Today we are looking at one of the central elements of Starshot, but also one of the easiest to overlook.
Drupal CMS will come preinstalled with a set of base modules and themes, as the basis on which other recipes will be built. The base theme track is responsible for this. Not only does this provide essential functionality to make a new Drupal site much more usable, it also provides an important baseline for the other tracks to build upon.
Some of the functionality either already implemented, or planned past Drupal CMS 1.0, is listed below.
Pathauto is now installed by default. This is a small thing, but something that previously had to be done for every Drupal website. Providing it in Starshot will lead to greater standardization of how it’s configured, and just remove the need for repeating the configuration on every site. I’ve long thought it should be part of Drupal Core, but it depends on the Token module, and I believe there are some good reasons for keeping that out of Drupal Core.
If a page that requires authentication is visited by an anonymous user, it automatically redirects to the login page, and redirects back to the desired page once logged in. This is done using the ECA (Event Condition Action) module, which allows automation to be built graphically, so also makes this module available to provide other functionality.
The Trash module allows deleted content to be retrieved easily.
The Gin admin theme is now the default administration theme, providing a more modern administration UI experience. The new core Navigation module is also used to provide cleaner administration menus on a left side-bar.
The admin interface is now searchable using the Coffee module, while the Linkit module makes it easier to link to other pages on the site inside CKEditor.
The Focal Point module allows the main subject of an image to be selected to ensure that if the image is cropped, the focus remains on the most important element.
Other features still being worked on include improvements to the default site search, automatic saving of work in progress on forms, and sending HTML formatted emails.
While these are all things that it’s fairly easy to include on a new Drupal website, having sensible default configurations of them out of the box is a huge win for Drupal’s ease of use.
The track is being led by Pamela Barone, who briefly chatted with me as she was departing for DrupalCon Singapore. She has been playing a key role in the governance of the Starshot Initiative. She is CTO of Technocrat. Her blog post about the progress so far was extremely helpful.
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