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All About Drupal CMS

Posted on by allison

Drupal has always been a huge part of the Open Web, empowering its users to create ambitious websites. The Drupal community continues to make the platform more accessible and feature-rich. One of the most exciting advancements in this space is the introduction of Drupal CMS, which is designed to provide an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box experience.

What is Drupal CMS?

Drupal CMS aims to make Drupal more accessible to a broader, less technical audience. This project joins the best of Drupal’s contributed project ecosystem to create a streamlined experience. Building on top of Drupal core, Drupal CMS takes advantage of recent core initiatives like Recipes, Project Browser, and Automatic Updates.

The goal? To make it easier than ever for users to go from installation to a fully functional website, even if they have little to no prior Drupal experience. Drupal CMS comes pre-packaged with carefully curated “recipes” that cater to everyday use cases. By guiding site builders through a smoother, faster setup process, Drupal CMS aims to reduce barriers to entry and attract new users to Drupal.

Drupal CMS is designed to compete directly with Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, and other out-of-the-box solutions so users can spin up a site quickly and effectively, but with the bonus of getting the most commonly used components of Drupal — and the power of Drupal — built in!

The Drupal CMS interface when you first download it.

What’s in Drupal CMS?

Administration experience

Drupal CMS has a stunning admin experience out of the box, using Gin for the admin theme to give the user interface (UI) a gorgeous, airy look. Users can log in with a username or password. Once they do, they will land on a brand-new Dashboard.

Drupal core’s Navigation module adds a new left-hand navigation bar. Together with the search in the top bar provided by the Coffee module, this makes navigating the Drupal admin screens much faster.

The Drupal CMS dashboard, showing all the navigation.

The Page

The base Drupal recipe comes with a Page content type and many niceties, such as a Trash bin, auto-saving of edit forms, page duplication thanks to Quick Node Clone, core Media enhancements like Focal Point, and, of course, Project Browser to find new recipes, modules, and automatic updates.

Drupal CMS's page for Project Browser, where you can search for various components.

Content types

Additional content types can be added in the installer or later in Project Browser.

The Blog, Case Studies, Events, News, Person profiles, and Project recipes all have their respective content types, dependent entities like taxonomies to categorize themselves or locations for events. They also have a listing page and a Drupal view that lists individual news, events, and other content types.

Content types in Drupal CMS

Additional Recipes

Not only are there content-type recipes, but you can also add functionality to Drupal CMS’ using prebuilt add-ons provided by recipes. The application is fast, and what would take a developer hours or days to configure is now done in the blink of an eye. These recipes include:

SEO Tools

It adds standard search engine optimization tools such as meta tags, XML sitemap, robots.txt management, and more.

Google Analytics

This recipe adds tracking of website traffic using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Requires a Google Tag Manager ID.

Accessibility Tools

Adds automated checks to help ensure content conforms to web accessibility guidelines.

AI Assistant

Adds integration with AI services, such as alt text generation and a chatbot to assist with site-building. Requires an API key from Open AI or Anthropic.

Search

Adds a search to help visitors find content.

Forms

This recipe adds a simple contact form and tools for building forms.

Where can I try Drupal CMS?

There is a Drupal CMS Trial at https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms/trial, where you can spin up a temporary instance of Drupal CMS and test all the features.

You can also download the Drupal CMS code directly from https://www.drupal.org/project/cms

What if my site gets too robust for Drupal CMS?

This is one of the advantages of Drupal CMS: If a marketer wanted to expand their Drupal CMS site into a more complex one as their needs grow, it would be easy to do! Drupal CMS installs the latest version of Drupal 11. So the goal is one spins up a Drupal CMS site, grows it over time, and when additional support is needed to expand the site, it can be seamlessly expanded to take advantage of all the flexibility and complexity that Drupal offers. 

The Future of Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS 1.1 will be released in the short term in early 2025. This release will contain not only bug fixes but also minor enhancements. Still, it will also include a demo of Experience Builder (XB), then a new page builder that will empower site builders to construct and theme their entire website solely within their browser using basic HTML, CSS, and templating markup, eliminating the need for extensive coding experience and Drupal expertise. A full release of XB is expected in the fall of 2025 and will be the main feature in Drupal CMS 2.0.

2025 will also bring new tracks to Drupal CMS as work wraps up on existing tracks.

Project Browser

Work will continue on the Project Browser initiative as an official Drupal CMS track. The tool continues to evolve to support recipe application and re-application, module discovery, and as a gateway to automatic updates with the eventual goal of adding Project Browser to the core.

