Recipes, Site Templates and the future of Drupal distributions
Time: Thursday 14th May 11:50-12:20
Room: Te Aro
Track: Drupal Development
For many years agencies and organisations have tackled the problem of packaging a "standard" Drupal distribution and installing it across multiple sites. We've seen GovCMS in Australian government, custom university distributions, and global community projects like Lightning and Commerce Kickstart.
Traditional distributions promised faster launches, reduced decision fatigue, and consistent user experience through opinionated defaults, but often resulted in rigid architectures, difficult upgrades, and awkward long-term maintenance. Drupal is now entering a new phase with Recipes and Site Templates, offering a modular and composable approach where teams can intentionally layer functionality, reuse proven patterns, and evolve sites over time without starting from scratch.
In this session we'll explore what it actually means to build and use recipes and site templates in practice. We'll cover how recipes are structured, how configuration and dependencies are packaged and applied, and how site templates fit into modern Composer-based workflows. We'll also examine the architectural decisions teams need to make to avoid recreating the limitations of traditional distributions.
This talk is aimed at developers, solution architects, and technical decision-makers who want to understand where Drupal site building is heading, and how to take advantage of it without repeating the mistakes of the past.
Traditional distributions promised faster launches, reduced decision fatigue, and consistent user experience through opinionated defaults, but often resulted in rigid architectures, difficult upgrades, and awkward long-term maintenance. Drupal is now entering a new phase with Recipes and Site Templates, offering a modular and composable approach where teams can intentionally layer functionality, reuse proven patterns, and evolve sites over time without starting from scratch.
In this session we'll explore what it actually means to build and use recipes and site templates in practice. We'll cover how recipes are structured, how configuration and dependencies are packaged and applied, and how site templates fit into modern Composer-based workflows. We'll also examine the architectural decisions teams need to make to avoid recreating the limitations of traditional distributions.
This talk is aimed at developers, solution architects, and technical decision-makers who want to understand where Drupal site building is heading, and how to take advantage of it without repeating the mistakes of the past.
Speakers
Michael Strelan
Michael is a seasoned Drupal developer, having been involved in Drupal projects since the days of Drupal 5. Throughout his career he has led, delivered and maintained projects across a wide variety of sectors, most prominently Government, Education and Healthcare. Contributing back to Drupal and the Drupal community is something Michael feels strongly about, as well as solving problems and helping others to learn. Outside of work hours, Michael enjoys cycling (hates running), drinking coffee (and beer), listening to music and spending time with his family.
Additional speakersN/A