Relaunching with Drupal CMS 2.0

15 January 2026

A screenshot of the Drupal Canvas user interface.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a content management system written in PHP and backed by MySQL/MariaDB (or PostgreSQL or SQLite). It is used by all kinds of sites, from nonprofit organizations such as Amnesty International to government agencies such as the United States General Services Administration. It is extremely flexible, which is also what can make it extremely cumbersome to get started with.

Drupal CMS

Last year, Drupal released Drupal CMS 1.0, the goal was to greatly simplify site-building through the use of "recipes" that can be applied to a website to quickly add new functionality. It is an incredible initiative and has made launching this site a breeze compared to setting up Drupal from scratch. Recently, they have released Drupal CMS 2.0, which revamps the recipe system and creates a brand new page building experience. The goal of the project is to create a system where anyone can get started using Drupal quickly without the hassle of setting up all the odds and ends by hand.

Drupal Canvas

With Drupal CMS 2.0 comes Drupal Canvas, a drag-and-drop page editor similar to what you'd see in WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc. It uses single directory components, otherwise called SBCs, create a fully-featured, what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) block interface.

Not a designer

Front-end development isn’t a strength. Because of that, keeping up with the latest CSS rules hasn’t been a priority and there’s a degree of self-consciousness around anything that gets put together. The site was launched using Olivero for Drupal CMS, a clunky but functional starter theme. Olivero was never meant to be used long-term, but digging into Drupal theming was never prioritized.

Drupal CMS 2.0 is launching with Mercury, a basic starter theme you're meant to fork as opposed to subtheme. In contrast to Stark, the blank-canvas theme that comes with Drupal, Mercury is an opinionated stack that uses Tailwind CSS and comes with a large number of predefined SBCs. With the help of tweakcn, a person is able to put together a color palette for use with the SBCs that makes theming a breeze. Without needing to plan every little aspect of the build process, you can get right to building your theme fast.

Why choose Drupal?

When relaunching this site was first considered, the first choice was WordPress. With past experience and a great out-of-the-box experience for a simple blog, it seemed like a good choice. However, while it is highly extensible, you'll be paying through the nose for extra features or building them yourself. This site is used to track other things on the backend and learning an entirely new plugin system to replicate functionality that can be easily done in Drupal seemed daunting.

Considerations

Version control
WordPress is not version-control friendly. You can use something like Bedrock, but there are WordPress security plugins that don't play nicely with it. Figuring out all the nuances of how that system works was not a good use of time.
Cost
WordPress is free and many plugins have free versions, but most plugins hide a large majority of their features behind a paywall. While people absolutely deserve to get paid for their work, spending hundreds of dollars per year on a website isn't in the budget. This is also why site builders like Squarespace or Wix weren't used.
Ownership
In the modern age of "you will own nothing and be happy", maintaining ownership of this site is important. Renting it from some site-building company that can raise rates at their leisure is not an appealing prospect.
Ease of use
Arguably this is where Drupal falls down the most. It is not always the most intuitive piece of software. As mentioned though, with SBCs, Canvas, and recipes, it's easier than ever to get started with Drupal.