fidzu : Drupal

At DrupalCon Chicago 2026, the Drupal Community Working Group was honored to announce April Sides as the recipient of the 2026 Aaron Winborn Award. Named in memory of longtime contributor Aaron Winborn, this award recognizes individuals who embody kindness, integrity, and a deep, above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community.

About April Sides

April Sides truly embodies the spirit of the Aaron Winborn Award through the care, consistency, and intention she brings to everything she does in the Drupal community. She has been a driving force behind initiatives like A11yTalks and Drupal Camp Asheville, while also contributing to programs like MOSA and serving on the CWG Community Health Team to foster a more welcoming and supportive space for all. As a speaker, trainer, organizer, and volunteer at nearly every camp she attends, April shows up again and again for this community. Her work is grounded in accessibility, inclusion, and genuine care for people, and her impact is felt not just in what she builds but in how she supports and uplifts everyone around her.

Heartfelt Nominations

April is not just a stellar professional. They are a habitual contributor. Serving their local Drupal community and now serving on a non-profit board over Drupal events, April is an inspiration. When I think of April, I remember how they brighten the room, with humble fashion sense, making the multitudes of duties seem easy.

April Sides deserves the Aaron Winborn Award because she consistently shows up for the Drupal community with care, integrity, and a deep sense of responsibility for the people in it. April does the kind of work that often goes unnoticed, not because it isn't important, but because it's rooted in trust, discretion, and kindness. She makes space for people when they need it most and does so without expectation of recognition. Over the years, I've seen April take on some of the hardest and emotionally demanding roles in our community, including event leadership, community health work, and serving as a code of conduct contact. These roles require empathy, patience, and fairness, and April approaches them in a way that makes people feel heard and supported. When situations are complicated or uncomfortable, she listens, she helps, and she follows through. April's commitment goes beyond maintaining community spaces. She actively works to make them better. April leads with kindness and integrity, and her quiet, consistent dedication has made the Drupal community a safer, more welcoming place for so many of us.

April is such a great person and cares so much about the community. She's an organizer of the second best DrupalCamp in the world (which is no small feat). I believe that camp would not exist without her hard work.

Award Creation

Special thank you to Annertech and CSGov in Czechia for creating and delivering the award this year.

Take a look at how the award was made.

About the Aaron Winborn Award

The award is named after a long-time Drupal contributor who lost his battle with ALS in 2015. This award recognizes an individual who, like Aaron, demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and an above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal project and community.

Previous winners of the award are Cathy Theys, Gabór Hojtsy, Nikki Stevens, Kevin Thull, Leslie Glynn, Baddý Breidert, AmyJune Hineline, Angie Byron, Randy Fay, Mike Anello, and Kristen Pol. Current CWG Conflict Resolution Team members, along with previous winners, selected the winner based on nominations submitted by Drupal community members.

Nominations for next year's award will open in early 2027.

At DrupalCon Vienna, Dries Buytaert opened his keynote with a question the room was already asking: what happens to Drupal in a world full of AI?

He answered with a live demonstration showcasing three things the initiative had built and shipped:

• Pace of delivery: pages that used to take hours now get built in minutes.
• Brand and voice control: a new Context Control Center feature lets teams set their brand voice once, and every AI agent applies it.
• Governance at scale: autonomous agents scan the site, find internal references, and propose updates.

The keynote highlighted an important aspect: humans stay in the loop and approve every change before anything goes live.

The Drupal AI Initiative arrives in Chicago with more to show

Since Vienna, 10 new organisations have joined as partners, bringing the total to 31. The initiative has now secured the equivalent of $1.5 million in combined support, comprising both direct funding and a committed contribution of 50 staff dedicated to advancing the work.

What is most exciting to me is not just what we've built, but how we've built it. With a growing group of contributors and more than $1.5 million in funding, this is now a coordinated effort to bring AI into Drupal in a way that is open, trusted, and built to last.

Dries Buytaert

A portion of funds is being invested in delivery management. The initiative conducted a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process to appoint delivery partners responsible for coordinating work across both the innovation and product development streams. QED42 and 1xINTERNET were selected to lead the innovation and product development work streams respectively.

Progress is also visible in what has shipped since Vienna. Drupal AI 1.2.0 came first. MCP support followed. Drupal CMS 2.0 launched with Canvas as the default editing experience.

Drupal AI 1.3.0 introduced governance controls, editorial workflows, and production visibility for organisations running AI seriously.

Dedicated AI Marketing Leads Appointed

With the increased momentum in development it has been essential to scale marketing capacity. Paul Johnson announced the appointment of 10 marketing leads. Each will specialise on delivering specific key elements of the marketing strategy.

• Media Relations: Pritam Prasun, Open Sense Labs
• Social Media: Amber Henry, Morpht
• Webinars: Matthew Saunders, Amazee.io
• Events: Paul Johnson, 1xINTERNET
• Sales Enablement: James Tillotson, 1xINTERNET
• Case Studies: Rosie Gladden, ImageX
• Existing Capabilities: Duncan Worrel, Zoocha
• Upcoming Roadmap Capabilities: Will Huggins, Zoocha
• Demos: Dan Lemon
• Brand and Design Strategy: Dan Stratton, Zoocha

The initiative has been successful in bringing Drupal to external audiences across multiple global locations including Oaisys Conference in Pune, Drupal AI Summit Paris, DrupalCon Nara in Japan, the European Commission hackathon, and a growing number of workshops and meetups kept the work visible across contributors, regions, and practical discussions.

