Starshot and Experience Builder

Last week, I attended DrupalCon Portland 2024, and, like many others, I was swept up in the excitement of the Starshot announcement. 

Starshot

This is a new concept that accelerates Drupal innovation by providing recipes or templates of best-practice features and configurations when creating a new Drupal site. It’s a separate product built on top of Drupal Core and has the working title “Drupal CMS”.

For years, we’ve pondered the question, “Is Drupal a product or a framework?” The answer has always been “both.” However, we can now clearly distinguish between the two.

We’re fully committed to the vision of bringing Drupal to new audiences by offering a straightforward way to create new Drupal sites using best-practice contributed modules and configuration. Combining Recipes with Project Browser, Automated Updates, and the new Experience Builder initiative will demonstrate Drupal’s full potential for product evaluators.

Releases for Drupal CMS will not be tied to Drupal Core, allowing it to innovate rapidly and evolve as contributed module updates and new best practices emerge. Drupal Core can simultaneously focus on maintaining quality and stability.

Experience Builder

Experience Builder is an ambitious initiative to reinvent how we build pages (experiences) in Drupal.  Core committer Lauri Eskola undertook an extensive review of our own tools (Layout Builder, Paragraphs) and research into competing products to find a model that would best combine innovative user interface design with Drupal’s strengths in structured data.

Our team is in a strong and unique position to meaningfully contribute to the Experience Builder initiative. We have successfully delivered the Pitchburgh competition winner Decoupled Layout Builder prototype. We also provided numerous contributions to Layout Builder in core and contributed modules.

Experience Builder will become our primary contribution focus for the short and medium term, so watch this space.

We hope you are as excited as we are about the future of Drupal. We’re just getting started!