How the new era of Single Directory Components and Canvas is basically Drupal’s "Experience Cloud" moment. Grab a Malört; we need to talk about enterprise architecture.
I remember the old days. And by "old days," I mean, like, 2019.
Building a Drupal theme back then felt a lot like waiting for the bus on North Michigan Avenue in mid-February. You’re standing there, the wind is whipping off the lake, cutting right through your supposedly "weather-rated" parka, and you’re just praying the #151 shows up before your toes freeze off.
In Drupal terms, that wind was the existential dread of trying to find where the hell the CSS for a specific button lived. Was it in the theme’s global style.css? Was it hidden in a module’s assets folder? Was it somehow hardcoded into a Twig template named node--article--teaser--full--weird-variant.html.twig buried six folders deep?
You were running all over the house just to pack a suitcase. Your socks were in the kitchen, your toothbrush was in the garage, and your passport was inexplicably taped to the ceiling fan. It worked—Drupal always works, that’s why we love it—but it was exhausting. It was messy. It was very un-Midwestern in its lack of practical organization.
But folks, the weather is breaking. The bus is here. And it looks suspiciously like something we’ve seen parked over in the Salesforce lot for years.
Drupal 11 is ushering in a vibe shift that feels less like an incremental update and more like a fundamental rethinking of how we build the web. We're moving from the sprawling, chaotic "Page-Based" thinking to tight, organized "System-Based" thinking.
And the wildest part? If you’ve spent any time in the corporate trenches working with Salesforce Experience Cloud, this new Drupal feels incredibly, strangely familiar.
Here is the breakdown of how Drupal’s new toys—Single Directory Components (SDC) and Canvas—are basically the open-source cousins to Salesforce’s Lightning and LWR components.
The Unit of Work: SDC vs. Lightning Components
(Okay, stay with me here. I know bringing up Salesforce on a PHP blog is like bringing ketchup to a hot dog stand in The Loop—you’re gonna get some side-eye. But they cracked this code awhile ago.)
In the Salesforce ecosystem, they have Lightning Web Components (LWC) or the newer Lightning Web Runtime (LWR). The central idea is encapsulation.
If you want a "Hero Banner" in Salesforce, you don't scatter its guts across the entire org. You build a component. The HTML, the JavaScript controller, the CSS metadata—it all lives in one neat little bundle. It’s a self-contained universe. You can pick it up and drop it into another org, and it just works because it brought its own lunch.
That is exactly what SDCs are for Drupal 11.
Before SDCs, a Drupal component was an abstract concept held together by naming conventions and hope. Now? It’s a literal directory on your server.
- my-component/my-component.twig
- my-component/my-component.css
- my-component/my-component.js
- my-component.yml (The contract, the schema, the rules of engagement).
It’s practical. It makes sense. If I want to fix the "Donate" card for a university fundraising site, I don't need to go on a scavenger hunt. I go to the donate-card folder. Done. It’s the tech equivalent of organizing your garage with those nice label makers. It just feels good.
The Stage: Canvas vs. Experience Builder
So you have all these perfectly organized little components. Now what?
In the old days, you, the developer, had to hard-code exactly where they went in a page template. If the marketing team wanted to move the "Featured Story" above the "Newsletter Signup," that was a Jira ticket. That was a code deploy. That was annoying.
Salesforce solved this with Experience Builder. It’s a drag-and-drop interface where you take those Lightning Components from a sidebar and drop them onto a canvas. You configure the properties on the fly—change the headline, swap the background image—without touching code. It empowers the site builders to actually build the site.
Enter Drupal Canvas.
Canvas (part of the Starshot initiative) is Drupal’s answer to the Experience Builder. It’s the visual layer that recognizes your SDCs. It reads that .yml file you wrote and says, "Oh, this component needs a Title and an Image URL? Cool, I’ll generate form fields for those in the sidebar."
The marketer drags the SDC onto the page. They fill in the fields. They hit save.
The developer is no longer the bottleneck for layout changes. The developer is now the supplier of high-quality, tested, accessible building blocks. We aren't building the Lego castle anymore; we're designing the bricks so the kids can build whatever weird tower they want.
Conclusion
This shift isn't just about chasing the shiny new JavaScript framework vibe. It's about maturity.
It’s about recognizing that the old way of sprawling theming was unsustainable for huge, complex sites. It’s acknowledging that people expect modern, visual tools to manage their content. They don't want to edit YAML configurations to move a block; they want to drag it with their mouse.
Drupal 11 with SDC and Canvas is finally giving us a workflow that feels professional, scalable, and frankly, sane. It’s solid. It’s reliable. It’s ready to handle the heavy lifting without complaining.
It’s still Drupal under the hood—powerful, flexible, open—but it’s finally got a decent winter coat on. Now let's get to work.