What Is a Drupal Distribution Now?

If you asked "what is a Drupal distribution" three years ago, the answer was simple: a packaged copy of Drupal bundled with the modules, themes, and configuration needed to stand up a particular kind of site without assembling it yourself. That definition is still accurate. What has changed is the conclusion most teams should draw from it. The distribution, as a way of packaging Drupal, is being deliberately retired in favor of two newer mechanisms: recipes and Site Templates.

This piece explains what a distribution was, what replaced it, and how to think about the choice if you are evaluating Drupal or maintaining an existing build today.

What is a Drupal distribution?

A Drupal distribution is a collection of Drupal core plus additional software, assembled and configured so it can be used close to "as is" for a defined purpose. Instead of downloading core and selecting from tens of thousands of contributed modules yourself, you install a profile that has already made those decisions. Historically, this took two forms: full-featured solutions for a specific use case, and lighter quick-start kits.

The well-known examples tell the story of the model's reach. Open Social packaged community and collaboration tools. Thunder targeted publishers. Commerce Kickstart bundled Drupal Commerce. Acquia's Lightning provided a developer baseline. Varbase, our own distribution, packaged an enterprise CMS foundation. The shared promise was time-to-value: launch in hours rather than spending weeks wiring modules together.

What replaced the Drupal distribution model?

The change did not come from distributions failing. It came from the Drupal project deciding the packaging mechanism itself could be better. The Distributions and Recipes initiative reimagined the concept as recipes: smaller, composable configuration packages that can be applied to any Drupal site. Recipes shipped in Drupal core, and Drupal CMS 1.0, released in January 2025, was built on them, effectively replacing the old "Standard" install profile.

The direction was confirmed at the top of the project. In his March 2025 State of Drupal, Dries Buytaert said Site Templates could replace Drupal distributions, a concept that had been part of the platform for nearly 20 years. Site Templates arrived with Drupal CMS 2.0 on January 28, 2026, built on Drupal Core 11.3. They are pre-configured starting points that include themes, content, layouts, and design systems, and the release shipped with the first one, a marketing site template called Byte, with more to follow through a planned template marketplace.

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Distributions gave way to recipes for composable configuration, and Site Templates now sit on top of recipes and Drupal Canvas, the visual page builder that ships as the default editing experience in Drupal CMS 2.0, to deliver the complete, ready-to-use experience that distributions once aimed for.

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Distribution vs recipe vs Site Template at a glance

What does the shift mean for your build?

Two points matter for decision-makers. First, distributions have not been removed from Drupal, and sites running on them continue to work. There is no forced migration. Second, the strategic path for new work has moved, and the reasons are worth understanding rather than taking on faith.

The original distribution model carried two structural costs:

• Lock-in: you could not cleanly combine two distributions, so adopting Open Social and later wanting Commerce Kickstart's tooling meant a rebuild, not an addition.
• Maintenance: distribution maintainers shouldered the burden of shipping updates to every downstream site, which slowed everyone down.

Recipes were designed to remove both. They can be mixed, matched, added, and removed at any point in a site's life, which is precisely what a monolithic profile could not do.

For most teams, the question "which distribution should we choose" is now better phrased as "which recipes, or which Site Template, fit what we are building."

Our view: the curation survived, the bundle did not

Here is where we land, and it is a position rather than a settled fact. The distribution did not fail; it succeeded so thoroughly that the project absorbed its best idea into core.

The value of a distribution was never the bundle itself. It was the curation: the opinionated, tested decisions about which modules to trust, how to configure them, and how they fit together. Recipes and Site Templates keep that curation and discard the part that aged badly, the rigid all-or-nothing packaging. In our work with enterprise clients as a Drupal Diamond Certified Partner and the maintainer of Varbase that distinction matters more than the headline that 'distributions are dead'.because it points to where the new risk lives.

That risk is governance. Recipes are applied and then become your responsibility; the maintainer no longer pushes a single update across your stack the way a distribution did. The configuration discipline that a good distribution enforced now has to be owned by your team. The pattern we see consistently is that organizations underestimate this and treat recipes as a one-time convenience rather than an ongoing standard. The composability that makes recipes attractive is the same property that lets configuration drift if no one owns it.

Is Varbase still a Drupal distribution?

A fair question, given that we maintain a distribution: what happens to Varbase? The answer is that Varbase adopted the new model rather than being displaced by it. With the latest Varbase  release, we rebuilt the platform's feature bundles, including Media, Search, SEO, and Layout Builder, as recipes, and added Project Browser, Package Manager, and Automatic Updates to Varbase Core. Varbase now supports Drupal 10.3 and Drupal 11.

In other words, Varbase is a distribution that moved its internals onto recipes while keeping the curated, enterprise-ready foundation that made it useful in the first place. The principle is the same one driving the broader shift: preserve the curation, drop the rigidity. For teams already running on Varbase, this means continuity rather than a rebuild, and a path forward that tracks where Drupal core is heading rather than against it.

How do you decide: distribution, recipes, or Site Template?

If you are weighing how to start or continue a Drupal build, three situations cover most cases.

1. Starting fresh. Begin with Drupal CMS and the available Site Templates and recipes. This is the path the project is investing in, and it gives you composable configuration from day one.
2. Running an existing distribution-based site, including Varbase. There is no urgency and no forced migration. Plan around recipe adoption and your Drupal 11 path on a normal upgrade cadence, and decide who will own configuration going forward.
3. Building repeatable sites at scale, such as a multisite estate. This was always the hardest case for distributions, and it is where recipes are strongest. Composable, repeatable configuration is the point, and it is common in higher education and government portfolios.

In all three, the deciding factor is the same: less about the label "distribution" and more about who owns the configuration decisions over the site's life.

Where to go from here

If you are choosing a starting point for a new Drupal project, or you maintain a distribution-based site and want a clear-eyed read on the recipes path, that is the kind of decision we work through with enterprise teams every week. We also maintain Varbase, so we have made this transition on our own platform, not just advised on it.

If it would help to talk it through, we are glad to.