One of the world’s most widely used publishing systems, Drupal, is releasing a new, highly accessible version on January 15, 2025 that is imperceptibly packed with AI.
The goal of Drupal CMS, as project Starshot will formally be called, is to become ‘the gold standard among no-code site builders’, Drupal inventor Dries Buytaert explained yesterday during a conference in Barcelona.
That’s jargon for: anyone without any technical knowledge should be able to create and manage a fully functional website in no time. Companies no longer need to use specialist agencies and, conversely, these agencies can serve their customers with much shorter lead times.
Buytaert outlined last spring: “We are in a race with competitors like WordPress, Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager. An implementation must be accessible even for junior developers. Up until now, we have focused solely on senior developers. A new group is joining us.”
The digital editorial system, invented in Belgium, is one of the three largest open source CMSs in the world (5%), after WordPress (60% market share) and Joomla (7%).
The new CMS will be released on Drupal’s 24th birthday, which is January 15, 2025. Version 2.0 is scheduled for release later that year.
Unique to the software is the deep integration of AI functionalities. There is an AI chat on all pages of the CMS dashboard. The user can give commands such as: ‘Insert an image gallery with dimensions of at least 1920×1080’, or ‘I want to create categories for the twenty tastiest cheeses’. An AI first finds out which ones and then adds these categories. Alt tags for photography can also be generated with AI. No manual work is required for that.
Any relevant CMS feature can be connected to an AI provider via an API:
Buytaert: “Drupal is open source. We need to help the community set the standard, because I am convinced that others will follow our example. We always need a human in the loop, the AIs need to be transparent and LLMs need to be swappable.” In other words: Users need to be able to choose which model best suits their situation.
“I foresee that a site could have dozens or hundreds of AI agents building a site in the future.”
Drupal users include Nestlé, RTL Nieuws, Victim Support Netherlands, many municipalities, the European Commission, NASA, Tesla and Pfizer.
Source: www.emerce.nl