Workspaces as content moderation

Workspaces is a module in Drupal core that allows for staging content changes beyond simple Draft <> Published workflows. As page creation evolves with Experience Builder, making changes to any number of different components and pages at once will be possible, and those changes will be able to be published en masse, providing next-level content staging.

Telemetry

Telemetry is a process of collecting information about how software acts in the real world and how users interact with it. Besides collecting module usage information, Drupal has never previously collected data about how users interact with Drupal. This is a new initiative where we aim to improve the product with actual data from users.

Migration

Migrating into Drupal’s structured data architecture has always been a developer-centric task. As more folks adopt Drupal and may want to migrate off their existing platforms, the track aims to simplify content importing into Drupal. AI-assisted migration demos have already been demonstrated using existing websites and even PDFs. Still, this track will look at all options for making migration to Drupal easier.

Tours

The Drupal Tour module, powered by the open-source Shepherd JavaScript library, provides users with tours through web content using tooltips. This track aims to provide user-facing documentation of the Drupal CMS administration area in an instructive and seamless manner to educate users about all the tools and possibilities.

Translation

Initially slated for the initial release of Drupal CMS, extending Drupal core’s multilingual capabilities to recipes and Drupal CMS is a big task that will expand its global audience. Since Drupal CMS is built on top of Drupal, users can manually configure all of Drupal’s multilingual tools. Having them preconfigured with improvements in translation tools and workflows will make Drupal CMS much easier to use.

Single Sign On (SSO)

Single sign-on, managing who can log into your CMS and what permissions they have in an external system, is a popular request for sites we build. Numerous platforms and services can be used, each with nuances and requirements. This track will aim to create easy-to-use solutions to aid organizations in user management.

A New Design System

Experience Builder will require a design system of easy-to-use components that site builders can adapt to their own organization’s styles and one that designers can adapt to their visions. Mediacurrent, an open-source product agency, has been selected to lead that track. Look for a preview at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025.

Contribution in Drupal CMS

Kanopi Studios is playing a key role in the development of Drupal CMS, sponsoring contributions first on the Recipes Initiative going back to 2022, and now being a top-tier agency committing time and resources to the development of Drupal CMS 1.0.

Engineering Manager Jim Birch serves as a Drupal Recipes Initiative Coordinator and a Drupal Core Subsystem Maintainer for Recipes and Default Content. These roles are vital because Recipes form the foundation of Drupal CMS, ensuring that preconfigured solutions are available for various website use cases. Recipes simplify the site-building process by providing modular, ready-to-use solutions that are easily customized to meet specific needs.

In addition to his work with Recipes, Jim is a Drupal CMS Lead for the SEO Track alongside John Doyle from Digital Polygon. Together, they oversee the integration of SEO best practices into Drupal CMS. This ensures that websites built using Drupal CMS are optimized for search engines out of the box.

Kanopi Studio’s involvement doesn’t stop there. Jim Birch is also a member of the Drupal CMS Advisory Council, which helps guide Drupal CMS’s strategic direction. The council bridges the Drupal CMS team, the Drupal Association, Drupal core, and the wider community.

Drupal CMS is a bold new chapter for Drupal!

This is an exciting development in the Drupal project that really speaks to those marketers and content creators who are looking for easier and better ways to share their content online. By combining Drupal core with pre-packaged recipes, Drupal CMS aims to make the web a nicer place.

Screengrab of the on-demand webinar from Jim Birch about Drupal Recipes and Starshot

Want to dig deeper into Recipes and Starshot? Check out this webinar by Kanopi’s Jim Birch called “Recipes. Starshot, and the Future of Drupal.” (47 minutes)

Algolia for Search

Posted on by allison

Algolia is a powerful search and discovery API for creating fast and relevant search experiences. Designed to optimize user interaction, Algolia enables teams to build and refine custom search functionalities. It offers features like instant search, autocomplete, faceted search, and typo tolerance, ensuring users find what they need quickly and accurately.

Why we like (and use) Algolia

There several compelling reasons why we use Algolia here at Kanopi:

Speed & performance. Algolia provides lightning-fast search capabilities, enhancing the user experience on our websites.

  • Developer’s perspective: Offloading the search functionality to Algolia instead of relying on the main site database significantly speeds up overall site performance. By handling search queries separately, the primary database experiences reduced load and faster response times, leading to a smoother and more efficient user experience.

