The Rightup

The Rightup is a media, news, and magazine site template for newsrooms, publishers, and editorial teams. It is built the Drupal recipe-first way, with the Vartheme BS5 Rightup front-end theme, and works on both Drupal CMS and the Varbase project.

Drupal.org Project

https://www.drupal.org/project/rightup

Demo

https://rightup.demos.vardot.com/

Release and Requirements

• Latest release: 1.0.0 (24 September 2026), the first stable release, see the release notes.

• Drupal core ^11.4, on Drupal CMS 2 or on Varbase 11 (drupal/varbase_project:~11.0.0).

• PHP 8.4, see Requirements.

Recipe Type

Site recipe (full site template)

Overview

The Rightup composes the Varbase and Drupal CMS base recipes, installs its own theme, and adds what is its own: the pages, the Drupal Canvas patterns, and the demo content.

It ships a home page with a live feed ticker, section landing pages, news and podcast listings, article and podcast episode pages, a search results page with filters, and newsletter, about, contact, and policy pages, all built with Drupal Canvas. Demo content fills them: news articles, podcast episodes with audio and transcripts, authors, media, menus, and taxonomy terms.

What You Get

• Drupal CMS recipes: admin UI, authentication, media, forms, search, SEO basic and SEO tools, accessibility tools, anti-spam and privacy.

• Varbase base recipes: users, admin, security, media, editor, content, workflow, search, SEO, webform, page, blog, news, podcasts and performance.

• Vartheme BS5 Rightup installed and set as the default theme, with the front page set to /home.

• Pages ready to publish: a home page with a live feed ticker, section landing pages, news and podcast listings, article and podcast episode pages, search results, newsletter, about and contact, and the policy pages the footer links to.

• News and podcasts: articles with categories, tags, authors and media, and podcast episodes with audio and transcripts.

• A live feed ticker an editor curates from an entity queue, falling back to the newest published content, so publishing an article reaches the home page without anyone editing it.

• Search that filters: a results page with category, content type and date filters, and inline filters on the news listing.

• A header and footer built from the design: main and offcanvas navigation, newsletter call to action, social links and a copy-page-link control.

What It Composes

Section	Comes from
News: the News content type and its listing	Varbase News Base
Podcasts: the Podcast episode content type, its fields, and its listing	Varbase Podcasts Base
Blog: the Blog content type and its listing	Varbase Blog Base
Search: the content type facet, the date filter, and the result displays the search page uses	Varbase Search Base
Pages, media, editor, workflow, SEO, forms, and the admin UI	The Varbase and Drupal CMS base recipes

What It Owns

The Rightup adds no content type of its own. What it owns is the editorial presentation on top of the content types the base recipes provide:

Feature	Purpose
Live feed ticker	A single scrolling line of the latest headlines on the home page. An editor curates it from an entity queue, and it falls back to the newest published content, so publishing an article reaches the home page without editing the page.
Search results page	A Drupal Canvas page at /search, with a keyword bar, a results listing, and a filter rail of category, content type, and date.
Editorial page set	Home, section landing pages, news and podcast listings, newsletter, about, contact, and the policy pages the footer links to.

Included Modules

Module	Purpose
Entityqueue	Holds the curated list of items for the live feed ticker.

Included Themes

Theme	Description
Vartheme BS5 Rightup	Media and magazine theme for Varbase, based on Vartheme BS5.

Setup

A site template is applied during the site installation, so it is chosen in the installer rather than applied to a site that is already installed.

Install With the Drupal CMS Installer

The Rightup is listed in the Drupal CMS installer. You need DDEV installed; see also the DDEV Drupal CMS quickstart.

mkdir my-drupal-site && cd my-drupal-site
ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web
ddev composer create-project drupal/cms
ddev launch

In the browser, choose the The Rightup card (Created by Vardot) on the Choose a site template step and finish the installation. No composer require is needed.

The Rightup Card in the Drupal CMS Installer

Scripted Install With Composer and Drush

For scripted or CI installs, require the template and install the site with Drush. Tested on Drupal CMS 2.2.0 with Drupal core 11.4.8.

mkdir my-drupal-site-rightup
cd my-drupal-site-rightup
ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web --php-version=8.4
ddev start
ddev composer create-project drupal/cms
ddev composer require drupal/rightup
ddev drush site:install -y ../recipes/rightup
ddev drush cache:rebuild
ddev launch

Add --site-name="The Rightup" to the site:install line to name the site; without it the site is named "Drush Site-Install". Keep the cache rebuild: right after install the home page can serve a cached 404 until the cache is rebuilt. Without DDEV, run the same composer and drush commands without the ddev prefix.

Set Up on the Varbase Project With DDEV

See Installing Varbase With DDEV for the full guide.

mkdir my-varbase-rightup-site
cd my-varbase-rightup-site
ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web --php-version=8.4
ddev start
ddev composer create-project drupal/varbase_project:~11
ddev composer require drupal/rightup:~1
ddev launch

Finish the installation in the browser and select Rightup (the name the Varbase installer shows) in the Choose a site template step.