Drupal Starshot: improving the out of the box experience

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Written by
SparkFabrik Team

Drupal

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!"

Drupal has been around for well over five years, and its mission has changed significantly during that time. Over the years, there has been discussion about whether Drupal should be a framework, then a product, then a distribution, then a framework again, and so on.

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and some community members proposed a new solution at the DrupalCon North America this spring: Drupal should be both a framework for developers and a product for users who want to use it in a no-code way.

While the Drupal core will stay available for developers to build complex websites on, a new flavor of the system will allow users to install, configure, extend, and personalize Drupal without leaving the browser. The internal name of the project is Starshot, recalling the urgency and difficulty of the Apollo project, which finally brought humanity to the Moon.

The vision behind Drupal Starshot

Starshot (or "Drupal CMS", as it will probably be called once completed) is based on a new set of features already committed to the beta version for Drupal 10 and Drupal 11, like the ability to import content and capabilities from "recipes". A recipe is a folder containing content, configurations, and instructions on installing them in a running Drupal website. More than one recipe can be enabled at any time; in the future, a recipe could be uninstalled too.

It seems like the “old” distribution concept, but it’s way better. You can now install Drupal without an installation profile (basically without any feature) and then start to compose the capabilities you need, downloading them through the browser.

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Starshot will basically be the Drupal core plus a set of pre-packaged recipes, allowing users to download new ones using a project browser. It will include the best modules available and ready to be used.

Why Starshot is a Game Changer

Starshot aims to bring back to Drupal all the hobbyists and developers who had difficulties with the changes made from Drupal 8 onwards. At that time, many people switched to other platforms, like WordPress, Wix, or Shopify. We must convince them that an owned website is better than spreading personal information through different closed-source social platforms. We need to fully embrace the Open Web Manifesto, which will “actively shape a safer and inclusive web”, as Dries says.

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Key features of Drupal Starshot

Some of the features that will be part of Starshot will be:

Recipes: a new system in Core able to package contents and configurations
Default content: to easily provide ready-to-be-used content packaged within a recipe
Experience Builder: Layout Builder + Paragraphs + Single Directory Component = 🔥
Project Browser: to browse and download modules and recipes
Automatic Updates: to keep modules, recipes, and Core up to date

Call for contributors

Like many other Drupal agencies, SparkFabrik has developed its internal version of Drupal based on a set of contrib modules and custom code. We plan to join the community to work on Starshot and to provide our expertise in delivering Drupal as a product.

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Useful resources about Drupal Starshot