Thunder

Thunder is the professional publishing distribution initiated by Hubert Burda Media and maintained by its core team with a coalition of publishers — Drupal shaped for newsrooms and magazines: editorial workflows, media handling, scheduled publishing, paragraphs-based article building.

What ships on BOA

The THR platform is rebuilt from the upstream Composer template as BOA releases ship — at the time of writing the 8.x line on the current Drupal 11 core. One structural quirk worth knowing: Thunder uses docroot/ as its web directory rather than the more common web/ — BOA handles that for you, but it matters if you browse the codebase over SFTP or wire up your own Composer workflow on a platform you added yourself.

Installing a site on it

Create a site on the Thunder platform with the thunder profile and the install lands on a clean, working site greeting you with its login page — log in and the editorial environment is ready. No wizard, no post-install assembly.

Good to know

• Thunder tracks Drupal core closely upstream, and the BOA platform tracks Thunder — a newer BOA build usually carries the newer Thunder. Moving an existing site up happens with the Migrate Site task, on your schedule.
• Publishing workloads lean hard on caching, and a Thunder site here gets BOA's standard stack (Valkey object cache, page caching) without any setup on your side — see Caching.

Where to go next

• Choosing and managing platforms — getting THR into your platform list.
• Cloning and migrating — the safe way to move an editorial site between platforms.