Drupal offers a plethora of distributions but which one is the best that fits the specification of your project? Here are some of the top 8 Drupal distributions that you would want to invest your time into for their robustness, scalability, and more.
2. Index
● What are distributions?
● Types of distribution
● Why distributions?
● Starter Kit
● Media and Publishing
● Government
● Community
● Learning Management System
● Headless Architecture
3. A Drupal distribution packages a set of contributed and custom
modules together with Drupal core to optimize Drupal for a
specific use case or industry
What are Distributions?
4. Primarily there are two types of Drupal distributions:
● Full-featured distributions - for specialized use cases.
● Other distributions - quick-start tools, starting points for
developers and site builders.
Types of Distributions
5. ● Out-of-the-box Additional Features: You get all the required
features according to your requirement in your distribution.
● Easy set up of the website: Launching your website now means
setting up the distribution and getting a preconfigured site in a
single download!
● Less Maintenance: You get the whole website ecosystem into one,
maintenance is not an issue since everything will be updated in a
single update.
Why Distributions?
7. ● Varbase
An enhanced Drupal distribution packed with adaptive functionalities
and essential modules, that can speed up your development process,
and provides you with standardized configurations.
It follows the concept of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and relieves you
from repeating all the modules, features, configurations that are
included in a Drupal project.
Starter Kit
8. ● Panopoly
A base distribution powered by Chaos Tools and Panels magic.
It is designed to be both a general foundation for site building and a base
framework upon which one can build other Drupal distribution, Panopoly
provides search, widgets, responsiveness at its core.
9. ● Presto! - Drupal 8 Starter Kit
With intelligent content editing functionality, configuration defaults,
and optional eCommerce integration, it can save upto 20% of the
development time. Presto is ready to use right out-of-the-box.
Some functionalities include:
● An Article content type with some pre-configured fields
● A couple of pre-configured user roles: Administrator & Editor
● The ability to share nodes on social media
● Pathauto for automatic URL aliasing
10. ● Thunder
The distribution for professional publishing, Thunder functionalities are
publisher-centric. At its core, it has the Paragraphs module, media
entity module, and various SEO features to keep it working. As a free and
open-source technology, it is cost-effective, knocks down
developmental efforts and isn't time-consuming.
Media and Publishing
11. ● Lightning
Lightning enables the developers to create a great authoring experience. It
delivers a powerful set of tools to your editorial team and site builders right
out of the box and is best suited for the media and publishing websites.
The distribution provides a lightweight framework, documentation and best
practice examples for building working solutions in Drupal.
12. ● aGov
A distribution built for government websites. It was first developed for
Australian Government website.
It incorporates the Digital Transformation Agency's UI Kit, helping you
adhere to the Digital Service Standard.
It is ideal for any federal, state or local government agency wanting to
move their websites quickly and easily to Drupal whilst retaining full
control of their codebase and choice of hosting provider.
Government
13. ● deGov
One can build all levels of government websites (federal, regional, local)
to publish information. With the base of Acquia Lightning, it extends the
valuable functions to meet the use cases for different scenarios.
It provides a service-oriented E-Government portal to close the gap
between citizens and your administration with various citizen
engagement portals to discuss.
14. Features of deGov distributions:
● Open311 portals for civic issue tracking
● Open data portals to publish and create communities around
data
● Intranet/Extranet for government employees
15. ● OpenSocial
OpenSocial is an out-of-the-box solution to build an online community
and intranet solution for nonprofits and innovative companies.
Providing with features such as notifications, timeline, events, follow,
groups it can help personalise your news feed with the people you want to
connect with.
Currently employed by the United Nations, Greenpeace and others to
connect with their employees, volunteers, and stakeholders.
Community
16. ● Opigno
A full-fledged LMS based on Drupal, Opigno is the quickest way to get
started with the e-learning framework. SCORM (1.2 and 2004 v3)
compliant, it integrates H5P technology to create rich interactive training
contents.
It allows to:
● Manage training paths organized in courses and lessons
● Assess students with quizzes
● Award certificates
● Facilitate interactions with live meetings, forums, and chats
Learning Management System
17. ● OpenLMS
OpenLMS is an interactive LMS to make learning a fun and easier process.
Provides various kinds of content types such as text, video lectures, quiz,
calendar, and documents to be used as course material for students/users.
Modules such as webform are part of its core.
18. ● Contenta
Contenta helps you make the headless transition smooth. Contenta (and
Drupal in the backend) has the capacity to control behind-the-scenes
systems for languages like Python, PHP, Java React, Vue and Ember.
Powerful and complex, Contenta is API-First.
It optionally installs all the content types and dummy content necessary to
build an application.
Headless Architecture
19. OpenSense Labs has sound experience in building new pillars for
organizations. We would love to hear your requirements, drop a
mail at hello@opensenselabs.com.