Drupal turned 24 in 2025 and is in the middle of its most significant strategic repositioning since the Drupal 8 rebuild. The "Pitch Black" initiative โ€” the codename for Drupal's ambitious plan to compete directly with WordPress for non-technical users while retaining its enterprise edge โ€” is reshaping everything from the installation experience to the editorial interface. Here's what's coming and why it matters.

1. The "Pitch Black" Strategic Shift

In late 2023, Dries Buytaert published a detailed roadmap positioning Drupal as the CMS for "ambitious digital experiences." The key insight: Drupal's complexity was simultaneously its strength (for developers and enterprises) and its biggest obstacle (for content editors and smaller agencies). The response was a two-track strategy:

  • Drupal CMS โ€” a pre-configured, batteries-included distribution for the non-developer market
  • Drupal Core โ€” continuing as the powerful, extensible foundation for complex enterprise projects

Both tracks coexist, share the same core, and benefit from each other. Improvements to the editorial experience in Drupal CMS flow back into core; stability improvements in core benefit Drupal CMS installations.

2. Drupal CMS and Starshot

Project Starshot โ€” now shipping as Drupal CMS โ€” is the most visible expression of this strategy. It's a set of curated Recipes on top of Drupal 11 that delivers:

  • A working site in under 5 minutes with a modern default theme
  • Pre-configured content types (blog, news, events, landing pages)
  • Smart defaults for SEO, performance, and accessibility
  • A simplified admin interface that hides unnecessary complexity
  • An AI assistant (via the AI module) for content creation

The target user is someone who would otherwise choose WordPress or Squarespace โ€” and the goal is to win them over with a better editorial experience, without sacrificing the power available to developers underneath.

3. Experience Builder Initiative

The Experience Builder (codenamed "Canvas") is Drupal's answer to Elementor, Webflow, and the Gutenberg block editor. It's a visual, drag-and-drop page builder built natively on Drupal's Single Directory Components system. Unlike page builders that bolt on top of the CMS, the Experience Builder is deeply integrated โ€” components are the same SDCs used by developers, simply exposed through a visual interface.

Expected to land in Drupal 12 (with an experimental module in 11.x), the Experience Builder represents a fundamental change to how pages are assembled in Drupal.

4. AI as a First-Class Citizen

The Drupal AI initiative is not a single module โ€” it's a framework for integrating multiple AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Google Gemini, local models) into Drupal's architecture. The goal is a provider-agnostic AI layer that any module can hook into for:

  • Content generation and summarisation
  • Automated tagging and classification
  • Intelligent search and semantic retrieval
  • Translation and accessibility suggestions
  • Editorial workflow assistance

Drupal CMS ships with an AI assistant powered by this framework out of the box.

5. Community and Governance

The Drupal Association has restructured its governance to accelerate the Starshot and Experience Builder timelines. Acquia, Lullabot, Palantir, Tag1, and several other major Drupal companies have committed engineering resources to these initiatives โ€” a level of coordinated industry investment Drupal hasn't seen since the Drupal 8 launch.

6. Competitive Positioning

Drupal's competitive position in 2025 is nuanced. It has lost market share to WordPress in the SMB segment for years โ€” Starshot is the direct response. In the enterprise segment, Drupal continues to grow, particularly in government, healthcare, higher education, and financial services where data sovereignty, accessibility compliance, and complex editorial workflows matter most.

Against headless-first CMSes like Contentful and Sanity, Drupal's JSON:API and GraphQL layers, combined with its fully-featured back-end and open-source licensing, make it increasingly competitive for organisations that don't want to pay per-user SaaS pricing.

7. What It Means for Your Projects

If you're evaluating a CMS for a new project today, the calculus is shifting:

  • For content-heavy, structured data projects: Drupal 11 remains the strongest open-source option
  • For marketing sites needing easy editing: Drupal CMS / Starshot is now a serious contender vs WordPress
  • For decoupled/headless builds: Drupal's JSON:API + React pairing has matured significantly
  • For enterprise and government: Drupal's security track record and accessibility compliance remain best-in-class

The next two years will be decisive. If the Experience Builder delivers on its promise, Drupal's addressable market expands dramatically. We're watching it closely and investing in building on these new primitives for our clients.