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I haven't kept up with updating this blog, so this is a short summary of what happened, and where we are with the Dashboard Initiative.

Our initial goals

When the Dashboard Initiative was announced, the goal was to get this into Drupal Core. 

As with most initiatives, we started in a sandbox, then moved to a contrib module.

Based on the above, our idea was

• providing a very simple Dashboard framework,
• according to Drupal core standards,
• based on layout builder,
• providing a set of blocks that could cover the requirements for 80% of sites
• that users would see first thing when they log in to their site,
• and with nice defaults for the standard profile in Drupal core.

We had weekly meetings, where we worked on defining what the defaults for the Standard profile would be (with Aaron, Cristina and Megh leading the way), while the module was steadily progressing. We attended many events, where we (Cristina, Pablo and I) spoke about the initiative, gathered lots of interesting feedback, and could work on sprints where we got dozens of new contributors to help with the initiative.

Fast-forward to the Drupal Starshot initiative

And that was our plan for DrupalCon Portland 2024. But we were surprised with the Drupal Starshot announcement. Our session about the dashboard, scheduled just after the keynote, was quite an experience for Pablo and me.

The Drupal Starshot initiative has evolved, but its foundation was packaging a new version of Drupal providing a great out-of-the-box experience. So we pivoted and the Dashboard initiative became one of the Starshot Tracks that would become Drupal CMS 1.0.

In a few months we were able to redefine our goals and implement what was needed to launch Drupal CMS on January 2025, which included the Dashboard 2.0.0 first release.

Shortly after, I was appointed as one of the few Drupal CMS committers, which I consider a huge honor. 

Is becoming part of Drupal core still the goal?

Drupal CMS is the promoted option for downloading on drupal.org. In DrupalCon Atlanta 2025, exploring a marketplace of site templates was announced, which would be based on Drupal CMS 2.0. Given that, having the dashboard as part of Drupal core shouldn't be a priority, even if it would be satisfying.

In Dries' July 2025 update to the Drupal core strategy 2025-2028, you can find good arguments for both including it or not including it. If I leave my bias aside, I'm 50-50. The tie-breaker would be adoption.

Dashboard adoption

Before 2.0.0 was released, I worked on a proof-of-concept for updating Dashboards with Layout Builder module to be based on Dashboard, to ensure this was possible with an automatic upgrade path. That's feasible, but never really happened.

Of course, Dashboard adoption is great. Even if it's short-lived, since it's part of Drupal CMS and the future site-templates on top of it. So I'm looking at what distributions outside of that are adopting it.

The last releases of the Varbase distribution moved to Dashboard already (and they have been really collaborative on issues on the Dashboard queue, thanks!). 

Drupal Commerce introduced its own dashboard functionality in their 3.x releases ^[1]. I think adoption on high profile distributions/modules like Commerce would help make the point on having this as part of Core. 

Another case I'm looking at is drupal.org itself. With their upgrade to Drupal 10, it is quite possible some kind of dashboard is needed on drupal.org too for feature parity with what we have today. Opening an issue to see if they already have something in mind is on my to-do list.

What's next then?

If we look at our initial goals, providing a set of blocks that could cover the requirements for 80% of sites is not something I'm looking at right now. Thanks to Drupal's new recipes system, I don't think that belongs in the dashboard module itself anymore, but on dedicated recipes (as Drupal CMS proves) or modules.

We've been working on bugs, minor features (like our new coffee integration!), and keeping up with new core releases and PHP new features. We just released 2.1.0-beta1, which should be shortly followed by 2.1.0.

So to be honest, I don't know what's next. Feedback is welcome on the issue queue or at the #dashboard channel on Drupal Slack.
 

^[1] I was corrected this happened with Commerce 2.37.
 

Photo by Paul Johnson, available for publishing under Creative Commons Licence with attribution via Flickr.

