Drupal CMS 2.0 represents one of the most significant updates in Drupal’s history, introducing a new visual building experience, optional AI assistance, and ready-made site templates designed to help teams launch polished, fully branded websites much faster, while still being built on Drupal core and retaining the enterprise-grade security, scalability, and flexibility the platform is known for.
At the center of the release is Drupal Canvas, now the default editing experience. Instead of building pages through back-end forms and repeatedly switching to preview screens, teams can assemble pages directly on the canvas with live preview and real-time editing. The goal is to let non-developers move from concept to published landing pages and marketing experiences with far less friction.
Drupal CMS 2.0 is built on Drupal Core 11.3, and the release highlights a substantial performance step up, citing the ability to serve roughly 26% to 33% more requests with the same infrastructure. Alongside the editing shift, a new component approach is reinforced through the Mercury component library, which provides common page building blocks such as cards, heroes, testimonials, menus, and accordions.
Another headline change is the introduction of site templates designed as feature-complete starting points for specific use cases. The first included template, Byte, is packaged as a SaaS marketing site foundation with a blog, newsletter signup, pricing pages, and a contact form, wrapped in an opinionated dark design and built to be installed in minutes.
To reduce setup and configuration work, Drupal CMS 2.0 also expands its “recipe” approach to integrations and repeatable configuration. One example highlighted is a Mailchimp recipe that can authenticate, pull audiences, and generate signup form blocks that can be placed into Canvas pages without manual wiring.
AI features are offered as optional add-ons, including generating full pages from text prompts using available Canvas components, an admin chatbot to help complete common site-building tasks such as creating content types and taxonomy, and AI-assisted alt text suggestions to support accessibility with human review. Provider support is positioned as straightforward, including built in support for amaze.ei, plus integrations with OpenAI and Anthropic, and an AI dashboard to manage what is enabled and which providers are connected.
Drupal CMS 2.0 also carries forward the core “CMS 1” foundation introduced in January 2025, including a streamlined installer with smart defaults, a project browser for discovering modules, automatic security updates, the recipes system for packaging configuration, a modern admin UI, built-in SEO tooling, accessibility checking, and privacy-oriented features.
The release post emphasizes that the work reflects community-driven development at scale, crediting hundreds of contributors across many organizations, with specific acknowledgement of partners involved in the AI initiative and broad testing and issue filing across the community.
Drupal CMS 2.0 is available now through the official Drupal distribution channels, with trial and download options published by the Drupal Association.
