Inspired by Mark Conroy's blog series, I’m starting a series of blog posts detailing Dripyard’s contributions. My hope is that it brings a bit of visibility to 1) inspire y’all to buy our themes, and 2) inspire folks to contribute on their own.
March 2026 was especially busy for us, as 1) we made a bunch of contributions to the Drupal CMS installer, 2) created a badass new module (see below), and 3) did a bunch of work at DrupalCon Chicago.
Single Directory Components (Drupal Core)
SDC slots can set expectations and cardinality was committed yesterday! I’m super excited about this finally landing, as it will allow page builders (such as Canvas or Display Builder) to limit slots to certain SDCs or groups of SDCs.
Allow schema references in Single Directory Component prop schemas still needs a bit of work, although Pierre and Andrew made a lot of progress on it at DrupalCon.
This one is important to me, as it’ll finally put to bed the issue where if you have a SDC with Canvas’ image schema, but do not have Canvas installed, it will blow up.
Olivero (Drupal Core)
Olivero does not support core's responsive tables API is waiting for me to review again. It’s kind of embarrassing that Olivero doesn’t have support for Core’s responsive tables. This will be ready to go soon.
Navigation (Drupal Core)
The Navigation module is the new admin Toolbar that slides out on the left-hand side of your screen. It has been stable for months, but not enabled by default in the standard profile. That changed last month! In Drupal Core’s next release, it will be enabled by default!
To accomplish this, I had to work with a bunch of great folks to burn through various accessibility issues including invalid ARIA, focus traps, keyboard navigation and more.
- [meta] Add Navigation to the Standard profile and recipes
- Mobile sidebar should close by ESCAPE key
- Mobile expanded sidebar modal overlay has invalid ARIA attribute: aria-expanded
- Navigation's top level menu items for workspaces and help have the same ID when caching enabled
- Improve how and what navigation block titles are communicating to screenreader users
Default Admin (Drupal Core)
“Default Admin” is going to be Drupal core’s new admin theme. It’s basically Gin renamed.
At DrupalCon, I met with Mike, Jürgen, Bernardo, and Dharizza. Our plan to do weekly meetings is 1) to remove a bunch of cruft from the theme (it has sooo much that it inherited from Gin, Claro, and Classy), and 2) to triage the accessibility blockers to set the minimum standards for beta and stable.
The CSS in the theme is currently a bit of a hot mess because the compiled Sass was merged in without any partials, not to mention that the theme also contains the entirety of Claro’s CSS. Untangling and cleaning this up will be no small task, but needs to be done before the theme can become stable.
To clean this up, we’ll need a visual regression testing framework. Luckily, my friend Claude and I coded one up yesterday. It’s built off of Playwright and packaged as a DDEV add-on. You can check it out at https://github.com/mherchel/ddev-drupal-admin-vrt.
Drupal CMS
In the weeks leading up to DrupalCon Chicago, Andy, Pamela, Adam G-H, and I did a whole lot of work on the Drupal CMS installer to allow for premium site templates. This allows end users of Drupal CMS to browse both free and premium site templates!
- Add the partner templates to the installer
- Add support for listing paid site templates in the installer
Drupal Canvas
Allow Canvas Patterns+PageRegions+ContentTemplates provided by Recipes to NOT specify component versions - This issue is probably the highest priority issue that I’ve worked on this month. Currently our Canvas pattern recipes can break depending on what contrib modules are installed, and even what version of Drupal Canvas is installed.
At DrupalCon, Matt Glaman wrapped his head around the issue and wrote a test, and we also had some great conversations in the issue queue to figure out a path forward.
I’m going to continue prodding folks to work on this as much as I can this month.
Quicklink
The Quicklink module provides an implementation of Google Chrome Labs’ Quicklink library for Drupal. Quicklink is a lightweight JavaScript library that enables faster subsequent page-loads by prefetching in-viewport links during idle time.
In Upgrade Quicklink to latest version (currently 3.0.1) I worked with nickolaj to upgrade the library to the latest version (and I also fixed various tests).
New module: Dripyard Recipe Builder!
We still have yet to write our official announcement post about this, but Andy created an amazing new module called Dripyard Recipe Builder (aka DRB).
This module solves a real issue when creating recipes. It allows you to run it on a current site, select which content types, entities, and configuration you’d like to export. It also automatically resolves dependencies (e.g. image styles, or contrib modules) and writes the recipe to file (including YAML, composer.json, and everything else).
Next month
For April 2026, I’m really hoping to make progress on Allow schema references in Single Directory Component prop schemas, Allow Canvas Patterns+PageRegions+ContentTemplates provided by Recipes to NOT specify component versions, as well as starting work on cleaning up the Default Admin theme’s CSS and templates.
If you find this kind of work valuable, check out our themes or consider contributing to Drupal yourself. Both help move the ecosystem forward!
