fidzu : Drupal

02 Sep 2026 7:58am GMT

Missing image alt attributes cost accessibility and SEO points

Empty alt attributes are an accessibility and SEO killer, and the cost is measurable. Google Lighthouse flags the error on both of its audits: up to 6 points subtracted from the Accessibility score and 8 points from the SEO score.

The impact on real users is worse than the score. A screen reader completely ignores an image with no alt text, so blind users never know the image was there, which makes the experience disruptive and confusing. It also violates WCAG Success Criterion 1.1.1: Non-text Content, the baseline requirement for accessible non-text content.

That is why we had to act when a migration project resulted in thousands of images without an alt attribute.

A Drupal migration left 12,000 images without proper alt text

A Drupal 9 to Drupal 11 migration for a multilingual sports news project surfaced around 12,000 images with missing or incorrect alt attributes, found via Screaming Frog tool. Some images had no alt attribute at all, while others had alt text in the wrong language, with English alt text appearing on the /es version of the site.

The obvious next step was to look for a pattern. Was the issue tied to a specific content type, such as Articles? Was the wrong-language text caused by untranslated Media content? Answering these questions turned out to be surprisingly hard: Drupal provides no default mechanism, no view…

01 Sep 2026 10:53pm GMT

AI traffic is not one thing, and a policy which treats it as one thing gets the answer wrong in both directions. Here the decision is written down, class by class: the crawlers which harvest sites to train models are turned away at the edge before a single line of Drupal or Backdrop runs, while AI search indexers, and the fetch a real person triggers by asking an assistant, stay open and rate-limited per vendor, not per address, because one prompt fans out across dozens of addresses. Every layer ships with the platform and runs on your own server; nothing is rented, and no rule lives somewhere you have no login for. Changing it for one site is one line in a file you own, live in about two minutes, deleted to restore the defaults; and your own policy goes out at /llms.txt straight from the site's files folder. The honest part is the best part: a user-agent can be forged, the maps fail open on purpose, and the docs say where each shield stops and the next one begins.

01 Sep 2026 6:47pm GMT

Publishing one good page is a writing task. Keeping hundreds of pages accurate across products, markets and languages is a systems problem.

Drupal content operations at scale means treating each fact as structured data with relationships, permissions and history, then reusing it across templates, languages, JSON-LD and APIs. Here is how fields, taxonomy, Views and workflows keep large Drupal sites governable when AI-assisted research raises the bar.

01 Sep 2026 2:58pm GMT

01 Sep 2026 1:02pm GMT

Drupal Canvas hides most Metatag fields behind one SEO title box. Check out how Canvas Page Metatag restores them and fixes a Robots checkbox bug.

01 Sep 2026 10:38am GMT

Every Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 migration we run follows the same 52 steps in the same order - audit, content model, module mapping, the 301 map, build, verification, and a cutover designed so rollback is one DNS change away. The full checklist, with the reasoning behind each step and a printable summary card.

01 Sep 2026 1:13am GMT

Reproducing a bug that only happens on the live Drupal site used to mean a hand-made dump, the uploads copied across one rsync at a time, and an hour of persuading the copy it is not production. On a BOA-hosted site it is one pull into the DDEV project you already have: a small add-on reads what the site reports about itself, sets the local project to the same PHP and Drupal version and the same docroot, then brings the database and the uploads down through the ordinary limited shell account you already use for SFTP, with the key you already have, and nothing new switched on server-side. It syncs one way only, on purpose, and the site's own Drush takes over once the copy is yours. Self-hosters get the other door: the whole stack on a spare VM at a private hostname, no public IP, no DNS, the same BOA as production. This post is the recipe, six commands from start to Pull succeeded, plus the small print neither door hides.

31 Aug 2026 9:30pm GMT

Drupal Meets Matrix part 1: Setting up Matrix API

John Locke Mon, 08/31/2026 - 14:30

Dev Corner

31 Aug 2026 9:30pm GMT

Imagen

Imagen

Carlos

Ospina

·

Technical Account Manager / Drupal Advisor

31 Aug 2026 5:54pm GMT

AI assistants increasingly sit between people and websites, retrieving and interpreting information on their behalf. That shifts the problem beyond whether software can connect to a site at all. The system also has to make clear what information means, what software may access, and which rules govern what happens next.

