Lightning

November 2, 2021: So long and thanks for all the fish...

Acquia ended support for the Lightning distribution on November 2, 2021, simultaneously with Drupal 8. Lightning 3, 4, and 5 no longer receive any security updates or bug fixes. It is possible to safely uninstall Lightning from your site; please see the official announcement, FAQ for site owners, and developer instructions for more information.

The distribution for Enterprise Authoring

curated by Acquia

The intent of Lightning is to enable developers to create great authoring experiences and empower editorial teams. We do this by providing a lightweight framework, documentation and best practice examples for building working solutions in Drupal.

In Drupal 8, we have taken advantage of new D8 functionality and tightly coupled functional areas we consider to make up the new standard for enterprise authoring in Drupal including Layout, Preview, Workflow and Media. We have also embedded hundreds of automated tests allowing developers to implement continual integrations pipelines that monitor major functionality, essentially providing a safe environment to innovate with their own custom code additions to Lightning.

Lightning "à la carte"

You can take advantage of nearly all of Lightning's functionality without having to use the Lightning distribution itself. Check out the individual components' pages to learn more:

• Lightning API
• Lightning Media
• Lightning Layout
• Lightning Workflow

Compatibility

Lightning does NOT pin to a specific version of Drupal core, so you are able to update core as needed. However, Lightning does restrict to specific minor releases of core, in order to preserve compatibility. See the following table for which Lightning versions are compatible with which minor versions of core:

You'll notice that the latest versions of both Lightning 3 and 4 support the same versions of core. Read more information about that.