Daedalus: Human+AI publishing system

Daedalus is a human+ai publishing system for Drupal: a page builder, site designer, and content editor all in one. And anything you can do, the AI can too.

With Daedalus, a user doesn't have to know Drupal. They can work at a high level and focus on the content itself: creating can be as simple as using a text editor. If they want granular control, Daedalus is a user interface for HTML and CSS with tools tailored to amplify their skillset.

Daedalus builds on Drupal's existing fields and Layout Builder foundations. It can be installed into existing sites and creating a new site is easier than ever with our install script.

Checkout the release article!

Built on Drupal Core.

We built on top of the existing Drupal data model. Whether you are using vanilla nodes, Paragraphs, or Layout Builder, a block that has been doing good work for 10 years can continue to work in this system. Use YAML to tell the page builder about your HTML or there's also an experimental auto-discover markup module and then stylish can style it.

When you drag and drop blocks that we provide, the markup has been boiled down to the absolute essentials. Text blocks are text tags like h1 and they become <a><h1>Hello World</h1></a> when you click the link icon or ⌘k.

And that's regular text. The CKEditor integration will blow your mind!

Container blocks are just a div, nest-able, and style-able for layout. Using these thin blocks, you can build anything.

Stylish, the pixel painter.

The Daedalus theme is intentionally small. Instead we have design systems, which are purpose built for human+AI collaboration. Design systems can be installed from files or created by the user.

Design systems take the shape of materials, the site's reusable styling vocabulary:

• skin: a collection of site defined design tokens (css variables) and default styles
• palette: named colors and gradients
• animations: keyframe animations
• variants: a saved set of styles for a given element
• stencils: a full component's markup plus its styling (Daedalus native blocks)

It is optional, but these materials allow for structurally enforced, on brand-styling. Just like the user, the AI uses the design system, so on-brand or wild-and-crazy is just a checkbox away.

One page builder backend, two frontends: Browser and AI.

AI was not retrofitted into a page builder. Daedalus was built from the ground up as an opinionated claim on how humans and AI can collaborate with a shared abstraction layer. Anything you can do, the AI can do, and vice versa.

Try it, Undo it.

Human+AI changes stage in tempstore so they are undoable in the history panel. Until you hit save, the changes aren't public and if you want to go back to the original state, discard changes.

Blast radius: one workspace.

When Daedalus is combined with workspaces, changes and saves land inside the workspace. This way, you and the AI can work together in a sandbox across multiple sessions, iterate on the page, and review before publishing to live.

AI providers.

Currently we support Anthropic for chat and gemini for image generation. Using a small model like Haiku works, but you will get much more impressive results using larger models like Sonnet or Opus.

More AI providers coming soon!

Getting Started

New Sites

To try it out: use this curl command that launches a Drupal site with Daedalus installed. Using the Daedalus Recipe, it creates a new project directory, asks if you want AI integration, downloads dependencies, installs Drupal, and launches the site.

With DDEV installed, paste this curl command in your terminal:

curl -sL 'https://git.drupalcode.org/project/daedalus_recipe/-/raw/1.0.x/install.sh' -o install.sh; bash install.sh

Existing Sites

Recipes have their limitations. For example, a recipe cannot configure your already existing Layout Builder pages to use Edit Mode. So it's impossible to make a recipe that would work for every site.

To make adopting Daedalus on existing sites easier, the Daedalus Recipe was broken up into ingredients. The easiest way to apply the ingredients is to give your coding agent this prompt and let it drive. This is experimental though and your milage may vary, so patches welcome! Alternatively, you can manually apply these individual ingredients based on what your site needs. For example:

drush recipe ../recipes/daedalus_recipe/ingredients/daedalus_styling/

Use the new site curl command as a working example that you can reference. For AI integration, check out the Daedalus AI recipe.

Sub Modules

Daedalus Stylish

Style anything on the page. Browser widgets and AI share one style model, validated against your style guide, and the site's look itself lives as data (design tokens, site element defaults).

Daedalus AI

Adds Agentic page building to Daedalus. Users chat with an assistant that understands the page they are viewing and can edit it in place.

Daedalus UI

Provides Edit Mode. When a user enters Edit Mode, the page turns into a WYSIWYG editor.

Daedalus Blueprint

Bidirectional JSON entity serialization for Drupal. Serialize any fieldable entity, including Layout Builder pages with nested paragraphs and inline blocks, to a clean JSON format.

Daedalus Edit

Adds inline editing and Daedalus native blocks.

Daedalus Layout

A drop in replacement for Layout Builder. Sections nest natively: place a section inside another section, at any depth.

Daedalus Tempstore

Adds tempstore support to non-layout builder pages and undo/redo capabilities.

Companion projects

Daedalus Recipe

Daedalus Theme

Technology Preview

Expect breaking changes on each alpha release.

Don't use Daedalus for real until a stable release!