobile devices, making content management more intuitive.
  • Modern Design: Aligns with contemporary design trends, ensuring a visually appealing backend.
  • Dark Mode: A built-in dark mode option to reduce eye strain during extended usage.
  • Accent & Focus Colors: Allows you to change the Accent and Focus colors based on your branding color palette
  • Sticky action buttons: Improves the authoring experience while creating content by making action buttons like Save & Preview as sticky headers on content forms.

The Gin theme enhances the admin interface and authoring experience by offering a clean, responsive design with its intuitive layout, and modern UI streamline workflows, making content management faster and more user-friendly for administrators and content creators alike.

Navigation

Drupal CMS Admin UI utilizes the new Navigation module that further improves and modernizes administrative tasks by providing easy access to the links required to maintain, build, and configure a Drupal website.

Key features

  • Menu Management: Enables creating, editing, and rearranging menu links through an easy-to-use interface.
  • Hierarchical Structure: Supports nested menus for organizing content effectively.
  • Permissions Control: Allows setting access permissions for menu items based on user roles.
  • Block Integration: Menus can be displayed as blocks, providing flexibility in placement across the site.

The module simplifies navigation setup, improving user experience and site accessibility, making it essential for structured and well-organized Drupal websites.

Dashboard

The Drupal CMS Dashboard provides a centralized and customizable admin interface to enhance the user experience for site administrators. It allows users to create personalized dashboards with widgets for quick access to critical information and frequently used functionalities.

Key Features

  • Customizable Layout: Admins can configure the dashboard layout to fit their workflow needs.
  • Widget Support: Includes widgets for site statistics, content management, user activities, and more.
  • Role-Based Dashboards: Offers different dashboards based on user roles for tailored experiences.
  • Easy Integration: Works seamlessly with other Drupal modules and features.

Dashboard improves productivity by consolidating tools and data in one location, streamlining site administration.

User Roles

Drupal CMS 1.0 comes with 4 distinct user roles for different user personas that define user permissions and access control within a site. Roles allow administrators to assign specific capabilities to groups of users, ensuring secure and efficient content management. This ensures a structured workflow, maintaining security and flexibility in managing user access and responsibilities.

Media Management

The Media module in Drupal manages reusable multimedia assets like images, videos, and documents, streamlining content creation efficiently. Drupal CMS enhances Media management by adding and configuring media-related contributed modules to enhance the usability of Media items.

Key Features

  • SVG Media type: Provides a media type that allows the user to upload an SVG image which can be useful for assets like icons & logos
  • Focal Point: Allows users to add a focal point to images being uploaded which improves the visibility of the image when rendered via image styles
  • WebP: Converts any uploaded image to WebP extension to improve the performance of rendering images by reducing the size of the image without compromising the quality of the image
  • Responsive Image Styles: Pre-configured responsive image styles to render different image resolutions based on the screen size of the end user.

Content types

Drupal CMS 1.0 ships with six distinct content types that are tailored to meet different scenarios. These content types are optimized keeping in mind the usability of various use cases. This streamlines content management by providing structure, flexibility, and consistency for creating and organizing various types of content on a website.

  • Basic Page: Use Basic Page to create static content pages like the “About us” page.
  • Blog Post: A simple content type to post blogs with attributes like categorization via tag, a Featured image for the blog, and a Description which can be used to have a brief summary of the post
  • Case Study: Use Case Study to post an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real-world context. The content type also allows you to categorize Case studies by tags and add Client information like name and logo.
  • Event: The event content type in Drupal CMS provides a foundational template to create events with tools like Smart Date, address field and map integration.
  • News item: Use “News item” to post the latest news with attributes like categorization via tag, a Featured image for the blog and a Description which can be used to have a brief summary of the post
  • Person profile: A person profile content type to add information about a person. This can be useful to create profiles for team members in an organization and display them team in a list or a grid
  • Project: “Project” allows you to post an informational insight about an example of work for an intended audience.

Cookie Consent

Drupal CMS ships with a cookie consent implementation out-of-the-box for GDPR compliance. It uses the Klaro service for cookie management which makes it easier for you to get started.

