Acquia Site Studio (formerly Cohesion) helps us to build design system driven web applications. This means you can assemble pages from a library of re-usable branded components without learning any coding skills. User experience, accessibility are all built-in.

If you are planning to migrate to Drupal, we'd recommend building Site Studio in from the ground-up. However, if you have an existing Drupal 8 application, you can still gain the benefits of Site Studio. Here's a comparison.

Re-platform

Migrating to Drupal 8+? If you are looking to re-platform onto Drupal 8+ - either from Drupal 7 or another CMS entirely - Site Studio can establish a pattern library that will help smooth your migration. 

Site Studio helps us create a flexible library of re-usable design patterns, stored as configuration within your CMS rather than code. This allows non-developer editors to assemble pages using branded components. These components draw their look, feel and behaviour from the website’s base styles - the core typography, colour palette and design principles that express your brand.

Site Studio components are configurable, so a single component can support a range of differing content needs depending on image usage, content alignment, component nesting, shown / hidden elements and so on.

Branding, responsive behaviour, and accessibility features such as spacing, semantic markup, descriptive tagging are baked-in to the components so your application will remain brand-consistent and enterprise grade without developer intervention.

Building Site Studio into the core of your site has some great advantages:

  • Site Studio is built into the base theme of Drupal, meaning it can control the responsivity and layout of the entire site.
  • Everything can become a component, giving you the flexibility to change anything you want apart from native Drupal elements like content types (news stories, case studies) etc - which are driven by the CMS already.
  • The editor has a consistent editing experience - with Site Studio at the core.

For all new Drupal sites, we recommend building Site Studio into the core of the site and let it power all responsive, styling and layout behaviours.

Platform enhancement

Are you looking to boost your existing Drupal 8+ application with Site Studio capabilities?

Site Studio can add a powerful set of site editing capabilities to an existing Drupal 8+ web native web application. And, depending on what you need to achieve, can be added with a minimum of disruption to your application.

We can create a series of branded design patterns in Site Studio. These can be inserted into your existing Drupal Content Types by adding Site Studio fields which  create a Layout Canvas for Site Studio. Components.

We can help to configure Site Studio to match your existing website’s responsive behaviour, typography and colour palette settings (base styles). We then create the component library to match your branding.

This allows you to:

  • Create bespoke campaign pages from your Site Studio pattern library
  • Insert component driven content into existing native Drupal Content Types for page take-overs, feature sections, and other flexible page configurations.
  • Use native Drupal to drive the rest of the site.

This might be the perfect option for you if you have an existing Native Drupal 8 site, and don't want to rebuild it with Site Studio in the centre.