Top Highlights of Drupal in 2024: Our Experts Share Their Thoughts

Jan 13 2025

Drupal has been gaining momentum lately, with its innovation pace reaching an exciting new level. This past year has been full of especially remarkable developments — from cutting-edge features to even stronger community collaboration. These changes aren’t just shaping Drupal’s future — they’re also pushing the boundaries of what’s possible for Drupal websites.

Our team of Drupal experts has been deeply immersed in the latest innovations while collaborating closely with Drupal. From building websites for our clients to sponsoring and attending events, contributing to Drupal.org, and championing the platform, we've been at the forefront of its growth. Read on to discover how our top experts share their thoughts on the most important Drupal developments over the past year.

Best Drupal innovations through the eyes of our team’s experts

Recipes

Recipes are undoubtedly one of the most significant innovations in Drupal's history — not just in the previous year, but ever. We explored the latest demos of how Drupal Recipes work from Drupal creator Dries Buytaert’s keynote at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 and were impressed with the outstanding user-friendliness they offered.

Just one click is enough to get a full-fledged package of SEO features, a ready-to-go event section with a calendar, preconfigured multilingual functionality, or anything else you might need. The utmost flexibility of Recipes enables you to add them at any moment of your Drupal website’s lifecycle.

Our Software Architecture Director, Bryan Sharpe, talks about Recipes as the latest enhancement he finds the most impactful. He has an in-depth understanding of Recipes as a contributor to the Recipes Initiative, and our team is proud to support his valuable contribution.

Bryan Sharpe

Director, Software Architecture

“Drupal Recipes are a new and exciting development in Drupal (starting as of 10.3) because they offer a streamlined and more flexible way to build and configure Drupal websites:

Simplified Site Building: Recipes provide pre-defined configurations and components, making it easier and faster to set up common website features and functionalities. This reduces the time and effort needed for initial setup and configuration.
Flexibility: Unlike traditional Drupal distributions, Recipes are not monolithic. You can pick and choose the specific functionalities you need, allowing for greater customization and avoiding unnecessary bloat.
Reusability: Recipes can be easily shared and reused across different projects, promoting consistency and best practices. This also helps in quickly replicating specific site configurations.
Modern Approach: Recipes represent a shift towards a more modular and composable architecture in Drupal, aligning with modern web development practices.”

Creating events based on the Events Recipe: a demo from Driesnote

Drupal CMS (Starshot)

Earlier in this article, we rightfully called Recipes an incredibly user-friendly innovation. But there’s another groundbreaking project where Recipes take center stage and user-friendliness reaches an all-time high. In this project, non-technical users enjoy nearly limitless possibilities, achieving their goals with just a click of a button. They can even interact with AI through a simple dialogue window to make any adjustments they need.

This new project is officially called “Drupal CMS.” Built on top of Drupal core, it’s specifically designed and optimized for non-developers. It was introduced in 2024 under the codename “Starshot” and immediately grabbed the limelight. On January 15, 2025, it will launch its first ready-to-go version. Both Drupal CMS and “traditional” Drupal (referred to as Drupal core) will be available for all users to install.

Our President and CEO, Glenn Hilton, was particularly impressed with the potential of Drupal CMS. Read on to discover his thoughts on how this project is making an invaluable impact on the Drupal landscape.

Glenn Hilton

President/CEO

“I’m excited about the Drupal CMS initiative because it’s aimed at making Drupal easier and more accessible for everyone. It focuses on improving usability and adding features that simplify site-building, like "Recipes," which help automate setup and configuration. These recipes work for both new and existing sites, reducing the need for one-off, unsupported modules.

Building on Drupal’s strong core, this initiative encourages better-quality, more versatile extensions and speeds up how often updates and features are released. The goal is to make it easier for users to create well-optimized, feature-packed Drupal sites without the usual hassle.”

