starshot-prototype
Prototype of a new kind of Drupal, based on recipes and loaded up with contrib's best modules and themes. Not a fork or a distribution.
An experimental prototype bundling Drupal's best community modules and themes into a ready to use, recipe based CMS starting point.
Note: this repository has since moved to GitLab on drupal.org as the official Drupal CMS project, and this copy is described as an experimental prototype not meant for production sites.
Drupal CMS is a supercharged starting point for building websites with Drupal, an established open source content management system. Plain Drupal is powerful but bare bones: to build a real website you typically need to find, install, and configure dozens of community built modules yourself, which can be overwhelming for anyone new to the platform. Drupal CMS solves this by bundling the most popular and useful community modules and themes together, already configured and ready to use.
Out of the box you get content types set up with translation support, search engine metadata, clean URLs, content moderation, and scheduling. There is media management with smart image cropping, a full form building system with spam protection, and an improved admin interface with better navigation and accessibility tools. Basic utilities like XML sitemaps, URL redirects, and better date fields are included, along with sample content so a fresh site is not completely empty.
The key architectural difference from similar Drupal distributions is that Drupal CMS is built on Drupal's recipe system rather than a traditional install profile. Older distributions tend to lock you in: once you start a site on one, switching away later is very difficult. Recipes apply configuration in a way that can be composed and does not lock you in, so individual components can be adopted on an existing site, or the whole set can be customized freely, without being trapped in one path.
Installation works through DDEV for a quick local start, or through Composer if you are not using DDEV, and either route installs Drupal CMS with all the bundled modules and themes preconfigured and ready to explore. Who this is for: anyone who wants a Drupal site without building the authoring experience from scratch using Drupal core's relatively bare bones tools.
Where it fits
- Spin up a Drupal site with translation, SEO, moderation, and scheduling already configured.
- Build web forms with spam protection without hunting for and configuring separate modules.
- Adopt individual bundled components on an existing Drupal site without full lock in.
- Explore a modern admin interface with improved navigation and accessibility.