Drupal CMS: a New Version of Drupal Aimed at Marketers and Website Builders

January 29, 2025

On January 15th, Drupal CMS was released. This is a distribution of Drupal aimed at marketers and website builders.

Drupal CMS will check all the checkboxes for data privacy, security, and accessibility compliance;
  • Automatic security updates
  • Data privacy protection to support GDPR, CCPA, cookie consent
  • Built-in tools to make your website fully multilingual
  • Industry-leading accessibility

Automatic security updates are not possible in Drupal 10, but are coming in Drupal 11, and already available in Drupal CMS. Combined with the user-friendly editor and the privacy, multilingual, and accessibility options, Drupal CMS is a solid choice for less complex sites, and makes it more of a one-to-one comparison with WordPress. It allows less technical site owners to stand up a Drupal site much faster than with the standard Drupal release.

Themes

Bear in mind that whether using Drupal CMS or the Drupal 10/11+ release, you will still need a Drupal theme. There are some good free base themes out there, including Bootstrap, Radix and Adaptive Theme. With a base theme you will need to create a child theme (just as in WordPress), and these base themes offer different ways of doing that. Some offer tools to generate child themes via the UI, but creating child themes and customizing them will typically require web development skills.

Alternatively, you could try some of the free themes, such as Creative Responsive Theme, Civic Theme, or Creative & Innovative Theme. There are also some free(mium) themes out there.

We never use the free(mium) themes on sites we build. We use either a good base theme such as Bootstrap, or we build a custom theme.

Customization and Feature Enhancements

Most sites add features over time. This is where Drupal modules come in. If you build a site using Drupal CMS, you can add modules to add functionality to your site, but you will need to involve (or be) a developer to do so. Drupal CMS is great for small to medium sites without super complex needs, but as soon as you need to add modules, customize themes, or otherwise deviate from the initial Drupal CMS recipe, you will likely need a developer. We can help!

Drupal CMS vs. WordPress

Drupal CMS allows Drupal to compete head to head with WordPress. In fact, it took many lessons from WordPress. It offers an easy starting point for a Drupal site, with the option to add complexity as the site grows.

Drupal offers much more robust features out of the box compared to WordPress (think Views, APIs, integrations, and so on), whereas a WordPress site would have to add many third-party plugins to achieve the same thing.

WordPress’s plugin ecosystem is its biggest asset, but is also problematic in that one plugin can interfere with another, leading to difficulty troubleshooting issues. Very often, the first debugging step people are asked to perform is to disable all other plugins but the one being debugged. That’s a pain. Drupal avoids those issues, because it uses proper namespacing, something WordPress does not enforce; it is left to plugin developers.

Conclusions

Drupal CMS is worth serious consideration for anyone starting a new small to medium size site, in particular if there is a reasonable chance the site will add more complex features in the near term.