Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS is the Drupal Association's flagship product — Drupal core plus a curated set of contributed modules and recipes, packaged for people who want a capable site without assembling it piece by piece. It's the version of Drupal the project itself now leads with.

What ships on BOA

The CMS platform is rebuilt from the upstream Composer template as BOA releases ship, so it tracks the version the Drupal Association currently publishes — at the time of writing the 2.1 line, rebuilt on the current Drupal 11.4 core. The platform's name in the panel — as the Platform picker lists it — shows the exact version. The codebase is a standard Composer project with the web/ docroot, so its layout and tooling are what you would expect. What differs is the lifecycle: like every registered platform it is treated as immutable once it is in the panel, so Composer belongs to building a fresh codebase, not to a platform with live sites on it (see Deploying your code).

The platform also carries Drupal's full migration pipeline in its codebase — the migrate_plus, migrate_tools and migrate_upgrade contrib modules, present but switched off — so a site here can take on a Drupal 7 migration, including a fully scriptable one from your shell, without any Composer work first. The workflow that uses them is Migrating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal CMS.

Installing a site on it

Create a site the usual way, pick the Drupal CMS platform, and pick the distribution's own install profile — drupal_cms_installer — in the Install profile field; it does the rest. One expectation to set: the interactive, browser-based setup wizard you may know from trying Drupal CMS elsewhere does not run here — the panel installs the complete package unattended, which means your new site greets you with the starter theme's placeholder front page:

A fresh Drupal CMS install's front page: the starter theme's placeholder hero

That's a healthy install, not a broken one: log in and start configuring, and the full Drupal CMS toolset is already in place.

Good to know

Drupal CMS moves quickly upstream — patch releases arrive steadily. Because the platform is rebuilt each BOA cycle, a newer build usually means a newer Drupal CMS; you move an existing site to it with the Migrate Site task whenever you're ready (see Cloning and migrating — one change at a time).
A site you build here is a normal Drupal 11 site to every other part of BOA: same backups, same HTTPS, same caching — and the same shell tooling as any modern Drupal site, which means the platform's own bundled Drush run as vdrush (after a one-time Unlock Local Drush platform task), not the bare drush, which is the system Drush 8 for legacy Drupal 6/7 only. See Drush basics.

Where to go next

Choosing and managing platforms — getting CMS into your platform list.
Creating and managing a site — the create-site form field by field.
Migrating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal CMS — the end-to-end workflow for bringing a Drupal 7 site's content into a site you build here.