Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS is a ready-to-use website platform that the Drupal community releases on drupal.org as the project cms. It adds an installer, site templates, preconfigured features and a visual page builder to Drupal core. Release 2.2.7 of 23 October 2026 requires Drupal core ^11.4: 11.4 or a later 11.x release.

How Drupal CMS works

Drupal CMS is a Composer project. Its composer.json requires drupal/core-recommended at ^11.4, so it always installs a Drupal 11 core. It also requires drupal/core-recipe-unpack, and its installer paths put packages of type drupal-recipe, the recipes, in a recipes folder.

The installer is an install profile named drupal_cms_installer. You pick a site template, the installer applies it, and the profile is meant to be used once. Its project page calls it an internal part of Drupal CMS with no backward-compatibility promise. Its info file carries the distribution key with the name Drupal CMS, so the installer skips the profile choice. In installer terms, that makes Drupal CMS a distribution.

A site template is a recipe. The 2.0.0 release notes describe the Byte and Starter templates, and the 2.1.0 release notes mention free and premium templates. The shared foundation is the Drupal CMS Basics project. On 26 October 2026 its page lists two roles, four media types and 54 modules and themes, among them Automatic Updates, Project Browser, Drupal Canvas, the Gin admin theme, Pathauto and Scheduler.

Since 2.0.0 (28 January 2026), Drupal Canvas is the default editing experience, with the Mercury component library for cards, heroes, menus and accordions. The drupal.org Drupal CMS initiative page lists Project Browser, Recipes, Automatic Updates and Drupal Canvas among its initiatives (checked 26 October 2026).

Example

The README recommends DDEV for running Drupal CMS locally: install DDEV, open a terminal in the project folder and run ddev launch. The installer opens in the browser and asks you to choose a site template. After installation, go to Extend › Recommended (admin/modules/browse/recommended) and click Install next to an add-on. Drupal CMS installs the modules and applies preconfigured settings. It may ask for an API key or identifier, and it may add demo content.

Common mistakes

• Treating a trial as a site. The Drupal CMS launcher creates a temporary trial site. Use DDEV or a hosting provider for a real project.
• Expecting the update screen to do everything. The documentation says the update UI does not work on all hosting providers. For core it supports patch updates only; minor and major versions need Composer, and the update cannot be reversed. Make a backup first.
• Editing the installer profile. Its project page says to fork it under a new name if you need to customize it.

For marketing and content teams

You get a site that already has a Content editor role, SEO modules (Metatag, Simple XML Sitemap, Real-time SEO for Drupal) and a consent manager (Klaro), all listed in the Drupal CMS Basics project. Your developer still needs to choose the site template and the hosting. After installation, the site is a standard Drupal site: the project page says you update its modules and themes like any other Drupal site, not Drupal CMS itself.

With DXPR

DXPR also publishes DXPR CMS. Its DXPR CMS page describes it as a distribution that brings Drupal, the DXPR Builder page builder and DXPR Theme together, curated and maintained by DXPR.

Sources

• Drupal.org: Drupal CMS project page
• Drupal CMS 2.2.7 release notes
• Drupal CMS 2.0.0 release notes
• Drupal CMS 2.2.7 composer.json
• Drupal CMS 2.2.7 README
• Drupal.org: Drupal CMS Basics project page
• Drupal.org: Drupal CMS Installer project page
• Drupal CMS documentation: Updating Drupal
• Drupal CMS documentation: Updating Drupal core
• Drupal CMS documentation: Installation options
• Drupal CMS documentation: Set up Drupal CMS
• Drupal CMS documentation: Recommended add-ons
• Drupal.org: Drupal CMS initiative