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11 Drupal Distributions You Should Know in 2019

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If you are looking to build your website on Drupal in 2019 but don’t know where to start from, you need to know more about the Distributions. 

Here’s a list of top Drupal 8 distributions you could use in 2019. 

eight logos on a white background


The Basics. What are Drupal Distributions? 

Distributions are full copies of Drupal that include core, in addition to themes, modules, libraries, and installation profiles. For a layman’s understanding distributions are a website (dummy) copy for an industry with an explicit requirement for that niche. 

“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”

Accordingly, there are Distributions for Media and Publishing, Government,  E-commerce, Education, Travel among others. 

There are two types of Drupal distributions:

  1. Full-featured distributions: complete solutions for specialized use cases (as discussed above).
  2. Other distributions as the starting points for developers and site builders.

Why Bother Yourself with Distributions?

  1. Out-of-the-box Additional Features: Remember “...Distributions are a package of the core, modules, themes”? Well, this means zero time searching for the Drupal modules and other required features, you don’t need to work extra to set up your website. You get all the required features according to your requirement in your distribution. 
     
  2. Easy set up of the website: Since you don’t need to look for additional features, it saves your time to set up your website. Launching your website now means setting up the distribution and getting a preconfigured site in a single download!
     
  3. Less Maintenance: Downloading a host of modules and features means more maintenance and more security. With distributions, you get the whole website ecosystem into one, maintenance is not an issue since everything will be updated in a single update. 

Drupal Distributions for your Website

Drupal Starter Kit

  1. Varbase 

    Varbase is an enhanced Drupal distribution packed with adaptive functionalities and essential modules, that can speed up your development process, and provides you with standardized configurations, making your life easier.

    The essence of Varbase lies within the basic concept of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). It is probably the best starter distribution because it can help relieve you from repeating all the modules, features, configurations that are included in a Drupal project.

  2. Panopoly

    six white boxes arranged in a square in black background Panopoly is another powerful base distribution. At its roots lies the power of Chaos Tools and Panels magic. Designed to be both a general foundation for site building and a base framework upon which one can build other distributions, Panopoly provides search, widgets, responsiveness at its core. 

  3. Presto! - Drupal 8 Starter Kit

    Claiming to save the development time by up to 20%, Presto! is a Drupal 8 Starter Kit with more than a few tricks up its sleeve!

    With intelligent content editing functionality, configuration defaults, and optional eCommerce integration, Presto is ready to use right out-of-the-box. Other 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 automatical URL aliasing

    • A Basic Page content type with a Paragraphs-based body field

    • Some pre-configured Paragraph types:

      1. Textbox

      2. Image

      3. Promo bar

      4. Divider

      5. Carousel

      6. Block (allows the embedding of Drupal block

Media and Publishing

  1. 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.
     

    top 3 reason why thunder is popular

    Easy to install, deploy and add new functionality, Thunder is SEO friendly, responsive, Google AMP friendly, and allowing editors to publish their content easily as instant articles on Facebook as well. 

  2. 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.

    Built using the top 4 modules to enhance the editing experience - Workflow, Media, Layout, and Preview - it has taken the advantage of D8 functionalities and is tightly coupled to make up the new standard for enterprise authoring. 

Government

  1. aGov

    aGov is a Drupal distribution built for government websites and was developed for the Australian Government. It incorporates the Digital Transformation Agency's UI Kit, helping you adhere to the Digital Service Standard.

    australian govenment website with blue banner and text written in blocks


    aGov 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.

    • WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance, independently audited by Media Access Australia

    • Editor Workflows (Workbench Moderation)

    • Responsive design 

    • Example content - to get you started quickly

    • Common content types: News, Events, Publications, Blogs

    • WYSIWYG editor with media library
       

  2. deGov 

    After aGov, Drupal’s deGov is another Drupal 8 distribution focussing on the needs of (German) governmental organisations. 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.
     

    six columns with text written on it


    It provides a service-oriented E-Government portal to close the gap between citizens and your administration with various citizen engagement portals to discuss. 

    Following are the 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

Community

  1. OpenSocial

    OpenSocial is an online community and intranet solution for nonprofits and innovative companies. It is currently employed by customers like the United Nations, Greenpeace and hundreds of smaller organizations to connect with their employees, volunteers and other stakeholders.

    It is an out-of-the-box solution to build online community platforms. 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.

Learning Management System

  1. Opigno LMS

    A full-fledged Learning Management System based on Drupal, Opigno is the quickest way to get started with the e-learning framework.

    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

      SCORM (1.2 and 2004 v3) compliant, it integrates the innovative H5P technology, making possible to create rich interactive training contents.

  2. OpenLMS

    OpenLMS is an interactive LMS to make learning a fun and easier process. It provides various kinds of the content type such as written content, video lectures, quiz, calendar, and documents to be used as course material for students/users.

    Modules such as webform are part of its core. It also provides interactive content powered by H5P which can be added to a course.

    Read about the top Drupal e-learning modules.

Headless Architecture

  1. 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.  

OpenSense Labs has sound experience in building new pillars for organizations. We would love to hear your requirements, drop a mail at [email protected].

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web