Drupal 11 Release Date Arrived: Why This Upgrade Takes CMS to Whole New Level
In our recent article on Drupal 7 EOL (end of life), we mentioned the CMS’s declining popularity and the possible reasons behind it. We speculated that Drupal was falling out of fashion due to its high complexity and steep learning curve, giving it a reputation as an “enterprise-level CMS.” This, in our opinion, drove away owners of startups and small businesses seeking more user-friendly and accessible solutions.
Turns out, it wasn’t speculation after all.
The Drupal community seems to attribute the decline to the same reasons, as their Drupal 11 release and the introduction of the Drupal Starshot initiative address the very issue we’ve just mentioned. The team is currently working on a myriad of features and improvements to “enable people without Drupal experience to easily create Drupal sites.”
That’s one of the biggest changes in Drupal’s 23-year history, and as a leading provider of Drupal consulting services, we couldn’t ignore the release of Drupal 11. In the following paragraphs, we explore Drupal’s efforts to transition from an “enterprise CMS” to a “CMS for everyone.” We’ll discuss the crucial upcoming improvements that will make the content management system more user-friendly and can potentially transform its perception.
Let’s dive right in.
Drupal Recipes: New Feature for Streamlined Website Configuration
Recipes is a new CMS feature supported in the latest versions of Drupal that helps users jumpstart their websites. Added to Drupal core in Drupal 10.3.0, Recipes are templates to which we can add a set of predefined configurations (user roles, content types, and the like) and quickly apply them to our websites. We can create our own Recipes or utilize ones created by others.
This feature alone saves hours of manual work. And if you’ve ever configured Drupal websites, you know how tedious and time-consuming this process can be:
1. You start with a barebones installation of Drupal and add the modules you require with specific configurations to them.
2. You select one of the installation profiles and disable or tweak the settings you don’t need after the installation.
3. Additionally, you configure a dozen or so contributed modules to meet your specific needs.
The configuration takes from two to five hours. In case you have several sites, you have to repeat the process with each one of them. To complicate things even further, once you select a specific installation profile, you are stuck with it and can’t easily change it.