In the near future we have Drupal AI Summit New York City, May 14th, intended to bring the same conversation to enterprise leaders and practitioners. The team will exhibit at The AI Summit London as part of London Tech week which sees more than 45 000 attendees from around 90 countries across multiple days of programming.

In Chicago, that momentum was particularly easy to see

Drupal AI has moved beyond being merely a set of separate features. It is now realised through connected capabilities. Content, context, and editorial decisions begin to work together inside the same system.

Early in his Keynote at DrupalCon Chicago, Dries Buytaert widened the conversation. He said AI is now affecting three parts of Drupal at once. The product. The agencies around it. The open source community behind both.

That makes Chicago feel larger for Drupal AI. The releases matter. But they now sit inside a broader shift already affecting how Drupal is built, funded, and extended.

Photo: Paul Johnson

What Chicago made clear

Drupal AI is being deliberately designed as a native part of the platform, embedded within how Drupal operates rather than introduced as an additional layer on top. In doing so, AI becomes more useful as it works inside systems that already carry structure and context.

That is why Canvas AI mattered in Chicago. The demonstration was less about generating a page quickly and more about showing how content could move through Drupal while keeping structure, linking, and reusable patterns intact.

The same logic appeared when Dries returned to the Context Control Center, first introduced in Vienna. If AI is expected to assist meaningfully, organisational knowledge cannot remain outside the system. Brand rules, editorial priorities, and internal decisions need to stay close to where content is shaped.

That is what Chicago makes clearer: Drupal AI is being positioned around context as much as capability.

What this means for agencies

One of the clearest shifts in Chicago came when the conversation moved from product to agency work.

AI is rapidly reducing the cost of production, but that does not reduce the need for judgment. It changes where the value sits.

Dries brought in Aidan Foster's observation directly: the bottleneck is no longer making things. The harder part is deciding what should be made, how it should work, and what quality still means when output becomes easier to create.

That is why agencies remain part of the same conversation. As production speeds up, strategy, interpretation, and institutional understanding begin to matter more, not less.

In that sense, as production becomes easier, the harder part shifts elsewhere. Context, judgment, and internal knowledge begin to matter more, which is exactly where Drupal is placing more emphasis.

What do we want to accomplish by Rotterdam?

The initiative now feels materially different from where it stood even a few months ago. Prototypes are moving into alpha and beta stages, stable releases are approaching, and coordination across teams is visibly stronger. More people are involved, and the relationship between Drupal CMS, Drupal AI, and core has become easier to follow.

That shift matters because the work no longer reads as parallel experimentation. Product releases, editorial workflows, and context systems are beginning to move toward the same operating idea: AI becomes more useful when it works inside structures organisations already trust.

Photo: Jeremy Chinquist (jjchinquist)

The roadmap shown in Chicago reinforces that direction. For organisations already evaluating open source AI for digital platforms, Drupal AI now presents a clearer path to adoption.

For a complete view of how Drupal AI is framing that next stage, Dries Buytaert's full DriesNote from Chicago is worth watching.

In his '#DriesNote' presentation at DrupalCon Chicago 2026, Dries addressed the elephant in the room: AI is currently flooding the web with "average" content: fast to produce, but hard to distinguish. While there are tools that can generate beautiful prototypes in 15 minutes with no technical skill, those prototypes lack the structured data, governance, and durability required by serious organizations.

Drupal is bridging the gap between "AI speed" and enterprise assurance through two key innovations: the Context Control Centre (CCC) and Drupal Canvas AI, a new approach to building digital experiences.

The Context Control Centre (CCC): Institutional 'Knowledge as a Service'

The most significant hurdle for AI today is a lack of context. Without it, AI simply gives you the "average response." The Context Control Centre changes this by allowing organizations to store their unique "DNA" directly within Drupal.

The CCC organizes institutional knowledge into actionable data:

• Brand Guidelines: Specific rules for tone, voice, and formatting.

• Personas: Detailed profiles of target audiences (e.g., Controllers vs. IT Ops).

• Dynamic Context: A groundbreaking feature where the CCC connects to live data sources like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Built into your Drupal CMS, AI tools don't just guess; they work within your specific business reality to ensure their output is always on brand, within guidelines, and relevant to the contextual nuances of the task at hand.

Drupal Canvas AI: Where Speed Meets Substance

The second half of the equation is Drupal Canvas AI, the next-generation page builder.

Instead of dragging and dropping components, you can just tell the AI what you want with prompts that describe the page and content you want to produce. Canvas AI, in conjunction with the CCC, will create the page and include the components you need.

As Dries noted, production is becoming a commodity, but judgment and strategy remain human. Drupal AI doesn't replace your teams, it amplifies their capability to deliver 'Quality at Scale.'

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.