25 Mar 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

The Drop Times: April Sides Receives 2026 Aaron Winborn Award at DrupalCon

April Sides has been named the recipient of the 2026 Aaron Winborn Award, recognising her sustained contributions to the Drupal community through organising, accessibility advocacy, and community support initiatives. Presented at DrupalCon Chicago, the award honours individuals who demonstrate integrity, kindness, and long-term commitment to open source collaboration. Announced by members of the Drupal Community Working Group, the recognition situates her work within broader efforts to sustain participation and community health across Drupal.

25 Mar 2026 6:52am GMT

24 Mar 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Drupal blog: Drupal at 25: Built to Last. Ready for What's Next.

Missed the Driesnote? You can watch it here.

Drupal, the open source content management platform that runs some of the most demanding websites on the planet, turned 25 in January. But while the community is celebrating what is a remarkable milestone for any open source project, it is actively strengthening its foundations to lead in the AI era and looking ahead to a future it intends to shape.

This week at DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert delivered his annual keynote, the DriesNote, and it was one of the more honest talks you'll hear at a tech conference. A clear-eyed look at what's working, what's under pressure, and what the plan actually is.

AI is Disrupting Everything, But Deep Expertise is Irreplaceable

For more than two decades, the Drupal ecosystem has rested on three things: the platform itself, the agencies that build with it, and the community that maintains it. That triangle has survived waves of new technology and constant change. It's been remarkably resilient.

But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at once? When anyone can spin up a decent-looking site in fifteen minutes, what does that do to the people who've spent years building something better? That's what is happening at the moment, as the world is being flooded with AI-generated "average". Average content, average code, average websites - average is easier to attain than ever.

What it means is that the only thing that will actually matter, to customers, to organisations, to the people trying to build something lasting on the open web, is genuine, hard-won, deep expertise.

What AI Actually Can't Do

Here's something worth understanding, because it gets lost in the noise.

AI can generate a beautiful website in about fifteen minutes. Tools like Lovable and Replit are genuinely impressive. You give them a prompt, they give you something that looks polished and professional. It feels like magic.

But a prototype is not a production system.

The moment you need structured content that editors can actually update, workflows that a real team can follow, permissions, governance, security, accessibility, multilingual support, compliance... you're not building a website anymore. You're building a system. And building systems is exactly what Drupal has excelled at for 25 years.

The demo at DrupalCon made this tangible. A beautiful event site built in Lovable in minutes, then migrated into Drupal CMS using AI coding tools, where the hard-coded layout became structured, reusable, editable content. Same visual ambition. Completely different foundation.

The pitch is simple: AI gets you to visual ambition fast. Drupal makes that ambition durable.

What's Actually Shipping

This isn't a vision talk. Things are being built and released.

DrupalCMS 2.1 landed at DrupalCon, built on top of Drupal Core 11.3. Over the last 18 months, core database and cache utilization have roughly halved, meaning every Drupal site in the world gets faster when it upgrades. That's not a minor thing. That's the compounding benefit of a serious engineering community.

Site templates and a marketplace are now live at marketplace.drupal.org, with more than ten purpose-built templates covering nonprofits, education, healthcare, events, government, and SaaS, built by agencies that understand those sectors. Free and premium options, with direct access to the people who made them if you need help.

Canvas, Drupal's new page-building layer, lets teams create and customise pages at speed without sacrificing the structured content underneath.

The Context Control Centre is a system for storing and managing your organisation's institutional knowledge (brand guidelines, content strategy, audience personas, live analytics) and it's moving from prototype to production. The idea is that AI tools are only as good as the context they're given. Without it, you get the average of the internet. With it, you get something that actually knows your brand.

And in the AI layer itself, a demo showed what it looks like when a marketer can drop a raw content brief into Drupal, have the system read it, load the right brand and strategy context, ask clarifying questions, and generate a production-ready page, with proper cross-linking, structured data for AI search engines, and an accessibility check built in.

That's not a concept. That's a demo running on real code.

One Developer, Six Weeks, 90,000 Lines of Code

The most striking moment of the keynote was a contribution from Jurgen Haas, one of the Drupal community's most experienced developers. He builds ECA, Drupal's automation engine, running on thousands of production sites.

Three years ago, he knew what ECA needed. He knew how to build it. He never had the time.

