Drupal Canvas Explained: Components, Patterns, Templates and Pages
Drupal Canvas gives you four building blocks: components, patterns, templates and pages. Once their relationship clicks, building a site without touching code stops being mysterious.
The cooking analogy
The four pieces map onto something everyone already understands:
- Components are your ingredients.
- Patterns are the dishes you make from them.
- Templates are the recipe cards.
- A page is the meal on the table.
Once you can say which of those four you are reaching for, the interface stops being a guessing game.
What the walkthrough covers
- The component library, and why 50+ prebuilt components matter
- How patterns let you save a combination of components for reuse
- Templates as the starting structure for a content type
- Creating a new page, applying a template, and dropping in components
- Adding a saved pattern to a page
- Reviewing and publishing
- Reverse-engineering an existing page to see how it was assembled
That last one is worth the time on its own. Pulling a finished page apart teaches the model faster than building one up from nothing.
No code required
There is no code in this video. If you can describe what you want on a page, you can build it.
Part 2 shows the same workflow driven entirely by AI prompts: Building a Drupal Page with AI.
I'm Joshua Fernandes — I work on Drupal and AI at Axelerant.