On September 29, Dries Buytaert showed a multilingual food magazine demo in his DrupalCon Rotterdam Driesnote. That was Dashi, the culmination of our work to give Drupal CMS 2.2 standout multilingual features. Here is what it is, how you can try it and how it came to be.
What Dashi is
Dashi (pronounced dah-shee) is a fictional food magazine built as a site template for Drupal CMS. If that definition is familiar, that is because the name is a nod to its predecessor: dashi is the Japanese broth of kombu and bonito, the literal culinary source of the umami flavor.
So Dashi actually ports the classic Drupal core Umami demo to Drupal CMS! You get:
- Recipe and article content types, with ingredients, preparation and cooking times, servings, difficulty and categories
- Well-loved recipes and articles, in English and Spanish
- Page layouts, headers and footers built with Drupal Canvas, editable in place
- Translation right inside the Canvas editor via Canvas Translate, including optional one-click AI translation
- Search and RSS feeds out of the box
- A warm editorial look from the Dashi theme, derived from the Mercury design system
I like to think of it as an appetizer: enough to taste what the system can do, but light enough to invite you to start cooking yourself.
The perfect time to add this site template
Umami has introduced people to Drupal since 2018. Its community-contributed, cooked and photographed recipes gave Drupal a human face. It was used in many demos for search, AI and so on. But by now it was showing its age. With the advent of Drupal CMS and easy page customization with Canvas, the days of this demo in Drupal core were numbered.
In May 2025 I opened an issue to move Umami out of core and make it a contributed site template. Since then Drupal CMS grew to a dozen site templates, and Umami is not available to install for users in Drupal 12, kept only for performance testing. Its content deserved better than quiet retirement!
Given the various projects named Umami in core and contrib, I went with Dashi for the new site template. It keeps the recipes and the bilingual content people know, and puts them on a modern stack: Canvas page and content templates, recipes and site templates. It was the perfect showcase for the multilingual work in Drupal CMS 2.2.
Try it and help cook
Simplytest.me hosts demos of all site templates, pick the "Site templates" option there and Dashi from the popup to get a 2 hour sandbox to try it out.
For local installation the easiest way is to pick Dashi in the Drupal CMS installer directly.
Dashi 1.0 is a starting point, not a finished meal. Issues, ideas and new recipes are all welcome in the Dashi issue queue. Come cook with us!