Six weeks ago, he started. With AI as a collaborator, handling scaffolding, generating tests, refactoring code, he shipped a completely rebuilt workflow editor: a new visual interface, built-in debugging and replay, in-context automation for non-technical users. 90,000 lines of code. Full test coverage. One person.

"This is what one Drupal developer can build in six weeks," he said. "Imagine what all of us can build next."

The key detail: Jurgen could explain every line. He could defend the architecture. He owned what he built. AI removed friction. It didn't replace expertise.

The Harder Conversation

Not everything in the keynote was product news.

Dries was honest about the pressure on Drupal agencies. When AI commoditises production, and it is, the business models that agencies have built over years start to look shaky. An agency leader named Aidan Foster, seventeen years into running a Drupal shop, described the feeling plainly: "AI had converted making things into a commodity. That shook the foundations I had spent 17 years building."

But Aidan's conclusion was interesting. The bottleneck isn't production anymore. It's creativity, strategy, and judgement. If you use AI without asking the hard questions, who are we, who are our audience, what makes us different, you get the boring average. The agencies that will win are the ones that get good at encoding expertise, not just delivering outputs.

There's also a challenge for the community itself. AI lowers the barrier to contribute code, which sounds good, until you realise the burden of reviewing that code falls on the same small group of maintainers. And when people use AI to skip the deep learning that used to come from contributing, the community gets shallower. A shallow community can't maintain what's been built.

Dries' response was a new mantra:never submit code you don't understand. It doesn't matter what tools you used to write it. If you submit it, you own it.

The Bet Worth Making

Twenty years ago, Dries was a bedroom inventor who collapsed from stress on a street in Belgium. He had a choice: take a safe job, walk away from the thing he'd built, or ask for help and become a deliberate leader.

He made the harder choice. The community that grew up around that choice is why Drupal is still here, still relevant, still running critical infrastructure for organisations around the world.

Now there's another crossroads. AI is both the flood and the drainage system. It destabilises the foundations and it can help rebuild them stronger.

Twenty-five years of Drupal is twenty-five years of expertise built patch by patch, merge request by merge request. A community that showed up not because it had to, but because it cared. That's not a liability in the age of AI. That's exactly what this moment needs.

DrupalCon Chicago runs through this week. The marketplace is live at marketplace.drupal.org. The Context Control Centre is approaching production. The Drupal AI initiative is moving fast.

File attachments:
DriesNote1.png
DSC_8250.JPG
DSC_8272.jpg

24 Mar 2026 4:50pm GMT

DrupalCon News & Updates: Put users first and design for everyone: Submit to the UX, Accessibility and Design track

Great digital experiences don't happen by accident, they're built with intention, inclusion, and users at the heart of every decision. At DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the UX, Accessibility and Usability track is bringing together designers, developers, content strategists, and decision-makers to explore how Drupal powers truly user-centred digital products.

We're looking for speakers with real stories to tell. Whether you've transformed an accessibility audit into lasting organisational change, built a design system that scaled beautifully across channels, or used user research to completely reshape a development roadmap - we want to hear from you.

Photo by Matthew Saunders

Foto by Matthew Saunders

We're particularly interested in sessions covering:

· Accessibility beyond compliance - embedding WCAG and ATAG into everyday workflows

· User research that drives real development decisions

· Design systems and collaborative design-development workflows

· Usability improvements backed by evidence and data

· Content design and strategy, including practical uses of AI

· Digital sustainability - designing for efficiency and longevity

This track is for anyone who believes that inclusion, usability, and good design aren't nice-to-haves - they're essential. Whether you're sharing a case study, a practical toolkit, or a freshperspective, your session could help Drupal practitioners everywhere build better, more inclusive digital experiences.

Submissions close 13 April.

Submmit your session: https://events.drupal.org/rotterdam2026/program-glance

Don't wait! Share your expertise and help shape the conversation at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.

24 Mar 2026 4:44pm GMT

ImageX: Top Drupal Modules: How These Giants Can Transform Your Website

24 Mar 2026 4:29pm GMT

Matt Glaman: Catch @todo comments referencing the current issue

When making code changes or fixing issues, it's easy to leave @todo comments behind. Sometimes they mark areas waiting on an upstream fix, sometimes they're reminders that never got revisited. Either way, they accumulate - and the ones tied to the specific issue you're working on should be resolved before the MR merges.

phpstan-drupal 2.0.12 adds TodoCommentWithIssueUrlRule to catch this in the GitLab CI jobs on Drupal.org.

