Goodbye Drupal 7, Hello Drupal CMS
January 2025 is a big month for Drupal. On January 5, 2025, we saw the end of life for Drupal 7, and now we welcome the 1.0 release of Drupal CMS.
Many Drupal 7 site builders and marketers are bidding farewell to a CMS that has served them well for over a decade. As people look to what’s new and next, the natural progression is to migrate sites to modern Drupal, which includes Drupal CMS.
What do these changes mean for those in the Drupal community? For those that run Drupal websites and want to evaluate Drupal as a potential content management system for them?
When Drupal 7 landed on the scene 14 years ago (January 5, 2011, to be precise), it was touted as a revolutionary new version of Drupal. And it was. Drupal 7 brought a more robust hook system, with the ability to automatically locate and load certain external files, and consistent APIs for blocks and forms. It also included some improvements for content creators and content managers.
In those 14 years, there were over 100 releases that made security improvements, bug fixes, and performance improvements on the CMS. Even though Drupal 7 was actively maintained, it never had revolutionary improvements to stay on top of emerging technology trends and approaches.
A new version of Drupal called Drupal CMS will be released on January 15, 2025. As we covered in previous blog posts "Empowering Your Marketing Team with These Exciting Drupal CMS Features”, “A New Age of Drupal: Drupal CMS” and “A Breakdown of Drupal Innovations”. Drupal CMS (aka Drupal Starshot) is bringing a fresh approach to Drupal that allows marketers and less technical folks to build rich websites out-of-the-box.
Drupal CMS is a standalone version of Drupal built on Drupal Core and includes pre-built features and functionality that will accelerate the process of building a site without coding.
If we compare Drupal 7 to Drupal CMS, we can see the amount of change that has come to one of the world’s most popular open-source CMSes.
Goodbye: Starting from Zero
Hello: Pre-configured Features and Functions
A fresh installation of a Standard Drupal 7 site provided the basic pieces to let someone start developing a website. It included a basic page and article content types, and not much else. From there, it was up to you to build out all the other functionalities you wanted for your site. Drupal 7 could do almost anything you can imagine a website doing, but you needed the skills and know how to make it happen.
With Drupal CMS, you are guided through the process by selecting features you want during the installation process. You can select one or more common types of content that your site will feature: blog, case studies, events, news, person profiles, or projects. This list of pre-configured features will grow as they are developed for future versions of Drupal CMS.
After the installation is complete, you can choose to enable additional features in the ‘Extend’ section of the administration interface.
Goodbye: Outdated Administration Interface
Hello: Modern, User-Friendly User Interface
Drupal 7’s administrative interface was functional, but not very user-friendly. A first-time Drupal user would not intuitively be able to find the right pages in the admin interface to perform what they want to do.
Drupal CMS provides a more intuitive user interface. Upon installation of a new site, the user is taken to a dashboard that can help guide users on the next steps to continue the site building.
Goodbye: Limited Media Handling
Hello: Built-In Media Library
In Drupal 7, managing media assets like images and videos at any scale required a lot of additional effort, including the addition of Drupal Contrib modules. Depending on what mix of assets, what approach you took, and which modules you added, the experience often felt fragmented, incomplete, and inconsistent. There was not a great solution for organizing, managing, and reusing assets effectively.
With modern Drupal and Drupal CMS, the built-in Media Library streamlines media management. You can easily upload, organize, and manage media assets across the site. Additionally, if you leverage a DAM like Acquia DAM or Bynder, it easily integrates into the Drupal Media Library.
Goodbye: Complicated Content Management
Hello: Streamlined Content Creation
Content editing in Drupal 7 could feel cumbersome. Adding media, formatting text, and creating links between pages often required extra steps or technical knowledge, which slowed down the content creation workflow. When looking for more fine-tuned control over metadata, robots.txt, and other content to improve SEO, you would need to add more Drupal modules and add more steps to the content creation process.
Drupal CMS ships with a lot of modern tools including WYSIWYG editors and many SEO tools. You can enable drag-and-drop page building with Layout Builder to give you more flexibility in creating pages on a modern Drupal site. This gives a better experience for marketers and content creators who want to focus on content rather than managing a website.
Evaluating Drupal CMS
Are you interested in the new features of Drupal CMS and want to try it out? Testing out the new Drupal CMS is easy. Drupal.org offers a temporary demo for you to evaluate Drupal CMS and test out the features and functionality for yourself. This is the first time that Drupal will host an on-demand demo environment, which will give people a fast and simple way of testing out the new version.
You can find more information about Drupal CMS and try it out at https://drupal.org/drupal-cms
Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend and Welcoming a New One
Drupal 7 served as a reliable platform for over a decade, but its limitations became increasingly frustrating for content managers as the pace of change in the CMS ecosystem increased. Drupal CMS brings a wealth of modern features and improvements that empower marketers to create and manage websites with ease and flexibility. Drupal CMS is a game-changer that will power many digital experiences for the next decade!
