The friendliness of Drupal 8 for content editors and website administrators grows every day. New handy features come thick and fast — updated Media Library interface, built-in drag-and-drop Layout Builder, media embed button in CKEditor, and so much more.

Today, we are happy to announce another lucrative improvement — a new and modern administration theme Claro is supposed to come to the D8.8 core soon!

Why Drupal 8 needed a new administration theme

The idea of a new administration theme arrived as part of the Drupal team’s striving to make Drupal more competitive in everything.

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert wrote that he had talked in 2018 to almost a hundred Drupal agency owners to discover their key stumbling blocks in selling Drupal. One of their common replies was about the admin interface having an outdated look.

The admin UI theme, Seven, had been created back in 2008-2009 in the time of D7, with a few updates in D8. Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge and lots of modern UI design trends.

There was also an admin UX study performed in 2018 when content editors where asked in detail about their impressions of working with Drupal and given an opportunity to suggest improvements. According to the famous contributor who worked at this study group, Suzanne Dergacheva, Drupal 8 for content editors is “notoriously intimidating” when it comes to newbies.

So the great minds of the Drupal community agreed that the admin UI really needed a good brush-up and a new, clean, and modern theme.

The Claro theme in Drupal 8: a good core candidate

One of the results of the above-described decisions was the appearance of the Claro theme. It is a clean, concise, responsive theme with a modern look and an enhanced level of web accessibility. It is being built on top of the Seven theme.

It is now a contributed project, but there is a proposal to add the Claro theme to Drupal 8.8.0 core as an experimental theme.

The development is in full swing, with the project’s new version, alpha 5, released in September 2019. The maintainers actively welcome any feedback and bug reports about the new theme to brush it up.

Claro theme principles and features

Here are some features of Claro, both completed and planned:

a new, colder color scheme

higher contrasts

touchscreen readiness

the Quick Edit, Toolbar, and Contextual Links components

redesign of content pages and all their components

redesign of the file and image upload widgets

The Claro theme is built in accordance with the Admin UI & JavaScript Modernisation Initiative. It strictly follows the new Drupal 8 admin theme design guidelines:

precise shapes and good contrasts

clear hierarchy and relations between elements

a clear purpose for each element

rational use of white space

optimal readability

emphasis on what matters

visual clues

friendly and cheerful colors

and more.

Claro at the Drupal Usability meeting

The theme is receiving special attention at the Drupal Usability meeting, according to Gábor Hojtsy’s tweet. The meeting experts are asking to get more feedback, so it looks like the new project is going to be polished to perfection.

Claro as part of the top Drupal 8 distribution

Claro is already having a good test drive because it is part of the most popular D8 distribution, or installation kit — Lightning.

By the way, while we are talking about Drupal 8 for content editors, we should say Lightning is a distribution well-tailored to their needs and great for media and publishing websites. It is actively used by almost 3,000 websites. By itself, Claro is installed on 500+ sites today.

Use the benefits of Drupal 8 for content editors with us!

As you can see, the present and future features of Drupal 8 for content editors are very lucrative. To keep up with them, you can contact our web development team who will smoothly update your website to all new releases.