Drupal Forge is a volunteer-driven model marketplace for ready-made Drupal sites that is designed to sustain open contribution and collaboration.

  • Users get instant disposable demos they can use for evaluation or training, or save to customize and buy or deploy to their own hosting. They get the benefits of a hosted platform like Wix or Squarespace with full ownership of their sites.
  • Freelancers and agencies get recurring revenue from selling site subscriptions. They have the option to manage hosting and payment processing themselves or let Drupal Forge handle it for them. They set their own prices and decide what services they include.
  • Hosting providers get a sales channel for their services.
  • Drupal gets a business model that rewards contribution. A market for ready-made sites gives sellers an incentive to devote some of their recurring revenue to improving Drupal. Sellers attract buyers by making their sites as attractive and high-quality as possible. We ask each of our partners to split their share of subscription revenue with the Drupal Association and the Drupal projects their products rely on.

How Drupal Forge supports sustainable contribution

Rewards for maintaining projects

Many projects that would make Drupal great are outdated or unfinished because maintainers cannot afford to keep working on them. We have seen Drupal developers cast envious eyes at the WordPress marketplace for paid plugins and themes. But the WordPress marketplace does not encourage users to work together and contribute. We don’t want Drupal to develop a culture of selling software. So what should we sell?

Drupal’s culture is that people share software and own sites, so the business model has been selling services to site owners. That business model means developers have to spend most of their time billing hours to individual clients. Time spent maintaining shared software is a loss for developers unless they can get a client to sponsor it.

Drupal Forge helps us move from selling custom sites to individual clients to selling ready-made sites to an unlimited number of clients. When developers sell ready-made sites to lots of clients, the time they spend maintaining shared software will improve their products and increase sales. Drupal Forge provides a platform to free maintainers from the tyranny of chasing billable hours or sponsorship so they can devote time to updating and maintaining their projects.

On-ramp for inexperienced developers

There is not much of a market for entry-level Drupal developers. Selling and supporting ready-made Drupal sites will let inexperienced developers build a Drupal business the way they currently build Wix and Squarespace businesses. You don’t need someone to hire you if you can work for yourself.

Free cloud development environment

Drupal Forge demos include a cloud development environment. This makes it a great development tool even if you don’t use it to host your live site. It has enabled us to provide a cloud contribution solution to replace DrupalPod now that GitPod will not provide hosting.

How to get involved

Volunteer

Donate

Our free demos and cloud development environment rely on the generosity of our donors. Every demo site costs at least a dollar a day to run. You can become a donor by joining our Open Collective.

Partner

  • If you would like our users to buy their sites from you, open an issue in our issue queue and choose Vendors as the component, or contact one of our maintainers directly.
  • Look at our starter template for an example of how to create a site template for Drupal Forge. Reach out to us on Slack for help.

Sponsor

  • Donate at the sponsor level.
  • Provide hosting or funding for specific demos.
  • Promote a service that adds value to Drupal on our site.

Advocate

Our maintainers do not have contacts in all the organizations we would like to collaborate with. Use your influence to let people know about Drupal Forge so we can work together to make a better solution for everyone.

Projects that inspired Drupal Forge

Drupal Gardens

Drupal Forge was briefly named 1,000 Drupal Gardens in tribute to Drupal Gardens, a service that allowed thousands of non-technical users to launch Drupal sites. Drupal Forge has no affiliation with Drupal Gardens, which shut down in 2016.

Simplytest

Simplytest is a platform that supports demo links for modules, themes, and distributions.

DrupalPod

DrupalPod provides a cloud contribution environment for Drupal core, modules, and themes that can be launched from a link or from a browser extension.

Buzzr

Buzzr is a Drupal product created for non-technical site administrators. The Buzzr Private Label platform is a white label solution (your brand on their platform) for resellers to offer Buzzr sites to their clients.

Try Drupal

Try Drupal is a demo of 1xINTERNET’s Drupal product. Users can spin up their own demo just by logging in. Try Drupal was the inspiration for the initial Starshot prototype.

Drupal at the Edge

Drupal at the Edge uses WebAssembly to run Drupal in a browser without any hosting. In future, users will have the option of exporting their files and data to a hosting provider of their choice.