This rule is inspired by staabm/phpstan-todo-by, which handles expiring todos by date, version constraint, and issue tracker status. It doesn't currently support custom issue fetchers or alternative detection mechanisms, such as matching ticket IDs to branch names - but that flexibility could make its way there someday.

24 Mar 2026 1:00pm GMT

Specbee: How to get your content picked by AI Answers (Not just ranked by Google)

Simply ranking high in Google is not enough today. Learn how to get your content chosen by AI in this brief guide to AI Search Optimization.

24 Mar 2026 12:04pm GMT

Pronovix: How to Serve Markdown to AI Agents Without Breaking Your SEO

As autonomous agents increasingly interact with technical documentation, traditional HTML can introduce challenges by filling limited context windows with layout elements, navigation, and scripts. This structural cluttering not only drains computing resources but directly causes context pollution and AI hallucinations.

Discover how you can reduce this "token tax" and create cleaner, more AI-friendly documentation experiences.

24 Mar 2026 9:22am GMT

Wim Leers: Validation-first

When I wrote my last post one year and one day ago, "vibe coding" was new. In fact, I heard about it for the first time while walking to some DrupalCon Atlanta social event - Bálint and Lauri were talking about it after a long conference day. By the end of 2025, it was in the dictionary. Three months into 2026 and it's everywhere - for better or worse.1

Also at the end of 2025, Bálint did a very impressive demo for the Canvas team: AI tools that knew nothing about Canvas were able to successfully generate Canvas code components. During his demo he called out something unexpected (for 2024 Wim): the demo worked with minimal prompting thanks to Canvas' code components' detailed validation. 😮

How did we get here?!

Config validation for more reliability & less frustration

I started advocating for validating Drupal's configuration in 2022-2023. I argued Drupal's config (schema) system was powerful but unreliable, that we should add validation to Drupal core's config entity types.

The intended use cases for config validation that I mentioned in my DrupalCon talks: make Recipes reliable, allow decoupled admin UIs, make writing config via JSON:API a reality, improve automatic updates' reliability and increase the reliability of Drupal deployments (especially ones doing advanced things with config management).

In my assessment, superficial config validation was a risk for the Drupal ecosystem. Thorough (or often any) config validation would enable more use cases, and would allow the entire ecosystem to move faster and with more confidence - end users, developers, Drupal businesses but also automated tools such as scripts.

Not on my bingo card in 2023: AI.

Validation in Canvas

Later I found myself to be the (back-end) tech lead for Drupal Canvas. Product Manager Lauri had made it a clear requirement that all existing Drupal best practices for config management/syncing should result in perfectly reliable syncs when it comes to Canvas' config entities. Hence aiming for thorough validation2 was one of the few crystal-clear things when we started Canvas.

Canvas' config is 100% validatable, has thorough test coverage and detailed config schema, with many custom validation constraints.

The thinking:

  1. Achieve Canvas' reliability ambitions.
  2. Enable higher velocity by having these foundations be precisely validated, tested, defined. Knowing that much functionality would be built on top, unreliability would be painfully present throughout, for both developers and end users. So: aim for instantaneous feedback with precise, actionable guidance.
  3. Build Canvas validation-first, to avoid painful or even impossible update paths (Drupal core's path towards validatable config schema has been challenging).

The result is a quote of the inimitable phènaproxima3:

Canvas is the most goddamn validated piece of code in all of Drupal

Realization: reducing human frustration also is AI acceleration

Back to Bálint's demo of ~3 months ago. In his demo, the human doesn't need to keep re-prompting the AI to try changing X or Y for things to work: Canvas' validation errors tell the AI, so the human doesn't need to deal with mundane details!

The same reasons that reduce human frustration are also the ones that accelerate the use of AI tools. Humans benefit hugely, but as a bonus, LLMs can use the same precise guidance with actionable validation error messages (strictness alone is not enough); bringing not only more reliable results, but also less energy waste and faster results.4

Conclusion: the value of precise validation has multiplied. It now also guides AI/LLMs to generate something valid. Investment in validation now pays off multiple times. For some, "important because it enables AI" may be the most convincing argument.

Dries wrote about how AI flattens [user] interfaces. To use the terminology in his post: validation is something that supports both the visible and invisible layers! Without it, both humans and AIs need to either guess/retry or become experts in the underlying code.

Thanks to Bálint for reviewing this.

0% written by AI.

