Open-source innovation: Drupal Recipes and the upcoming Drupal CMS

In June 2024, Drupal 10.3 introduced an exciting feature that has been transformative for developers like us at 1xINTERNET. The integration of Drupal Recipes as the primary mechanism for shipping configurations has unlocked new possibilities for creating and reusing arbitrary configurations. This makes it an ideal fit for Drupal’s versatile web framework.

Why Drupal Recipes are perfect for Drupal

As Drupal continues to evolve, the introduction of Recipes has proven invaluable. Drupal is well-known as a robust open-source platform that powers everything from small-scale projects like brand websites and landing pages to large-scale enterprise solutions such as e-commerce platforms, corporate websites, full-featured DXP (Digital Experience Platform) solutions, customer portals, and intranets. With Drupal Recipes, developers can now ship preconfigured setups that meet the diverse needs of all these use cases, allowing them to focus on innovation rather than recreating common functionality.

One of the key strengths of Recipes is the collaborative potential they unlock. Developers can build on existing recipes, allowing the community to refine and improve them over time, resulting in more reliable and optimised solutions. This reduces duplication of effort and ensures that each recipe represents the best practices for solving common challenges. By applying various Recipes together, Drupal users can achieve tailored solutions while benefiting from highly tested, reliable code, reducing the need for custom development and lowering maintenance costs. The shared open-source nature of Drupal Recipes further distributes the cost of ongoing improvements, making this a powerful proposition for both developers and end users.

A new era for Drupal: Drupal CMS

Over the past two decades, Drupal has established itself as a leader in enterprise-grade open-source CMS (Content Management System) and DXP solutions, in part due to its superior technological architecture. Now, with the introduction of Recipes, Drupal has taken another leap forward with the upcoming Drupal CMS. This innovation aims to create a feature-rich, flexible, and easy-to-use CMS product that empowers both site owners and agencies.

At its core, Drupal CMS is designed to help projects start small while providing a powerful, scalable foundation for future growth. It balances Drupal’s hallmark flexibility with enterprise readiness, making it an ideal choice for organisations that need to adapt as their digital requirements evolve. Drupal CMS will offer a solid foundation for both small and ambitious web projects, all while remaining open-source and license-free. The first version is set to launch in January 2025, and it’s shaping up to be a game changer for the CMS landscape.

1xINTERNET's involvement in Drupal CMS

At 1xINTERNET, we've always believed in the power of preconfigured solutions, and we’ve contributed to many Drupal distributions over the years. Internally, we’ve been using pre-packaged configurations to streamline our development processes, ensuring we focus on innovation rather than spending time rebuilding common functionalities.

Given our experience with pre-configured solutions, we were eager to contribute to the development of Drupal CMS. Our involvement is focused on providing advanced search functionality. While Drupal’s Search API module family is already a powerful toolset, we took the leadership for building a Drupal Recipe that enables developers to start with a well-crafted, reusable search solution. This can save time and ensure compatibility for future updates. The current version of the search Recipe in Drupal CMS can be tested following this issue link. Below is a screen recording of the current status.

Our experience with Recipes at 1xINTERNET

For years, 1xINTERNET has built and relied upon our own CMS/DXP base system (a standard installation) on top of Drupal, which we use as the foundation for all our projects. This system consists of nearly 100 distinct, self-contained packages that cover the standard configurations most projects need, such as:

Over the past several months, we successfully converted all of these pre-configured functionalities into Drupal Recipes. Now, we can set up a fully configured Drupal installation without relying on a profile or additional modules that contain only configuration code. This shift has made maintaining and updating projects much faster. By eliminating the need to update or uninstall unnecessary modules, we also avoid compatibility issues and data loss during project updates.

The results of these efforts speak for themselves. We’ve fully replaced our old approach with Drupal Recipes, and we’re now able to deliver powerful, streamlined Drupal solutions that are easier to extend and scale. To see an example of a fully configured Drupal solution based on Recipes, check out the video below or try it out.

Try Drupal

Drupal’s open-source nature and its community-driven development have always made it a standout platform for building flexible, scalable digital solutions. The introduction of Drupal Recipes has only further strengthened its position. At 1xINTERNET, we’re excited to be part of this journey, contributing where we can and continuing to learn from the larger Drupal community. As we look ahead to the release of Drupal CMS in 2025, we’re eager to see how these innovations will benefit the entire ecosystem.