Welcome to this year’s Drupal Advent Calendar, and this year the focus is on the most important Drupal initiative in quite some time.
Code named Starshot, it aims to take Drupal to a new level of user friendliness and ease of use.
Over recent versions, Drupal has become incredibly powerful, and it now powers many enterprise websites for major corporations, governments, and NGOs around the world.
Starshot was announced by the founder of the Drupal project, Dries Buytaert, at DrupalCon Portland, in April of this year. This proposed a new default installation of Drupal with many extra features, and an ambitious release date of January 2025, with a beta release at DrupalCon Singapore, later this month.
At DrupalCon Barcelona in September, Dries presented a preview of how building a site would look like with Starshot. It’s well worth watching the recording of his presentation:
Over the 8 months since it was announced a lot of work has taken place across the many tracks of Starshot. The new name for the default release will be Drupal CMS (with Drupal Core also available for those who wish to continue building sites the old way).
There are many exciting new features to Drupal CMS.
The new installer will offer pre-configured features such as blogging, event management, and search engine optimization, and will install a number of helpful widely-used modules when setting up the site. Once installed, Automatic Updates will help keep the site updated, and Project Browser will make it easier to find new add-on modules to enhance your site. A new dashboard will give you an enhanced experience when you log in to your site, and there will be new administration menus and a better administration theme. There will also be much improved support for media management and site search. Another exciting new feature is Experience Builder, which will allow many aspects of the site theming to be controlled in the front end, reducing the amount of custom coding required considerably.
Perhaps one of the most exciting enhancements is the AI-based assistant to help build many aspects of your site, taking the pain out of many complex tasks.
I came to Drupal as a hobbyist, and one of the appeals of earlier versions of Drupal was how they made many aspects of building a site much easier for hobbyists. I feel Drupal lost some of these advantages over the years as it became more focused on delivering enterprise-grade websites. It is challenging for a single developer to build a site on their own, with many requiring a team, and a fairly significant budget.
My hope is that Drupal CMS will bring the ability to develop a site to individual developers and site builders once more.
Over the course of the Advent Calendar, we’ll look at many aspects of Starshot and highlight what makes it special.
We hope you’ll join us on this journey.
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