24 Mar 2026 8:58am GMT

The Drop Times: Dries Buytaert Reframes Drupal’s Role as AI Reshapes the CMS Ecosystem

Drupal's 25th anniversary keynote in Chicago moves beyond retrospective framing to address a structural shift affecting the CMS ecosystem. Dries Buytaert outlines how artificial intelligence is changing how websites are built, where value is created, and how Drupal must respond through product changes, new workflows, and a renewed emphasis on structured content and governance.

24 Mar 2026 6:54am GMT

23 Mar 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #545 - DKAN

Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it's used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We'll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545

Topics

Resources

Guests

Liz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

23 Mar 2026 6:00pm GMT

CKEditor: New in CKEditor Drupal modules: CKEditor AI and more

The latest update to the CKEditor contributed modules brings AI writing and editing directly into Drupal. Premium Features module 1.8.0 introduces CKEditor AI, adding AI Chat, AI Review, AI Translate, and AI Quick Actions inside the rich text editor. Authors can write, review, and translate content without the back and forth of third-party tools.

23 Mar 2026 4:40pm GMT

Drupal Core News: Help us reach Drupal 12's second release window in August

Recap of Drupal 12 release windows

Our release schedule includes three potential release dates for Drupal 12.0.0, depending on when critical requirements are completed:

  1. Week of June 15, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by March 27
  2. Week of August 10, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by May 15
  3. Week of December 07, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by September 11

Our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is the week of August 10, 2026

Many great improvements landed recently. The main branch is on Symfony 8 and most deprecated modules are removed already. With only a few days remaining until the March deadline of the first release option though, we are confident that not all critical requirements will be completed by March 27. Therefore, we are officially announcing that our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is August 10, 2026, and the beta deadline for critical requirements is May 15, 2026.

We need your help to complete requirements by May 15!

While there are other pending improvements that are not hard requirements for Drupal 12's release, these are the most urgent needs:

  1. PHPUnit 12 support

    While our ultimate goal is to support PHPUnit 13 in Drupal 12, there are significant API changes in PHPUnit 12 that we first need to adopt. See #3527936: Introduce support for PHPUnit 12

  2. Import maps API

    CKEditor 5 is changing their installation method in the near future. See #3527914: [PP-1] Use New installation methods for CKEditor5

    To support this, we need a JavaScript import maps API in core. See #3398525: Add an API for importmaps

  3. Update path related changes

    To test update paths from Drupal 11.3.0, we need to generate new database dumps. See #3569127: Add new 11.3.x database dump fixtures, without modules deprecated for removal in 12.x

    Remove older upgrade paths. See #3580877: [PP-1] Remove updates added prior to 11.3.0 from 12.x

  4. Remove tests from release packages

    To reduce the size of core, we are excluding tests from core release packages, and offering them via a different namespace. This is a disruptive change and should only be done in a major release.
    See #3067979: Exclude test files from release packages.

  5. Deprecate and remove libraries, modules, themes and dependencies

    The Toolbar Module needs to be removed from core now that the Navigation module is stable and in the standard profile. See #3484850: [PP-1] [meta] Deprecate Toolbar module

    There are more dependencies, modules and themes that are still possible to remove. See #3466088: [meta] Deprecate dependencies, libraries, modules, and themes that will be removed from Drupal 12 core

  6. Move from Claro to Gin as admin theme

    Gin is in core as an alpha experimental extension. Help make it stable and so it can replace Claro.
    See #3576488: [meta] Admin theme: path to stable.

  7. Update to ESLint 9

    The coding standard checks are using the unsupported ESLint 8. We need to update to version 9. See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.
    See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.

The above list are the current highest priorities. We'll keep identifying and tagging Drupal 12 release priority issues. The up to date list can be found using the Drupal 12.0.0 release priority tag.

23 Mar 2026 4:24pm GMT

The Drop Times: DrupalCon Begins, Conversations Ahead

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 has begun, bringing together the global Drupal community from March 23 to 26 at the Hilton Chicago. As the event kicks off, attention is turning to the sessions scheduled over the coming days, many of which focus on accessibility, inclusion, and how Drupal teams are responding to evolving real-world requirements.

In the lead-up to the event, The DropTimes published a series of articles previewing selected sessions from the program. These included Palak Agarwal's coverage of accessibility audits on Drupal websites, highlighting recurring issues such as missing alt text, poor contrast, and structural inconsistencies that continue to affect many Drupal projects.

