SDX Aurora is a modern, React-powered admin theme for Drupal that offers a faster and more interactive user experience. It features a sleek dark sidebar, a customizable design system, and allows for SPA-like navigation with features such as a command palette and inline confirmations. The theme provides enhanced administration pages for common tasks like managing content, views, and blocks, all with a fresh interface.
SDX Aurora is a modern admin theme for Drupal, built on SDX React Base and powered by the SDX component system. It replaces Drupal's default admin experience with a React-powered interface featuring a dark sidebar, indigo design system, SPA navigation, and DataProvider-powered admin pages.
Features
Design
- Dark sidebar with collapsible navigation, icons, and dropdown/flyout submenu modes
- Indigo design system with consistent typography, spacing, colors, and component styles
- Configurable accent colors: Indigo, Blue, Emerald, or Amber
- Block-driven layout with sidebar, topbar, and content regions configurable via Block Layout
DataProvider pages
Full React component implementations for common admin pages:
- Views listings and Views editor with drag-and-drop handler reordering
- Permissions matrix
- Field UI and field list management
- Block layout editor with place-block modal
- Content type editing
- Entity lists with bulk operations
- Menu editor, appearance/theme management, status report, help pages
- Announcements feed, admin overview, config pages
- Modules management page (via sdx_aurora_modules submodule)
Navigation and interaction
- SPA navigation with instant page transitions and skeleton loading
- Command palette via Cmd+K / Ctrl+K for quick admin navigation
- Inline confirmations for delete and destructive actions, no page redirects
- Prefetch on hover for near-instant page loads
- SidePanel for loading Drupal forms via AJAX without leaving the page
Drupal integration
- Full Drupal behavior support: machine name, tableDrag, states.js, vertical tabs
- Block system integration with contextual links
- Structured TopBar rendering from page data (title, breadcrumb)
- Toast notifications for Drupal status messages
- SSR-ready when sdx_ssr is enabled
Architecture
Aurora extends SDX React Base and inherits all standard Drupal template overrides (forms, tables, views, fieldsets, etc.). Aurora only adds its own layout, sidebar, topbar, and DataProvider components on top. The SDX build pipeline handles template inheritance automatically.
Submodules
- SDX Aurora Modules (
sdx_aurora_modules): modern modules management page with search, filtering, and batch operations - SDX Aurora Node Editor (
sdx_aurora_node_editor): React-based content editor
Post-Installation
drush theme:install sdx_aurora
drush config:set system.theme admin sdx_aurora
drush cr
Visit /admin/appearance/settings/sdx_aurora to configure sidebar mode (dropdown or flyout), accent color, and footer branding.
Customize the admin layout at /admin/structure/block/list/sdx_aurora:
- Sidebar: Site branding, Admin navigation
- Top bar: Breadcrumbs, Page title
- Highlighted: Status messages
- Content: Main page content
Additional Requirements
- Drupal 10.3+ or 11
- PHP 8.3+
- SDX core module with sdx_react, sdx_typescript, sdx_sass, and sdx_router enabled
- SDX DRAST with sdx_data_provider
- SDX React Base theme
- Node.js 18+ for building components
Recommended modules/libraries
- sdx_ssr (included in SDX) for server-side rendering
Supporting this Theme
Report bugs and feature requests in the issue queue.
Part of the SDX ecosystem.
Community Documentation
- Coming Soon -