The Drupal AI Initiative made the first part of that problem explicit on 24 August 2026. Fields, taxonomy, relationships, metadata, and other forms of structured content can give software information that is easier to identify and interpret than meaning conveyed mainly through page design. Permissions and workflows add another layer by distinguishing what is public, restricted, current, or subject to editorial control.

A more concrete access boundary appeared this week in Acquia DAM's MCP Server. Compatible AI assistants can search assets, retrieve metadata, and obtain links through an authenticated connection that follows the user's existing DAM permissions. The initial implementation is read-only: an assistant can retrieve permitted information but cannot edit metadata or upload files. The interface therefore exposes capability without giving the software unrestricted authority over the system behind it.

GovCMS addresses a different machine-readable problem. On 27 August 2026, Rules as Code became a production capability on the platform, allowing policy, legislation, and business rules to be represented as reusable digital assets and embedded in digital services. Its first production implementation is an eligibility checker for agencies considering GovCMS, and the underlying eligibility rules are also published as open source. GovCMS describes the approach as a foundation for future AI-assisted services rather than as an AI-agent implementation today.

These developments are not three versions of the same architecture. They expose three related requirements for systems that software increasingly has to interpret or use: meaning must be explicit, access must be constrained, and important rules should not have to be guessed from prose. For Drupal teams, the agentic web may therefore depend as much on long-standing work around content modelling, permissions, auditability, and governance as it does on new AI capabilities.

Follow The DropTimes on LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, and Facebook, or join #thedroptimes on Drupal Slack.

This issue of Editor's Pick was written and curated by Allen Jason.

31 Aug 2026 4:40pm GMT

Two Drupal GovCon keynotes on building through disruption: the courage to lead change, and the care to keep people from being left behind.

31 Aug 2026 2:19pm GMT

31 Aug 2026 11:38am GMT

Specbee has joined the Drupal AI Initiative as a Certified Partner. See what Drupal AI initiative is about, how it's governed, and what it means for your enterprise site.

31 Aug 2026 5:10am GMT

Drupal 11: Migrating From Jadu Into LocalGov Drupal: Part 3

This is the second article in a series looking at migrating from Jadu into a LocalGov Drupal (LGD) site for the Central Bedfordshire site. In the first article we looked at the Jadu API and setting things up so that we could make calls to the API and parse the XML data using the migration systems available.

In the second article we looked at reproducing Jadu URLs to create redirects for migrated content, even though the Jadu API doesn't contain any URL information.

Now that we have a the Jadu connection created and redirects working we can start tackling other aspects of the migration, so let's look at migrating the main content of the site from Jadu. We can pull structured pages of content out of the Jadu API and apply them to the structure of a LGD site, maintaining the same hierarchical structure and order of pages.

Much of the content of a LGD site is built using just a handful of content types, and Central Bedfordshire was built in the same way. LGD comes with a number of content types that allow content editors to add content in different ways, which allows for some decent customisation in the structure and layout of a site. Not only that, but as we are using Drupal it is possible to customise this structure as much as we need to suit the needs of the site.

For Central Bedfordshire, we had the standard structure of the site built with Service Landing pages, which gave editors the ability to link out to other pages that contained all of the content. These inner pages were set up as Guide pages, and the migration of that content is what we will be focusing on in this article. Please note that I will need to gloss over a little bit of the detail in this article, but rest assured that the source code will be available soon.

philipnorton42 Sun, 08/30/2026 - 20:02

30 Aug 2026 7:02pm GMT

Four version control systems in three files, a hardcoded root password we decided not to airbrush, and a surprising amount of today's stack already in place. In the oldest corner of our static file mirrors sits a directory called alpha3, and in it three shell scripts dated 20 November 2009 - older than the public BOA repository itself, whose GitHub history only starts in January 2010. These are the scripts Barracuda & Octopus grew from: one installs the Ægir layer on a VPS, one upgrades it with cron stopped and a backup taken first, and one builds a whole menu of 2009-era Drupal platforms, from Open Atrium to ManagingNews. Now published byte for byte on our docs site, with a guided tour of what survived, from the /data/disk tree to the /dev/ delivery path.

29 Aug 2026 5:05pm GMT