I've been struggling lately with PhpStorm IDE, specially when closing a big project and opening another big one, where sometimes it just hanged (if you are doing Drupal, any Drupal project might fall in this category given the amount of files).

After checking settings, I found out that I had the defaults, while my computer has 32Gb of RAM. 

If you want to play around with the options to see if it improves your experience, go to Help > Edit custom VM options....

It will open phpstorm64.exe.vmoptions where you can customize the VM options. It's important that you save the location of this file, as if your experimenting breaks PhpStorm, you want to be able to edit this outside of it.

I ended up with

-Xms4G
-Xmx8G
-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd
-Dawt.java2d.opengl=true
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=1G
-XX:+AggressiveOpts
-XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods
-XX:+UseStringCache
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
-XX:+UseCompressedStrings

and so far looks like it's working better.

UPDATE: das-peter pointed out about ulimit too for allowed open files. I remember having set up that before because my hard ulimit command inside WSL2 shows:

$ ulimit -H -n
1048576

You can set that with 

$ ulimit -n 1048576

Last year, during DrupalCon Prague, Cristina approached me with an idea to include Dashboards in core. We met with Sascha, and since then a team emerged and we have been meeting more or less regularly defining how this would look like, and creating some proof of concepts.

What are we trying to solve?

When you log in to your Drupal site, you land on the /user page. There you can see how old your account on this site is. Useful, huh? Unless you have customized this behavior with contributed or custom modules, now you need to think about why you logged in, and go to wherever you can do what you wanted to do, which usually will take you several steps.

There's a big chance that this journey will start at the Content page, if you are a content manager or a content editor, but you might be a site builder, a site admin, or be responsible for other duties on your website. So we need a landing area where the content shown makes sense based on your recurring tasks. This is where customizable dashboards come into play.

Wearing multiple hats

Users often have multiple roles, or they might want to perform different tasks which might be unrelated to each other. The initial idea was to have a dedicated dashboard for each role.  That evolved into the idea that a user should have access to different dashboards, where groups of tasks and information might be grouped by their nature, not neccessarily by their role. You might wear your content manager hat one minute, and later you might need to perform some SEO duties.

So nothing should block you from having unlimited dashboards, and use the permissions system to give access to them to different roles.

Is this aligned with Drupal core goals?

Drupal Core Product Manager Lauri Eskola recently stated the three tracks were most efforts are concentrating in Drupal Core: 

• Reduce the time it takes for site builders to become proficient with Drupal.

• Empower site builders to deliver engaging editorial experiences.

• Reduce the cost of keeping Drupal applications secure.

Adding dashboards helps with the second track, enabling site builders to make editors´ lives easier by providing customized dashboards based on their editors´ needs. There would be benefits to the other two tracks as well. Having clear journeys on some common tasks for different roles will help site builders to become proficient in Drupal; and can reduce the cost of keeping Drupal applications secure if we surface the need for security updates on the dashboard and make it easy to get up to date with security updates or news from the Drupal project and the Drupal Association.

How to get this into Drupal core

When new ideas go into core, usually they are introduced as Experimental modules, and that's also our aim. Similar to other existing admin tools (like the content listing admin page) in Drupal core, our approach is based on progressive enhancement. This translates to:

• If you don't enable dashboard, you will be redirected to /user as of right now. Drupal core Standard profile cannot depend on an experimental module, so it won't be installed by default (for now).

• We will ship Dashboard module with default dashboards for common tasks in core. 
• If Layout Builder is also installed, you will be able to customize the layouts and blocks of those dashboards on the UI. 

How to get involved?

For now, we've been working in a sandbox, and we also have a GitHub project that contains an easy-to-evaluate site with some demo content, and triggers a Tugboat that we can use as demo or to manually test changes. Thanks to Tugboat.qa for providing that, and James for helping out setting it up!

If you want to help, we welcome you at the #dashboard channel on Drupal Slack.

Thanks to Gábor Hójtsy, Lauri Eskola and Cristina Chumillas for reviewing this blogpost.