For years, Drupal has been the platform of choice for organizations that need serious digital capabilities—think universities managing millions of pages, government agencies with complex workflows, and Fortune 500 companies running mission-critical websites. The power is undeniable, but there's always been a catch: you needed technical expertise to unlock it.
That’s why one of the most exciting areas of Drupal’s journey has been the work underway on more intuitive, visual building experiences. The community has spent years exploring how to make Drupal feel more accessible to site builders and content teams without sacrificing the flexibility and robustness that define Drupal.
Drupal Canvas is the next step in that journey.
More than a “new feature drop,” Drupal Canvas represents an ongoing, community-driven effort to modernize how we build with Drupal. Canvas adds a more visual, flexible way to arrange and adjust page components, helping non-developers work more independently while providing developers space for deeper technical work.
No More Trade-offs
As Lauri Timmanee, Drupal Canvas's product lead, explained: "There's a trade-off that exists in Drupal - either you're forced into building sort of a cookie cutter website...or you go into complex coding. We want to break that trade-off by providing better tools so that you can actually build websites that are custom to your brand without having to know complex code."
What's Included in Drupal Canvas 1.0
Drupal Canvas provides the foundation for a more intuitive page-building workflow in Drupal. Built with React on the frontend and integrated with Drupal's core APIs on the backend, it focuses on helping site builders arrange and adjust content more easily, with features such as:
- Component based visual page building with a drag-and-drop interface
- In-browser code components that allow you to add new building blocks
- Create and preview multiple pages before publication with multi-step undo
Try It Out and Get Involved
Drupal Canvas represents the Drupal community's collaborative innovation at its best—open and with a foundation of real-world use cases. As work continues, community feedback will continue to play a large role in shaping the next phases.
- Check out the Drupal Canvas demo with the Drupal brand. Local installation instructions at https://github.com/phenaproxima/canvas-demo
- Join the #drupal-canvas channel in Slack for active community discussion.
Your feedback and involvement will directly shape the future of content management in Drupal.