Pulse
Pulse is a Drupal website template designed for quickly building content-rich sites like healthcare platforms or knowledge portals. It provides a pre-configured foundation with reusable UI components, layout templates, and essential Drupal features to accelerate site setup and ensure design consistency.
Pulse is a Drupal CMS site template (recipe) designed to quickly bootstrap
modern, content-driven websites such as healthcare platforms, knowledge portals,
research hubs, and digital publishing sites.
Built on Drupal CMS 2.x, Pulse provides a curated starter foundation with
pre-configured content structures, design-system-driven UI components, Canvas-powered
layout templates, and essential Drupal CMS feature modules.
The template bundles configuration, layout components, and recommended modules into a
reusable site starter that can be installed into any Drupal CMS project. Pulse helps
teams accelerate site setup, maintain design consistency, and adopt component-driven
development using the SPACE Design System and Canvas.
Key Features
Design System Driven
Pulse uses the SPACE Design System (space_ds) to provide reusable UI
components such as:
- Accordions
- Buttons
- Containers
- Hero banners
- Contact cards
- CTA banners
- Content detail layouts
- Image cards
This ensures consistent UI patterns across pages and supports a scalable,
component-driven approach to site building.
Canvas Layout Components
Pulse integrates Drupal Canvas to build flexible page layouts using
composable components. Included Canvas blocks and components support:
- Navigation
- Branding
- Breadcrumbs
- Menu blocks
- Webform blocks
- Content listing blocks
Canvas also enables component-driven page composition, giving editors greater flexibility
when creating and managing layouts.
Content Listing Blocks
Pulse ships with multiple predefined listing blocks powered by Views, including:
- Article listings
- Research listings
- Video listings
- Resource listings
- Recent content
- Recent pages
- Draft and scheduled content views
These blocks allow teams to quickly create dynamic content sections across pages.
Included Drupal CMS Recipes
Pulse extends the following Drupal CMS base recipes:
- Drupal CMS Admin UI
- Drupal CMS Anti Spam
- Drupal CMS Authentication
- Drupal CMS Content Type Base
- Drupal CMS Forms
- Drupal CMS Media
- Drupal CMS Privacy Basic
- Drupal CMS Search
- Drupal CMS SEO Basic
- Drupal CMS SEO Tools
Contributed Modules Used
Pulse installs and requires a set of contributed modules that provide a strong foundation
for modern Drupal CMS sites:
- Cookies – Cookie consent management
- Easy Email Express – Email delivery configuration
- SPACE Design System (space_ds) – Component-based UI system
- Drupal CMS Admin UI – Enhanced editorial interface
- Drupal CMS Media – Media management
- Drupal CMS Forms – Form management
- Drupal CMS SEO Tools – SEO configuration
Canvas Components Included
Navigation
- Main navigation
- Footer navigation
- Social media menu
- Account menu
- Utility menu
System Components
- Breadcrumbs
- Branding block
- Messages block
- Login block
Content Blocks
- Article listings
- Research listings
- Video listings
- Resource listings
- Recent content
- Publishing workflow views
Use Cases
Pulse can be used to quickly build:
- Healthcare websites
- Research portals
- Digital publishing platforms
- Knowledge hubs
- Corporate content sites
- Community platforms
- Media portals
Requirements
- Drupal CMS 2.x or higher
- PHP 8.1 or higher
- Composer-based Drupal installation
Installation
Pulse is a Drupal CMS recipe and must be installed into an existing Drupal CMS installation.
- Require the recipe
composer require drupal/pulse - Install the recipe
drush si recipes/pulseAdjust the path depending on your installation location.
Configuration
After installation, it is recommended to:
- Configure navigation menus
- Update the homepage layout using Canvas
- Add content using predefined content types
- Configure cookie consent settings
- Configure email delivery through Easy Email Express
Recommended Workflow
Pulse works best with the following development workflow:
- Component-driven development
- Canvas layout builder
- SPACE Design System components
- Composer-based Drupal projects
Maintainers
Pulse is maintained by the community. Contributions and improvements are welcome.
Contributing
You can contribute to Pulse by:
- Improving Canvas components
- Adding new SPACE DS components
- Enhancing default layouts
- Reporting bugs
- Submitting feature requests
Please use the issue queue for discussions, bug reports, and improvement suggestions.