The dust has now settled since Dries Buytaert announced the Starshot Initiative in his Driesnote presentation at DrupalCon Portland 2024. In the presentation, Dries outlined a bold new future for the “Drupal CMS” where Drupal is shipped with a set of useful and common modules to provide an enhanced site-building experience for ambitious site builders.
Starshot is comprised of several components, all of which are designed to make Drupal easier to use:
- Drupal CMS: A set of useful contrib modules
- Project browser: A way to find useful modules
- Automatic updates: Easily update sites
- Recipes: Encapsulated configuration which can be added to sites
- Experience Builder: A new layout engine for building pages with layouts and Paragraphs.
- Single Directory Components: An agnostic way to define components.
The initiative can be seen as a way to re-engage site builders, the traditional heartland of the Drupal community and ecosystem. Moving the focus back to the site-building experience will shine a light on what Drupal has traditionally been good at - readily delivering value for complex sites through the user interface and configuration.
See the following articles from Gábor Hojtsy for more details on what’s coming, how it will work and what the benefits will be::
Drupal 11- Deep dive what's new, how to prepare, Gábor Hojtsy (@3:50)
15 reasons I am excited about Drupal's new Starshot initiative, Gábor Hojtsy
A leap in the right direction
The Starshot initiative is to be applauded for two main reasons.
Firstly, the Drupal leadership team has taken a proactive approach to reinvigorating the Drupal ecosystem by demonstrating a future vision. Drupal needs some fresh thinking so that it can thrive at the enterprise level as well as the mid-tier. Starshot provides a vision the whole community can get behind. This new initiative should reinvigorate Drupal adoption and lead new people to move into the ecosystem.
Secondly, this unifying vision has led to the community collaborating like never before - working together for a strong end goal. The community really has galvanised to improve Drupal and its standing relative to other CMSs. Drupal agencies are coming together to offer ideas, code and money to help build the vision. This is a step change for the community where previous efforts had been focussed on developing proprietary solutions on an open codebase. The effort is now going into building out the foundations together.
Will it make a difference?
Will it make a difference? Yes. The addition of important systems such as Experience Builder, Project Browser, Recipes and Automatic Updates will certainly strengthen Drupal's capabilities. If done well, there should be a resurgence in "site builder" based sites where there is joy in unlocking value through a no-code approach. This holds the promise of making Drupal fun again for site builders as hurdles for adoption will have been removed. This should bring new developers and clients into the Drupal ecosystem.
The changes will most likely have the biggest impact at the middle tier. Development agencies, experienced with building Drupal sites, will most likely have their own starting point distros, profiles and internal recipes to get things up and running quickly. The real winners will be users wanting an easy way to progress without having to invest in all the plumbing themselves.
Working with the tools
The tools will open up a way of working, however, there will be challenges in working out how to best build a site within the Recipe paradigm. One can think of Drupal in two ways. Horizontal aspects cut across structures (roles, workflows, paragraphs, layouts, common fields, taxonomy). Vertical aspects define the specific domain for the site (content types, special fields). The art of content modelling is to represent the domain and leverage the cross-cutting aspects as much as possible. It is an open question as to how this will be done with Recipes.
I would like to suggest that the most value will be delivered by incorporating horizontal aspects into a domain model. However, Recipes will install as a chunk of config. It may be hard to make that play nicely with already existing config. The community will likely need to work through the best way to arrange recipes so that they work nicely together.
My gut feeling is that Recipes will work in one of three ways:
- A site is effectively owned by a single "distro" with a very tight coupling between recipes.
- Fields will ship functionality, which can be added to content types as needed.
- Paragraphs also provide a way to add functionality in an encapsulated way.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves. The integration points of Fields and Paragraphs will need to work well with the existing content types. No doubt some common patterns will emerge for types and fields. Having a strong, flexible foundation should see community-contributed code work better together and more rapidly lead to the delivery of value to the community, the site builder, the end user and ultimately to site owners.
What Morpht is doing
Morpht is a Certified Drupal Supplier and a supporter of the Drupal Association. We believe that the Starshot initiative is important and will have an impact. We are also looking forward to the improvements coming with Experience Builder. We have therefore pledged financial support to the DA to help promote these initiatives.
We will be following along with the developments closely and updating the work we have done on Convivial , our open-source distribution. We will be adapting the work we have done to be compatible with the approach taken with Recipes. We look forward to seeing the patterns that emerge and then adapting what we have done with components, personalisation and recommendations with this new paradigm.
