Commerce Kickstart 5.0 Released as First Contributed Site Template for Drupal

Centarro has released Commerce Kickstart 5.0, marking a major milestone as the first contributed site template for Drupal. This update evolves the long-standing Drupal Commerce distribution into a modern, streamlined experience using Drupal’s new recipe and site template system, as introduced by Dries Buytaert during his DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 keynote.

Site templates combine recipes and themes to deliver complete, ready-to-use Drupal installations for specific use cases. Recipes—core to Drupal’s Starshot initiative—automate configuration, module installation, and content setup, empowering non-developers to build rich, functional websites without starting from scratch.

Commerce Kickstart 5.0 applies this model to eCommerce, providing an install-ready Drupal Commerce platform with multiple product types, faceted search, sample content, and improved Layout Builder integration—all wrapped in the Gin admin theme. Users can choose to include or skip the full demo store during installation, offering flexibility for both evaluators and production builds.

Jakub Piasecki, who led the effort within Centarro, helped convert the previous distribution into modular, reusable recipes. These include a base Commerce recipe and optional demo content recipes, enabling more granular control over the final site configuration. To aid support and maintainability, Centarro also developed the Recipe Tracker, a utility that logs which recipes were applied, when, and by whom—offering a helpful audit trail for project handoff and troubleshooting.

Installation has been significantly simplified through the use of the Recipe Installer Kit. Centarro has aligned the Kickstart installer with Drupal CMS’s streamlined setup flow, reducing custom code and improving maintainability. Developers can now spin up a new store quickly using Composer and DDEV-Local with just a few commands:

composer create-project centarro/commerce-kickstart-project kickstart
cd kickstart
ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web
ddev start

Looking ahead, Centarro plans to expand its recipe library and develop premium site templates focused on specific commerce verticals such as digital goods, premium content, and donations. These templates may be offered through a future marketplace, with the goal of making it easier than ever to launch high-quality, design-forward Drupal Commerce sites.

Commerce Kickstart 5.0 is available now. For install instructions and more details, visit centarro.io.