The premise: content teams want freedom to design, move fast, and ship unique pages without filing a ticket. Developers want structure that scales, consistency, and no broken layouts.
Those two forces tend to collide. Drupal Canvas looks like the answer!
To make it concrete I built a fictional metal festival, Drop Festival, and turned it into a real site with Canvas. Line-up, timetable, tickets, all of it built from components.
What I covered:
The line-up so far
Paragraphs give you clean, reusable, battle-tested content, but rigid layouts. Layout Builder gives you real layout control in core, but the UX can feel technical.
Canvas gives you visual editing on top of a structured, component based foundation. It is new and early, with a learning curve and an ecosystem that still needs to grow, but the direction is right.
What Canvas actually places
Single directory components and code components.
I focused on SDCs: in core since 10.3, not a Canvas invention, one folder, a contract plus markup plus optional styling and behaviour, no PHP, and portable between modules and themes.
Props and slots
A prop is a typed input that configures a component, defined once in the component.yml contract. A slot is a space you drop other components into. Slots are where most of the power lives.
You do not have to write these by hand. drush generate sdc walks you through it, and AI agents are genuinely good at SDCs because they are small, typed and predictable.
The better your codebase, with real examples and clear patterns, the better the output.
Lessons from the pit
- Get the component size right
- The contract is the work
- Slots are where the power is
- Think about group names, do not clutter the Canvas sidebar
- AI is a force multiplier after you set the pattern, not before
- It is new, so expect movement
Where to start: run Canvas locally and play with a single component.
Then turn one page into SDCs. Then build a component library for your theme, or build on an existing one.
Resources
Documentation: https://project.pages.drupalcode.org/canvas/
Roadmap: https://drupal-canvas.com/
Discussions: #drupal-canvas on drupal.slack.com
The festival site: https://dropfestival.webhaven.io
Demo of the Canvas components shipping with Webhaven: https://demo.webhaven.io/page-builder
One last thing, and I meant it on stage.
After 15 years of Drupal I was close to walking away. Then the new models dropped, and now it feels like Drupal is firing on all cylinders again. Optimism is a moral duty. The future is unwritten and we are all responsible for what it holds.
We are what defines Drupal. Go Drupal 💧
The recording is not online yet. I will add it here as soon as it is.
