Drupal in 2025: State of the Platform

The New Experience Initiative

For most of its history, Drupal has been the professional's CMS — powerful, flexible, and notoriously difficult to get started with. DrupalCon 2024 signalled a deliberate shift: the project is investing heavily in making Drupal accessible to site builders who don't have a developer on retainer.

The three pillars of this effort are Automatic Updates, Project Browser, and Recipes.

Automatic Updates

Drupal has historically required a developer (or at minimum, Composer knowledge) to apply security updates. Automatic Updates, now shipping as a stable contributed module and heading toward core inclusion, changes this entirely.

The module handles Composer-based updates in the background, with a staged update process that tests compatibility before applying changes to production. For the thousands of Drupal sites that have fallen behind on security releases simply because no one remembered to run composer update, this is significant.

Project Browser

Installing a module in Drupal has always required leaving the admin UI, going to drupal.org, downloading a package, and running Composer. Project Browser puts a searchable module directory directly inside the Drupal admin, with one-click installation.

Combined with Automatic Updates, this brings Drupal's admin experience significantly closer to WordPress and Craft CMS in terms of ease of use — without sacrificing the underlying power of the Composer-based dependency system.

Recipes: Composable Site Configurations

Recipes are perhaps the most architecturally interesting addition to Drupal in years. A Recipe is a distributable, reusable bundle of configuration — content types, views, workflows, permissions — that can be applied to a Drupal site with a single command:

drush recipe path/to/recipe

Unlike Distributions (which are essentially full site templates that fork your codebase), Recipes are composable. You can apply a "Blog" recipe, then an "Events" recipe, then a "Media Library" recipe, combining them on a single site without conflict.

This has huge implications for agency work: standard client configurations — editorial workflows, media handling, multilingual setups — can be packaged as Recipes and applied in minutes instead of hours.

Drupal CMS

Building on top of Recipes, the Drupal Association launched Drupal CMS — a curated distribution that ships with a set of opinionated Recipes for common use cases. It's positioned as the "easy on-ramp" version of Drupal, comparable to WordPress.com or Squarespace in terms of initial accessibility, but with the full power of Drupal underneath.

Looking Ahead

Drupal 11.1 and 11.2 are continuing this trajectory with deeper AI integrations, more Recipes in core, and performance improvements driven by the switch to Symfony 7's HTTP client. The platform is in a genuinely exciting phase — not just maintaining relevance, but actively expanding what a CMS can do.