Among the upcoming sessions is "Future-Proofing Accessibility: Strategies for Government & University Platforms," featuring M. Nikki Flores, Javier Reartes, and Kat Shaw, scheduled for March 24. The session will focus on moving accessibility earlier into the workflow, drawing from large-scale public sector and university implementations.

Another session featured in our coverage, "Designing for Difference: Practical Strategies for Building a Neuroinclusive Organization" by J. Matthew Saunders, will explore how workplace systems can be redesigned to reduce friction and support neurodivergent teams.

As DrupalCon Chicago gets underway, these sessions point to the conversations that will shape the week ahead. The focus is not only on what Drupal can do, but how it can be built and used in ways that are more accessible, inclusive, and effective in practice.

DISCOVER DRUPAL

EVENTS

ORGANIZATION NEWS

FREE SOFTWARE

Additional developments from across the Drupal ecosystem were published during the week. Readers may follow The DropTimes on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for continuing updates. The publication also maintains a presence on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.

Thank you.

Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor
The DropTimes

23 Mar 2026 3:42pm GMT

The Drop Times: ECA Session at DrupalCon Chicago Focuses on Expanding Access Beyond Core Users

A DrupalCon Chicago session will outline the next phase of the ECA module, focusing on making workflow automation accessible to a wider range of users. Despite adoption across more than 16,000 sites, ECA is estimated to be used by only a small portion of the Drupal ecosystem. The presentation will explore how usability, onboarding, and guided workflows are being reworked based on community feedback.

23 Mar 2026 10:04am GMT

ImageX: Take Control of Links in Drupal with Modules Like Linkit and Editor Advanced Link

Links help shape the experience of discovery: they are like little portals that transfer readers to a different place on the web with a single click. For search engines, they act more like pathways that reveal how your content connects to everything else. The practical importance of both internal and external links deserves special coverage, which we'll explore in this post.

23 Mar 2026 12:25am GMT

20 Mar 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Agaric Collective: Join us at the Healthcare Summit at DrupalCon Chicago 2026 this Monday

Come Monday, March 23rd, for a day devoted to Drupal in healthcare- a relaxed and friendly opening to DrupalCon with information-packed presentations plus two "table talk" sessions which will give everybody a chance to dive deeply into key topics, including privacy and overall takeaways. Whether you are in a state department of health, a non-profit hospital, a public health organization, or anyplace else in the broad healthcare space, there are unique needs in ensuring security, accessibility, compliance, and availability of important information and tools.

Online communication and emerging technologies promise improved access and capabilities for patients and professionals. Useful and inspiring digital experiences, however, must be built on a foundation of privacy, accessibility, and legal compliance. Come listen to healthcare technology practitioners share their experience solving these and more challenges in healthcare.

Get tickets to go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!

Ticket includes lunch, and we will be all wrapped up by 4pm.

Who Should Attend

Everybody interested in hearing and discussing how companies and the community are creating rich digital experiences in the healthcare space. All levels of colleagues in the pharma, medical, clinical, hospital, payers, caregivers, advocates, and healthcare professional space should go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!

Bring your needs to the table talks and we will embark on facilitated peer-to-peer problem solving with others who are affected and tech and healthcare industry experts.

COVID-19/DrupalFlu Safer Space

We will have a sensor in the room to monitor CO₂ levels and if they remain between at 800-1000 ppm.

Agaric will also have high-quality N95 masks available to anyone who wants them, and may bring our own MERV-13 Corsi-Rosenthal box fan filter, which provides appropriate filtration for reducing the spread COVID-19.

More about the Healthcare Industry Summit

The Healthcare Industry Summit brings together professionals and innovators to explore how Drupal can drive impact in healthcare. Through expert-led sessions, you'll gain insights into topics such as the responsible use of AI, personalization, content marketing, and streamlining migrations.

In addition to presentations, roundtable discussions will provide opportunities to share experiences, exchange ideas, and build connections with peers tackling similar challenges. Join us to discover innovative approaches and collaborative strategies that are shaping the future of healthcare with Drupal.

The Healthcare Summit at the 2025 Chicago, Illinois, DrupalCon is organized by Jeanne Cost, Laura Chaparro, and myself. I am glad to be playing a part in coordinating this summit, especially given Agaric's involvement in and commitment to health and science communities.

Read more and discuss at agaric.coop.

20 Mar 2026 7:39pm GMT