Starshot to take Drupal to infinity and beyond

Will Starshot be the initiative that smashes down any entry barriers to Drupal? Drupal founder and project lead Dries Buytaert certainly thinks so, and is throwing all his weight behind the launch of the new, easy to use out of the box CMS. 

The new CMS will come with pre-packaged starter kits and a layout experience that will require no coding skills to get started. The plan is for people to get their websites up and running on Drupal quickly and easily. 

The Starshot initiative – a reference to the US moon landing of 1969 – is essentially Drupal’s response to other CMS’s simple site building tools. Drupal Starshot will enable ambitious website builders with no coding or Drupal experience to create a website easily with a selection of starter kits available for a variety of different types of websites – from portfolio showcases to blog sites and ecommerce, the new CMS should have most website builders covered.

Who is Starshot being developed for? 

The short answer is “everyone”. Drupal is a popular website among larger organisations that can employ the developers needed to manage their large and often-complicated websites. 

Drupal Starshot is designed to appeal to smaller enterprises or organisations, and open Drupal up to a large section of web creators who until now found the CMS too intimidating or technical to use. It will essentially bridge the gap between developers and those who want to create a website using Drupal but who aren’t developers. 

“Right now our interface is too hard to use,” Dries said about Starshot during his keynote talk at Drupalcon Portland in April 2024.  

“I believe Drupal’s success hinges on taking all of that power, these rich, powerful features that we’ve built over the years, and making them easy to use for everyone. Drupal’s moonshot is to make all that power easy to use out of the box, especially for junior developers and people who are new to Drupal, because we want everybody to explore the open web.”

How will Starshot do that? 

Starshot will rely on a new Experience Builder module to enable site builders to easily theme and build their entire website using only their browser. It will also allow content creators to create content and add it to any part of a page without relying on developers. 

“The functionality that we built isn’t going away….” said Dries. “The Drupal that we know and love will still be there. It will just be available to more people.” 

And this is what will set Drupal’s new CMS apart from other platforms in this market sector. Even though it’s easy to use, Starshot will give people access to Drupal’s rich library of features and resources. It will leverage Drupal’s strengths (like structured data and access controls) to achieve data and design consistency and allow users to allow users to manage content at a large scale. 

“One of the things I love most about Drupal is that it is an open source CMS, so officially it has been available for anyone to download and use free of charge. The challenge has been that it’s difficult to just get going with Drupal if you don’t have some technical know-how. But once we remove the barriers to entry we can truly say that Drupal has embraced open source, because anyone will be able to download and actually use it,” said Managing Director Stella Power. 

“Starshot is an example of Drupal’s flexibility and innovativeness. It will open up Drupal to a newer, broader, market. I’m thrilled about seeing new entrants to the Drupal market, and I believe Starshot will open the door to many people. Its potential is limitless, and I’m really excited to see where it takes Drupal.”