Dashi Brings Umami's Food Magazine Demo to Drupal CMS

The Dashi site template brings the recipes and articles from Drupal's Umami demonstration profile into Drupal CMS. Gábor Hojtsy, principal community product manager at Acquia, released Dashi 1.0.0 on 25 September 2026 as a multilingual food magazine template with content in English and Spanish and pages built using Drupal Canvas.

Dashi carries Umami's content into Drupal CMS's newer site-building tools, including recipes, site templates and editable Canvas layouts. It also replaces Umami as the one-click demonstration on simplytest.me. The change gives Drupal evaluators a way to explore the multilingual and visual editing features of Drupal CMS without starting from an empty installation.

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, demonstrated Dashi during his DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 on 29 September 2026. The demonstration formed part of his presentation of Drupal CMS 2.2's multilingual capabilities. Gábor subsequently explained the project and its development in a blog post published on 6 October 2026.

Dashi Rebuilds Umami Using Drupal CMS Site Templates

Dashi is distributed as a site template, which uses a Drupal recipe to configure a starting website. It retains Umami's fictional food magazine concept and moves its content into the Drupal CMS site-template architecture. Gábor explained that the name Dashi was chosen partly because several existing Drupal projects already use Umami. Dashi is a Japanese broth traditionally made using kombu and bonito, ingredients associated with the umami flavour.

The template provides two content types: recipes and articles. Recipes include ingredients, preparation and cooking times, servings, difficulty levels and categories. A local installation tested by The DropTimes on 29 October 2026 created ten recipes and eight articles, each available in English and Spanish, alongside five Canvas pages. The demo also includes Umami's editor accounts, which the project's README states are created without passwords so administrators can configure them.

Dashi's page layouts, headers and footers use Drupal Canvas components that can be edited directly. Translation is handled through the Canvas Translate module, which provides translation controls inside the page editor. The template also includes search and RSS feeds, while its visual theme is derived from the Mercury design system.

Canvas Translate supports optional AI-assisted translation through Drupal's AI module, but Dashi does not install that additional module. AI translation therefore requires separate configuration. Canvas Translate also has no supported stable release at present; its latest listed release is version 1.0.0-beta1, published on 7 October 2026.

Drupal 12 Hides the Original Umami Installation Profile

Umami was introduced with Drupal 8.6.0 on 5 September 2018 as a demonstration profile and theme. Instead of placeholder content, the fictional magazine used recipes cooked, photographed and documented by Drupal contributors. It demonstrated Drupal's content modelling, listing, page composition and editorial capabilities through a working example.

Gábor opened a Drupal core issue in May 2025 proposing that Umami be deprecated, removed from core and made available as a contributed site template. The proposal argued that Drupal CMS could now demonstrate substantially more functionality than the original profile, particularly through modern site-building and page-editing tools.

Drupal 12 has taken an intermediate step rather than removing Umami entirely. According to change record #3587286, published on 28 April 2026, the demonstration profile is marked with hidden: true. This removes it from the normal installation choices while retaining it in Drupal core for performance testing. Umami remains available in earlier Drupal versions, including Drupal 11.

Simplytest.me Now Offers Dashi as a One-Click Demo

The online Drupal sandbox service simplytest.me now offers Dashi as a demonstration site that users can explore without registering or paying. Each sandbox is available for two hours. The service provides access to the site's English and Spanish content and its Drupal CMS editing interface.

Matt Glaman implemented the replacement through pull request #683, which was merged on 7 October 2026. The change replaces the former Umami one-click demo and redirects its existing demonstration address to Dashi. It also changes the service's tests and configuration to use the new template.

For local installation, Dashi 1.0.0 requires Drupal CMS 2 because it depends on version 2 of the Drupal CMS site-template base and search recipes. The Drupal CMS project template currently requires Drupal core 11.4 or later within the supported Drupal 11 release series. The project also requires DDEV 1.25.0 or later for the documented local development workflow.

Gábor recommends selecting Dashi directly through the Drupal CMS installer. It can alternatively be installed from the command line in an existing DDEV project. The DropTimes tested the following installation commands using Drupal CMS 2.2.7 on 29 October 2026:

ddev composer require drupal/dashi:1.0.0 -W
ddev drush site:install ../recipes/dashi -y

The core-recipe-unpack Composer plugin extracts Dashi's recipe files into recipes/dashi during installation. As a result, drupal/dashi does not remain listed in composer.json. The project's README also recommends running drush search-api:index after a command-line installation because the installer does not immediately index the demonstration content.

Two Compatibility Issues Affect Dashi 1.0.0

Testing also identified two compatibility issues affecting newly installed Dashi 1.0.0 sites. The first concerns the search interface. Drupal CMS changed its search recipe on 20 October 2026 to display search results through a block rather than a dedicated Views page. Dashi's existing header search configuration does not account for that change, causing an error in place of the expected search field.

Pamela Barone, who proposed and implemented the search recipe change, opened an issue in Dashi's repository to update the template. The issue calls for the template to provide a Canvas search page compatible with the revised search recipe.

The second issue affects Canvas Translate. A link value in Dashi's shared page configuration is stored as a string rather than the expected structured value. This causes errors in Canvas Translate's overview and prevents translation of shared header and footer regions, although individual Canvas pages can still be translated. Gábor committed a correction to the development branch on 7 October 2026, but the change has not yet been included in a new stable release.

Until an updated release resolves these problems, the original search recipe and the available configuration fix can be applied before installation. The search recipe's 2.2.0 release, published on 25 September 2026, predates the incompatible search change. The following sequence was tested by The DropTimes from the Drupal CMS project root on 29 October 2026:

ddev composer require drupal/dashi:1.0.0 -W
ddev composer require drupal/drupal_cms_search:2.2.0 -W
curl -sL https://git.drupalcode.org/project/dashi/-/commit/4780ec1b.diff | patch -p1 -d recipes/dashi
ddev drush site:install ../recipes/dashi -y
ddev drush search-api:index

In the reported test, this sequence restored the header search field and Canvas Translate functionality. The workaround applies to the specified versions and should be checked against newer releases before use. As of 30 October 2026, Dashi 1.0.0 remains the project's only listed stable release.

Gábor described Dashi 1.0 as "a starting point, not a finished meal" in his October blog post. He has invited contributors to report problems, suggest improvements and add recipes through the Dashi issue queue.

The DropTimes was a media sponsor of DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, where Acquia was also a sponsor.