Relevance. The advanced search algorithms ensure highly relevant search results, improving user satisfaction and engagement.

Query suggestions. Algolia’s query suggestions feature provides users with real-time search suggestions as they type, enhancing the search experience by predicting and displaying relevant queries. Also, developers or editors can easily rank, add and/or remove query suggestions as needed, ensuring the search interface remains intuitive and relevant.

Customization. Algolia’s flexible API allows us to tailor search functionalities to meet specific client needs and preferences.

  • Developer’s perspective: Being able to easily customize the frontend to meet design and client expectations is a wonderful thing! Algolia’s ease of customization stands out, thanks to its extensive documentation and examples for adding search functionalities to a site.
  • Algolia covers all popular JavaScript frameworks, such as React, Vue, Angular, as well as iOS, Android, and vanilla JavaScript. This comprehensive support empowers frontend developers to effortlessly integrate and customize search interfaces to meet specific client requirements.

Scalability. As our clients grow, Algolia scales effortlessly, handling increasing volumes of data and traffic without compromising on performance.

Ease of integration. Algolia integrates seamlessly with various platforms and technologies, including Drupal, making it a perfect fit for our technical stack.

We like Algolia so much, we’re parters with them.

How we use Algolia

We use Algolia to enhance the search capabilities on our clients’ websites. Here’s a brief overview of our approach:

Search implementation. We integrate Algolia’s search API into the client’s CMS, customizing the search interface to match the website’s design and user needs.

  • Developer’s perspective: The Search API Algolia module for Drupal allows us to easily set up content for Algolia to build a search index using a method familiar to anyone who’s ever worked with the Drupal Search API. 

However, Developers aren’t limited to this one Drupal module for sending data to Algolia. There are actually many ways to push and pull data to Algolia’s service. Developers can also create custom modules to meet specific client search needs if the Search API module doesn’t meet their requirements. The flexibility with which Algolia ingests data enables developers to curate the data before passing it to Algolia, ensuring a tailored and optimized search experience.

Indexing content. We set up and configure indexing rules to ensure all relevant content is searchable. This includes real-time indexing for dynamic content updates.

  • Developer’s perspective: When using the Drupal Algolia Search API module, any new, updated, or deleted content is immediately pushed to Algolia and can be searched almost instantly. This seamless integration makes indexing both new and existing content easy and efficient.

Search optimization. We fine-tune Algolia’s search settings to prioritize the most relevant results and ensure a seamless user experience.

Analytics and refinement. Using Algolia’s built-in analytics, we can continuously monitor search performance and user behavior, making data-driven adjustments to enhance search accuracy and effectiveness.

Using one of our clients — the Exploratorium — as an example, here are images showing examples of Exploratorium’s Algolia Analytics metrics:

A chart showing the Algolia interface
Several charts demonstrating Algolia's analytics interface


Examples of Algolia in action with Exploratorium

Renowned San Francisco public learning laboratory the Exploratorium needed to revamp their search experience. We used Algolia to create an intuitive, responsive search interface that caters to diverse visitor needs. The improved search functionality has significantly boosted user engagement, search relevancy, and satisfaction. (See the full case study for Exploratorium here.)

Specifically, we used Algolia’s Autocomplete and InstantSearch.js UI libraries:

Example of Algolia Autocomplete library

We integrated the Autocomplete library into the header, providing users with real-time suggestions as they type into the input field. This autocomplete feature predicts and displays full terms or results, forming the core of the autocomplete experience.

An example of Algolia's autocomplete library using the back-end of the Exploratorium website while searching for the term "eclipse"

Example of Algolia InstantSearch.js

InstantSearch.js provides faceted search results.

A screengrab of the back-end of the Exploratorium website showing the InstantSearch interface

Choosing a Content Management System: Proprietary vs. Open Source

Posted on by allison

Let’s say your organization needs a new website. You meet with your team to discuss the best way forward. Some are touting the benefits of an open-source content management system (CMS) like Drupal or WordPress. Meanwhile, others argue that a proprietary system is the right way to go. But you’re the one who has to make the final call. So, which one will it be? In this post, we’ll look at open source vs. proprietary CMS and what each one has to offer.

If you know anything about us, you already know that we strongly prefer open source for a long list of reasons. We’ll get into those reasons below, but we’ll also give proprietary systems a fair shake — promise. Hopefully, the more you know about each option, it will be clear why we’ve built our organization around open source right from day one.