The Klaro Cookie Consent module integrates the Klaro consent manager with Drupal websites. Klaro is a lightweight and customizable solution for managing user consent for cookies and tracking technologies, ensuring GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy compliance.

Key Features

  • Customizable Consent Banner: Display a configurable banner for users to accept or reject cookies.
  • Granular Consent: Allows users to enable or disable specific cookie categories, such as analytics or marketing cookies.
  • Multilingual Support: Klaro integrates seamlessly with Drupal's multilingual capabilities for global audiences.
  • Developer-Friendly: Easily configure the consent banner and categories via YAML or Drupal's UI.
  • Privacy Compliance: Helps meet GDPR, ePrivacy, and other data protection regulations.

By using the Klaro module in Drupa CMS 1.0, site owners can provide transparency and control to users over their data, ensuring a privacy-compliant browsing experience.

Search

The core search of Drupal doesn’t satisfy the real-world use case of a full-fledged search functionality. Thus Drupal CMS Search recipe provides feature-rich and extensible searches.

Drupal CMS utilizes a Search API module that enables flexible and customizable search functionality by indexing content and integrating with search solutions like Solr, Elasticsearch, or databases, offering advanced filtering and faceted search.

Credit - https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_cms/issues/3489037#comment-15884322

Key Features

  • Index Content: Index specific fields and entities for precise search results.
  • Faceted Search: Provide filters to refine search results, enhancing user experience.
  • Custom Search Pages: Create tailored search interfaces for different needs.
  • Autocomplete Search: Provides instant content suggestions based on user input.

Drupal CMS Search uses the database as the cloud engine to index the contents which builds a great foundation for providing better search results for end users.

Please note that Drupal CMS Search is not enabled by default during installation.

SEO

Drupal CMS 1.0 ships with 2 types of SEO implementations: SEO Basic which adds basic SEO implementations on a site (like adding Breadcrumbs, Path Alias, and Redirects). For more advanced SEO implementation Drupal CMS provides advanced SEO tools like Metatags, XML Sitemap, and configurable robot.txt.

Key Features

  • Meta Tags Management: Configure meta titles, descriptions, and keywords to optimize pages for search engines.
  • Clean URLs: Generate SEO-friendly, human-readable URLs automatically with the Pathauto module.
  • XML Sitemap: Automatically create and update sitemaps to improve search engine indexing.
  • Redirect Management: Use the Redirect module to handle 301 redirects, preventing broken links.
  • Configurable Robots: Provides an easy way to manage the robots.txt file, which is used to control how search engine crawlers access your website.

These features collectively improve your site's visibility, user engagement, and search engine performance.

AI

Drupal CMS AI leverages artificial intelligence to enhance content management, personalization, and user engagement on Drupal websites. AI-powered modules and integrations automate workflows, boost productivity, and create smarter user experiences.

Key Features

  • Content Automation: Automate content generation, editing, and recommendations using AI tools like OpenAI integrations.
  • Multilingual Support: AI-powered translation tools simplify managing content in multiple languages.
  • Chatbots: Add AI-driven chatbots for easy site-building enabling users to build content types, views, etc via prompts.
  • Automatic Alt Text Generation: Analyze images and generate meaningful descriptions that help meet WCAG and ADA standards for accessible websites
  • Workflow Automation: Simplify content publishing and approval processes with AI-driven automation.

Drupal CMS AI empowers administrators to build intelligent, scalable, and efficient websites with innovative capabilities.

Final thoughts

In my honest opinion, Drupal CMS 1.0 isn’t just a new version of Drupal. It’s a new chapter for the Drupal community. With its user-friendly setup, powerful features, and focus on accessibility, it’s set to change the way we think about content management. Drupal CMS offers something for everyone and I truly believe it is the future of content management.

If you’re looking for an experienced Drupal development company to bring your Drupal CMS website to life, we’re just a click away. But before you decide, take a look at the work we’ve done for some amazing clients, and let our results speak for themselves!

Contact us

LET'S DISCUSS YOUR IDEAS. 
WE'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU.

CONTACT US SUBMIT RFP