This idea has graduated to a strategic initiative after Dries approved this as a strategic initiative during the Driesnote at DrupalCon Portland. This page is now archived in favor of the official initiative documentation → .
The Distribution Modernization Initiative is a community effort modernize how distributions in Drupal work, as well as update how they are discovered and delivered by Drupal.org.
Distributions have been proposed as key Drupal feature since Dries blogged in 2006 about better support arriving in Drupal 5. Drupal 8's configuration management system has underpinned some improvements for Distributions and there are a few successful distributions such as Open Social, Varbase → , Contenta → , Thunder → , and LocalGov → .
Distributions are difficult:
We intend to implement:
More documentation about the initiative can be found at: https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes
We aim to:
When you install Drupal for the first time you are presented with Standard, Minimal or the Umami Demo to install. We want to explore using the Project Browser → to allow a user to select a Drupal recipe whilst installing.
If you choose a distribution, for example, OpenSocial, you cannot also install another distribution like Commerce Kickstart or Thunder to easily add e-commerce or professional publishing tools to your site. You're locked in. Multiple Drupal recipes can be installed on the same site.
Similarly, if after a few years of running your site built on standard Drupal you cannot use OpenSocial to add community collaboration tools to your site. We want to remove the barriers to do this.
One use-case that distributions satisfy is to provide a way to start and maintain 100s of micro-sites. This is particularly common within the education sector. We want to make this easier and also ensure that any of the other changes don't make this harder.
One of the pain points maintaining distributions is providing updates to sites that are already using your distribution. Working out how to add new functionality to existing sites is hard because every existing site is in a different state. A few distributions are working together on the Update Helper module → and we're looking to bring this functionality to core.
Drupal.org support for distributions has been improved to identify distributions correctly and will support pushing distributions to packagist so they can be used as composer project templates.
Many distributions provide example content as a way of introducing their functionality. At the moment distributions are doing this in many different ways, importing from CSV or using the Default content module. It's often complete something custom. We want to provide functionality in core and make it easy for a Drupal recipe to provide example content.
We meet fortnightly on Tuesday at 16:00 UTC in the #distributions-and-recipes channel in Drupal Slack.
Drupal recipes: https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes/-/blob/1.0.x/do...
Composer project templates: https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes/-/blob/1.0.x/do...
#3252534: [Plan] Distribution support on drupal.org and packages.drupal.org →
#3265281: Use composer templates for starter kits instead of install profiles →
#3264926: Split distribution functionality into a composer template and a module →
#1497268: Add revert functionality to Config entities →
#2114713: Enable installation of distribution (install profile) at install time and provide curated list of available distros →
TBD - Not sure.
@todo: Does this need to be more specific than the following list?
Dries signed off on the initiative as it was presented during the DriesNote at DrupalCon Portland.
Fixed
Active Initiative
Not all content is available!
It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.
Phase 1 has been completed and merged into Drupal core. Additional work continues in the initiative space to help move Starshot forward.
I think this can be considered fixed now that it is in core. Certainly there is no further work required in the ideas queue.