With the launch of Drupal CMS will be a new trial experience, making it easier than ever for non-technical evaluators to try Drupal, without needing to set up a local environment or any special tools.
I spoke with Matt Glaman, who was leading the Live Preview track in the initial development stage.
Matt has done a lot of amazing work to allow a webserver running Drupal to run directly in the web browser on your computer. How does this work? Matt took PHP, along with a webserver and database engine, and compiled them into WebAssembly, which is a language that runs in the browser, a bit like JavaScript, but at a much lower level. Once he had these running in the browser, he could run a Drupal site on top of them.
You can actually try out his Demo of both standard Drupal and Starshot right now.
I feel that further explanation from me would not do the topic nearly as much justice as Matt’s own blog posts (part 1, part 2, part 3), which I highly recommend reading.
Matt has also written a more technical description of what’s going on in the WebAssembly code.
While this work is very exciting, there are quite a few outstanding issues to be resolved, including some issues with browser support, as well as an unresolved question of how you’d take a site developed in the in-browser web server and move it a live hosted webserver.
For these reasons, along with the very tight deadlines the Drupal CMS project is working to, it was decided not to use the WebAssembly solution, at least for the initial release.
I believe a more conventional hosted solution is planned, though details have not been released yet.
You can already get an idea of what this might look like from previews offered by Tugboat and DrupalForge.
I’m very hopeful that this track will help to remove one of the major barriers preventing novice site builders from evaluating Drupal, and I’m excited to see what the live preview looks like when Drupal CMS launches.
Matt Glaman is an experienced software engineer and a prominent member of the Drupal community. With over a decade of experience in web development, he has gained a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the field. He is the author of several books, including “Drupal 10 Development Cookbook,” which provides a comprehensive guide to building and customizing Drupal sites.
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