Drupal CMS’s strategy: a slide from Driesnote at DrupalCon Singapore 2024

The AI module

Drupal's progress is closely aligned with the latest technological advancements, with artificial intelligence (AI) standing out as a key innovation. AI integration is one of Drupal’s top priorities for the near future. Dries Buytaert demonstrated the latest mind-blowing AI capabilities where you could see AI adjusting website configurations, building pages, or creating webforms.

One of the notable advancements in this realm is that Drupal is getting a unified Drupal AI (Artificial Intelligence) module. It is the quintessence of several other existing AI integration modules. Marcus Johansson, the creator of the AI Interpolator module, Kevin Quillen, the creator of the OpenAI module, and other experts have teamed up to create this powerful tool together.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the AI module was featured by our Software Development Director, Alexander Kolesnikov, as the innovation that impressed him most. Explore Alexander’s insights into its standout features as he delves into specific submodules like AI Automators, AI Search, AI CKEditor, AI Translate, and AI Content.

Alexander Kolesnikov

Director, Software Development

“Throughout 2024, the release of the Drupal AI module has been one of the most groundbreaking innovations, seamlessly bringing Artificial Intelligence capabilities to Drupal sites. Its abstraction layer simplifies AI integration, making it accessible for site builders, developers, and administrators alike.

With AI Automators and the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) module, the possibilities for creating workflows are practically limitless. These tools allow users to populate fields using AI generation or enhance functionality with web scraping and OCR file extraction, providing a solid foundation for building complex AI-driven applications.

Similarly, AI Search transforms content discovery by introducing semantic search capabilities. Developers can leverage embeddings and vector databases to deliver highly accurate search results, even for vague queries, while also enriching standard database searches with results from vector-based searches.

Content editing tools like AI CKEditor, AI Translate, and AI Content make site management significantly easier and more efficient, helping site managers save time while improving their workflow.

Overall, the Drupal AI module is an exciting tool that brings the power of AI to everyone, from beginners to experienced developers. It’s user-friendly and unlocks countless new possibilities for Drupal sites.”

A demo from a DrupalCon session about the AI module: AI creates a webform from a paper drawing

A new level of promoting Drupal

Besides building exceptional functionalities, there are other incredibly important missions in the Drupal community. One of them is to spread the word about Drupal, inspiring the world to embrace it and fully appreciate its remarkable capabilities.

Drupal promotion reaches new heights when passionate enthusiasts unite through special initiatives, turning exciting ideas into reality with incredible momentum! Over the past year, amazing work has been done on the updated Drupal brand, redesigned pages of the drupal.org website, and more.

Part of the redesigned drupal.org main page

Our Marketing Vice President, Rosie Gladden, knows the ins and outs of promoting Drupal. Rosie is a member of the Promote Drupal initiative, part of the Steering Committee for DrupalCon Atlanta 2025, and a speaker at numerous Drupal events. Some of her sessions include:

Rosie Gladden at Drupal-promoting events

Rosie talks about advancements in Drupal promotion as her top highlight of the year. Discover her thoughts and get inspired — next time, you could be one of the champions helping to boost the visibility of the amazing CMS.

Rosie Gladden

VP, Marketing

“Looking back at 2024, a highlight for me would be having been a part of the Promote Drupal initiative as the launch of the updated Drupal brand that we’d worked so hard on was rolled out. Seeing the wider community react positively to the changes has been fantastic and the recent launch of the rebranded drupal.org and the ongoing roll out across additional pages is a real milestone in the brand adoption.

With Drupal the perfect choice for enterprise orgs looking to meet their needs for, often, complex digital ecosystems, the updated brand will help reflect how the platform continues to be at the forefront of innovation.”

Final thoughts

As Drupal continues to evolve, it’s clear that the best is yet to come. With so many exciting innovations already under our belt and even more on the horizon, the future of Drupal looks brighter than ever. Whether you’re a developer, a content creator, or part of an organization relying on Drupal, there’s never been a better time to be part of this vibrant community. Let’s continue to push boundaries and build something amazing together!