Choosing a starter kit

Selection of the frontend framework for a web development project is a crucial decision as it impacts the scalability, performance, and maintainability of the project. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who will maintain the website long term?
• Will a development team maintain the website or will marketers who need site building capabilities be maintaining your site long term?

Drupal Starter Kits provides the following starter kits to help you choose how to maintain your frontend:

• Enterprise low-code starter kit
• Community starter kit
• Headless starter kit

Drupal Starter Kits is an open source, composable CMS for managing digital content and experiences. It is powered by Drupal and optimized for the Acquia platform.

• Starter kits manage an initialization process, not a code distribution.
• Starter kits do not use a custom profile.
• Dependencies are decoupled from distribution.
• Starter kit output is 100% customer owned and customizable.
• Starter kits do not have an upgrade path.

Starter kits include the following features:

• Starting point: Starter kits provide composable and replaceable templates to begin.
• Extendable: After instantiation, you continue to sub-theme your theme but your starter kit is no longer tied at runtime.
• Composable: Your distribution can have multiple starter kits. Instead of one monolithic install profile, your distribution can follow microservice principles.
• Decoupled and upgradeable: Backwards compatibility for themes was not possible before starter kits. Upgrades to a starter kit do not affect production themes.
• Command-line tools: Starter kits provide a CLI command to generate new sites with a starter kit.

Enterprise low-code starter kit

Site Studio is a Drupal add-on service available for Acquia subscribers. It empowers non-developers to make layout and design changes inside the CMS.

Designers with little coding knowledge can create within the CMS:

• Acquia's 70+ Drag and drop components with Layout Canvas
• Base and custom CSS styles
• Reusable responsive templates
• Component based elements

The low-code enterprise solution is ideal for marketers and companies seeking a simplified coding approach. Use the Enterprise low-code starter kit if your need:

• Low code
• Configurable
• Simpler architecture
• Tried and true
• Web pages

Headless starter kit

Headless is a term that refers to decoupling frontend UX from the backend systems that provide, manage and control data.

Benefits of Headless:

• Flexibility: By separating the frontend from the backend, you can use any technology stack for the frontend, such as React or Next.JS.

  This allows developers to choose the best tools for their specific project needs.

• API-first approach: Drupal's API-first approach ensures that data is accessible via web services (typically REST or JSON:API) right out of the box.

  This is crucial for modern web applications and mobile apps that rely on data APIs.

• Composable architecture: Components of a the application are designed to be modular and easily interchangeable

Features:

• Single unified editorial experience
• Omni-channel delivery of content
• Composable architecture
• Content service
• API first

Headless required design component:

Components are the reusable building blocks of our design system. Each component meets a specific interaction or UI need, and is specifically created to work together to create patterns and intuitive user experiences.

Use the Headless starter kit if your need:

• High code
• Developer freedom
• Flexible architecture
• Cutting edge
• Apps and IoT