

Talking Drupal #518 - Drupal Canvas
Sep 1, 2025
01:09:23
Today we are talking about Drupal Canvas, What it is, and when we can use it with guest Lauri Timmanee. We’ll also cover Starshot Demo Design System as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/518
Topics- What is Drupal Canvas
- The Evolution and Future of Drupal Canvas
- Building with Drupal Canvas: Components and Templates
- User Experience and Flexibility in Drupal Canvas
- Collaboration and Extensibility in Drupal Canvas
- Default Components in Drupal Canvas
- Introduction to Modular Components
- Drupal CMS and Site Templates
- Acquia Source and Drupal Canvas Integration
- Pricing and Use Cases for Acquia Source
- Canvas Beta and Stability
- Migration and Upgrade Paths
- AI Integration in Drupal Canvas
- Future of Drupal Canvas
Lauri Timmanee - lauriii
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
- Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted to try out Canvas (previously known as Experience Builder) with a fully built-out design system? There’s a Drupal theme for that.
- Module name/project name:
- Brief history
- How old: created in July 2024 by longtime Drupalist Kristen Pol of Salsa Digital
- Versions available: 1.0.6, which supports Drupal 10 and 11
- Maintainership
- Actively maintained
- Security coverage
- Test coverage
- Documentation - Multipage writeup of SDDS, including contribution and development guides
- Number of open issues: 34 open issues, 3 of which are active bugs
- Usage stats:
- 79 sites
- Module features and usage
- Some of our users may have already tried out the pre-release demo of Canvas that phenaproxima posted on Github. That actually has the Starshot Demo Design System, or SDDS, baked in. So, even if you watched a demo video of Canvas, you’ve probably seen SDDS in action
- SDDS is itself built on CivicTheme, a Drupal theme built to act as a component-based atomic design system. As such, CivicTheme includes a rich component library, built from published Figma and Storybook UI Kits. And because some of the early builds for SDDS were for GovCMS, the Australian whole-of-government CMS project, it is accessible, with WCAG 2.2 compliance out-of-the-box
- While the official purpose of SDDS is providing a platform to use for demos in Driesnotes and other presentations to illustrate the progress being made on Canvas, I think it’s also safe to say that testing the latest features of Canvas with a fully-realized design system has also helped to identify issues in Canvas itself. That means the products of all the work that has gone into SDDS will include a more production-ready stable release when that gets tagged (hopefully in time for Vienna)