Drupal CMS Expected by 15 Jan, XB Further Away in 2025: A Quick and Dirty Summary of Driesnote

“I’m so proud of how far we have come and how fast. This transformation is an incredible collective effort involving everyone from core committers, Drupal Association staff, volunteers, and agency partners; together, we focused on iterating rapidly and focused more on user experience than ever before. we had some brave out-of-the-box thinking…”

Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of Drupal and the chief strategy officer of Acquia, concluded his 40^th State of the Drupal address with pride and reassurance. 

Watch the Driesnote here: 

Here is a quick and dirty summary on DriesNote:

Launch of Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS 1.0 is targeted to be launched on 15 January 2025, Drupal’s 25th birthday. The Starshot project is now four months old, and we have four more months to finish it. While Kennedy’s space program challenged the US to launch a man to the moon in eight years, Drupal Starshot is creating the CMS out of core in just eight months. But before that, we could see a release candidate out by December 11, 2024, during DrupalCon Singapore. 

Experience Builder (XB)

XB is transformational in its own way and will change Drupal’s course. We are witnessing the ‘React-ification’ of Drupal! What would have taken months to accomplish in the traditional Drupal way is now being done in days using React. It would attract more Javascript developers to the fold. However, it will not be complete when Drupal CMS is released. The launch date for XB will be somewhere in 2025. We could probably see the release of Drupal CMS 2.0 with the XB 1.0 release. Developers equivalent to 30 pax are working on XB, among which 20 are from Acquia alone. 

Starshot Project Strategy

In his address, Dries revisited the Starshot project strategy and insisted that Drupal CMS should be the gold standard for no-code website building. For those who haven’t heard of the project, “Drupal CMS is a version of Drupal optimised for non-developers,” he said. 

“By non-developers, we mean content creators, digital marketers, and site builders. Drupal CMS is built on top of Drupal Core. It is to complement what we do, not to replace what we do. We are not abandoning Drupal Core or the developers or enterprise users.” 

“We are starting to market Drupal CMS over Drupal Core. For the last 24 years, we have been promoting the Core. This is, so far, the boldest mission in 24 years. To succeed, it should be the largest collaborative effort in Drupal’s 24-year history.”

Drupal AI Policy

Dries pointed out his 3 convictions about AI. 

1. Drupal must embrace AI to stay relevant and fulfil our mission of helping site-builders. 
2. Drupal is ahead of others when it comes to using AI. 
3. We need to build AI the right way. We want to guide our users to use AI responsibly. We need to set the standard for how to use AI and how to use AI responsibly. “I do believe that others will learn from us.” 

He also rolled out a Responsible AI Policy: 

1. Always involve a human in the loop. A human needs to review the decisions AI make and be able to reverse those decisions if need be. 
2. Transparency is a must. We must be really clear about where AI is used. 
3. A site owner must be able to swap LLMs or, in other words, Drupal APIs must be agnostic to language models and should be able to use different LLMs as per the requirement, be it practical, ethical or industry-specific. 

Extent of AI Potential

Dries demonstrated what AI can do for site building. “AI is the new UI,” he remarked. 

He showcased AI editing content types (e.g. renaming event content type to wine tasting), setting up fields (e.g. adding an image field to the event content type), configuring fields using AI (e.g. allowing only High-res images to be uploaded to the field),  setting up taxonomies including content population (e.g. creating the top-20 wine regions in the world in a wine-tasting event content type), content creation (e.g. writing Alt-Text for images), etc. These were all possible by using AI agents. AI-assisted content migration was also displayed, wherein plain HTML documents from legacy websites can be scrapped and added to a Drupal site as a more structured HTML document. 

Dries was confident that AI agents would transform Drupal. Drupal API will interact with AI providers using AI agents. Dries welcomed community efforts to add more AI agents to each contributed module, making it easier to adopt and install a module on a site, even for a non-developer. 

Demo of Drupal CMS

Driesnote focused on what we have accomplished so far after announcing the starshot project at DrupalCon Portland. He showcased the new branding for Drupal.org, available on new.drupal.org. The newly built trial experience was also presented. Using web assembly, it works directly from the browser and removes longstanding barriers to Drupal adoption. A new and better installer for Drupal is ready. 

Drupal Recipes

Recipes bundle years of experience into repeatable, sharable solutions. It includes modules, content, configuration and documentation. During his keynote, Dries presented the events recipe and a part of the SEO recipe. Currently, 14 recipes are in the works. This primary set includes recipes for Events, SEO, Blog, Data Privacy, Basic Multilingual Content, Content Publishing workflow, Accessibility Tools, Media Management, Advanced Search, Analytics, Dashboard, Marketing, Contact Form and AI. 10 more tracks will likely be announced in the coming weeks. 

Another important update is that the Project Browser now supports Recipes. The core maintainers and the track leads must now finalise a package manager, which is essential for both the project browser and automatic updates. 

Fresh Documentation

Building a comprehensive manual was one of the most pressing needs for the Drupal ecosystem. A new partnership between the Drupal Association and Drupalize[.]me is now building modern documentation for Drupal CMS and Core. Some old, non-relevant, outdated documentation will be archived. 

Dries launched the “Adopt a Document” initiative during his speech. 30 sections have been identified to build essential documentation. Each section will have one dedicated page. Organisations could sponsor a page for $2400. Instead, their name and logo will appear prominently on the page and accrue contribution credits. This money goes directly to the DA. DA will then pay Drupalize[.]me to create and maintain professional documentation for one year. A part of the money will be retained by the DA and used to hire a full-time documentation lead. Interested parties can contact Lenny Moskalyk for sponsoring a page. It will be allotted on a first-come, first-served basis.