Empower Your Marketing Team with These Exciting Drupal CMS Features

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 is a wrap. This DrupalCon was special not only because it was a return to a beautiful city, but also because it was the first DrupalCon since the announcement of Drupal Starshot (now known as Drupal CMS). Drupal CMS is an important advancement of Drupal as the community continues to innovate and expand Drupal’s capabilities. In his 40th DriesNote, Dries Buytaert, creator and product leader of Drupal, demonstrated the progress that has been made to date with Drupal CMS.

At DrupalCon Portland earlier this year, Dries introduced Drupal CMS. The goal of the project is to build a version of Drupal that is optimized for non-developers, like content creators, digital marketers, and site builders. Drupal CMS will not replace Drupal as we know it. Instead, Drupal CMS will be built on top of Drupal Core. Developers will continue to use Drupal Core to build more complex Drupal builds, yet will benefit from the advances made to developer Drupal CMS.

As we covered in our previous article on Drupal CMS, the primary goals for the forthcoming Drupal CMS are to enable marketers and non-technical users to create ambitious digital experiences, improve the ‘out-of-the-box' functionality of Drupal, adapt to emerging trends in the technology/CMS space, and boost the overall adoption of Drupal.

The launch of Drupal CMS is set for January 15, 2025, which will be Drupal’s 24th birthday and just a few weeks after Drupal 7’s end-of-life.  The retirement of Drupal 7 and the launch of Drupal CMS will mark a significant transition in Drupal’s evolution, as all supported versions of Drupal will now be built on a modern framework that will be easy to upgrade and extend over time. 

*If you are currently on Drupal 7, time is quickly winding down to Drupal 7’s end of life in January 2025. Bounteous x Accolite can help you quickly move your site from Drupal 7 to the latest version of Drupal with our Migration Accelerator technology. Contact us for more information. 

What Progress Has Been Made So Far?

When Drupal CMS was announced, Dries laid out the vision to complete the 1.0 version in eight months. It has been about four months since then, so Drupal CMS is about halfway through the timeline.

In his DriesNote, Dries demoed the current progress of Drupal CMS. The demo focused on several key areas: trial experience, artificial intelligence capabilities, SEO capabilities, and Drupal Recipes. All this was done through the lens of a non-developer building a new website.

Improving the Drupal trial experience is an important way to get more people to try and adopt Drupal. Historically, it has taken expertise to set up Drupal just to try it out. You would either need to set it up on a server or have a local configuration to set it up. Both require setting up and configuring software before even setting up Drupal. With Drupal CMS, it is now easy to set up a Drupal demo environment. If you follow this link, you can try Drupal in a browser. No server setup or configuration is necessary. 

Leveraging AI to Enhance the Site-Building Experience

In the demo, a hypothetical user asked the AI Agent (which took form as a chatbot) to make modifications to a Drupal content type, including changing the name of the content type and adding an image field. This feature will give people unfamiliar with Drupal the ability to make changes within Drupal without needing to learn site building and administration.

The demo also showed a content migration of a simple blog post into Drupal. When provided with the URL of a page, the AI Agent retrieved the page, parsed the content, and mapped it into fields of an existing blog post content type. It also augmented the content by classifying it with taxonomy terms.

Together, these AI features show the potential of AI with creating, migrating, and managing content. Dries noted that AI will be a fundamental shift in how Drupal sites are built, empowering non-technical users with tools that allow them to fulfill the aim of creating ambitious digital experiences.

Introducing Experience Builder 

The second notable item shown in the demo was the new Experience Builder. Experience Builder gives users the ability to place and update freeform content on pages a visual building experience. It features previews of content at both desktop and mobile breakpoints, giving insight into what the published page will look like. Experience Builder is the most effort-intensive feature within Drupal CMS with the equivalent of 30 full-time contributors to the initiative. Dries indicated that Experience Builder will not be production-ready at the initial launch of Drupal CMS in January but will be included in a future version of Drupal CMS in 2025.

Other features of Drupal CMS will be available through Drupal’s system of Recipes. Recipes are pre-packaged features that are designed to provide one-click installation of functionality to address frequent use cases for site administrators. To date, 14 features have been identified to be part of Drupal CMS. In addition to the AI features we mentioned above, there will be Recipes to bring enhanced SEO, accessibility, analytics, and marketing tools to sites, among others.

The future of Drupal is just a few months away. When it is released, Drupal CMS should significantly expand the usage of Drupal across the internet by making building Drupal easier for non-developers. Attaching this wider range of users and organizations to use Drupal to reach their audiences will spur growth within the Drupal community, provide greater community support, and make the overall Drupal ecosystem stronger.

Drupal CMS will also establish a framework for future-proofing Drupal. By investing and releasing new features like AI and Experience Builder will help Drupal remain competitive and relevant as methods to content management evolve. We are particularly excited to see this approach of releasing bold and innovative features through Drupal CMS rather than through the traditional experimental module approach. This new approach allows Drupal to be more nimble as future features and needs are identified and rolled out.

We are excited to see how Drupal CMS continues to develop and evolve in the coming months and years!

Interested in Learning More?

Take a look at the demo from the Driesnote, and tune into DrupalCon Singapore in December, when it’s anticipated the demo will be ready for release.