What is a proprietary CMS?

A proprietary CMS is a software platform owned and controlled by a company. Its users need to purchase licenses or subscriptions for access and updates. It typically offers limited customization compared to open-source CMS, with restricted access to the source code.

Organizations that choose the proprietary route usually cite a few main reasons:

  • Dedicated Support: Proprietary CMS platforms typically have dedicated customer support, offering immediate help with technical issues, bugs, and updates.
  • (Perceived) Security: With a closed-source environment, clients sometimes have the perception that proprietary CMS platforms have fewer vulnerabilities, since the code is not accessible to the public. The vendor manages security updates and patches. (Below, I’ll get into why this is more about perception than reality.)
  • Tailored Solutions: Proprietary CMS vendors may offer customized solutions, features, or integrations to meet specific business needs within a particular industry.
  • Legacy: In many cases, the client is already deeply invested in other proprietary platforms/software from a provider (their suite of office applications for example), so they’ll also use their CMS for the sake of convenience and continuity. There’s a pretty large company whose name starts with ‘M’ that relies heavily on this in their sales pitch.

These benefits, however, often come with trade-offs, such as higher costs and limited flexibility compared to open-source CMS options.

So, what about open source?

Open-source CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal account for a majority of websites on the internet. WordPress alone powers approximately 62.7% of all sites. They’re also usually more cost-effective to maintain in the long run compared to proprietary CMS platforms for a number of reasons:

  • For Starters, They’re Free: Open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal are free to use, eliminating the need for expensive licensing fees associated with proprietary software.
  • No Vendor Lock-In:  With a proprietary CMS, the vendor retains ownership of the code, limiting your control and flexibility. With an open-source CMS, clients own and control the code, meaning full customization and portability is yours. Using open-source software also means you’re not dependent on a single company for updates, support, or hosting. 
  • Flexibility and Customization: Drupal and WordPress offer extensive customization options with thousands of themes, plugins, and modules; users can tailor their websites to meet their needs without being locked into vendor restrictions.
  • Community Support: Open-source platforms have large, active communities of developers and users who contribute to forums, create plugins/modules, and more. This collective knowledge base can provide faster solutions and innovations.
  • Continuous Improvement: Open-source platforms are regularly updated with security patches, new features, and enhancements contributed by the community, making them more dynamic than proprietary software, which might have slower release cycles.
  • Ownership and Control Is All Yours: With open-source software, you have full ownership and control over your website, including the ability to host it anywhere and modify the underlying code. Proprietary systems may impose hosting restrictions and limit access to the source code.
  • Security and Transparency: Open-source platforms are generally considered to be more secure because the code is publicly available for scrutiny, allowing security experts to identify and patch vulnerabilities quickly. Proprietary systems may be more opaque, making it harder to spot and fix security issues. So while it’s true that many more people have access to open-source code, this results in greater platform security — despite what many proprietary system providers (and their sales teams) would like you to believe.
  • Scalability: Open-source platforms like Drupal are highly scalable, making them suitable for both small websites and large enterprise-level applications, whereas proprietary solutions may have limitations or require expensive upgrades to scale effectively.
  • Integration Capabilities: Drupal and WordPress are known for their ability to integrate with a wide range of third-party tools, APIs, and systems, providing more flexibility in building feature-rich websites — while proprietary platforms may restrict integrations or charge extra for them.
  • Innovation: Open-source platforms often lead in innovation, as developers from all over the world can contribute new ideas and functionalities, fostering a continuous flow of creativity and technical advancement.

It’s your call. 

So, returning to our opening paragraph scenario, it’s your call; you have proponents in your organization on each side of the coin. Which do you choose? Do you listen to those team members clamoring for a proprietary CMS and its benefits? Or do you choose the flexibility and efficiency of an open-source platform?

Not that we would openly encourage you to choose one over the other. Good heavens, no! However, if you should decide to go with an open-source CMS — specifically Drupal or WordPress — we have a little motto here at Kanopi: 

Never build alone.

Since 2010, we’ve been building websites that meet our clients’ unique needs, whether designing and developing from the ground up or enhancing existing sites with upgrades and CMS migrations. Our approach combines UX research, discovery, and visual design to create a user-friendly digital experience, followed by expert development to bring your vision to life. Even after launch, we provide ongoing support to ensure your site continues to perform at its best. With us as your partner, even the staunchest proprietary fans will be tipping their hats to you.

Have a look at some of our favorite Drupal and WordPress projects.