31 Jul 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

The Drop Times: Randy Kolenko on Maestro and Drupal’s Emerging Orchestration Work

Drupal's automation tools solve different problems. The harder question is how they can exchange work without weakening their execution models, permissions, or auditability.

31 Jul 2026 1:51pm GMT

Drupal AI Initiative: Empowering Creators and Governing Agents: The Next Phase of the Drupal AI Initiative

Author: Will Huggins

In 2025, the Drupal AI Initiative launched with a clear vision: to establish Drupal as the premier open-source AI platform for digital experiences.

One year later, the market momentum is clear. What began as a highly focused working group has grown into a powerful ecosystem supported by 32 global partner organisations, over 50 active contributors, and over $1.5 million in committed funding. Most importantly, with the core AI technology now clocking up over 18,000 installs, organisations are actively building their next-generation marketing engines on Drupal.

For digital teams, AI presents a host of opportunities. The power to increase speed of production on one hand, while maintaining quality, consistency and governance on the other. Drupal is addressing this head-on by creating two dedicated product workstreams: Inside AI and Outside AI.

This blog post outlines what this means for your digital roadmap and how Drupal can help your digital marketing operations win in the age of AI.

"Inside AI" vs. "Outside AI"

As AI has evolved from chat boxes into autonomous, multi-step agents, digital leaders need a platform that does two things simultaneously: empowers human creators inside the browser and securely integrates with external marketing systems.

To accelerate our product roadmap, we have divided our day-to-day development into two specialised, business-focused tracks:

1. Inside AI

  • The Core Value: Empowering your marketing and content teams.
  • The Focus: This stream focuses on the tools built directly into the editorial interface to supercharge you digital experiences and campaign execution. It drives our visual page-building tools, in-product copy editors, translation modules, and the Context Control Center (CCC).
  • The Goal: To eliminate the repetitive tasks and developer bottlenecks that slow down your marketing queue. Your team can take a campaign brief, generate a brand-consistent landing page, optimise it for SEO, and localise it for global audiences in seconds, all while keeping humans firmly in the loop to make the final publishing decisions.

2. Outside AI

  • The Core Value: Make it easy for site builders and developers to use coding agents to build, interact with and migrate to Drupal.
  • The Focus: This stream ensures that Drupal serves as a highly governed, secure production platform for websites, marketing systems, automation platforms (such as n8n or Activepieces), and external AI agents.
  • The Goal: To position Drupal as the most reliable, secure, and structured backend for your wider digital stack. We are making it incredibly easy for external systems and autonomous agents to build and deploy using Drupal without introducing security, compliance, or governance risks.

Through this dual focus, we aim to make Drupal the most advanced, intuitive workspace for your marketing teams and content creators, as well as the most secure and connectable platform to build on.

What is Ready Now?

As you plan your digital product roadmaps and marketing strategies, here is a summary of exactly what is production-ready, what is ready for pilot testing, and what is on the horizon:

Live and Ready

These capabilities are fully stable, secure, and ready to drive immediate ROI in your production environments:

  • Freedom of AI Choice: Drupal connects seamlessly with over 87 AI providers (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure and Amazee.ai). You can swap models behind the scenes to optimise for cost, performance, or geographic data residency rules without rewriting any code.
  • Creative & Editorial Assistants: Bounded, human-in-the-loop features like automated image alt-text generation, metadata auto-tagging, and initial copy drafting are ready to go. They act as immediate, built-in time savers for your editorial teams.
  • AI Automators: Automate time consuming content management tasks like re-tagging all your content or turning PDF or word documents into accessible HTML pages - AI Automators are your CMS superpower!
  • Brand & Data Guardrails: Advanced security filters that automatically sanitise sensitive customer data before it ever leaves for an external LLM, while validating incoming AI responses to ensure compliance and prevent "hallucinations" on your live site.

Ready for Beta Testing

These features are highly advanced and close to general availability. They are perfect for controlled pilot programs to gain a competitive edge:

  • The Context Control Center (CCC): The brain of your brand. The CCC is a centralised space where you can define your brand voice, editorial style guides, target audience personas, and domain knowledge. This ensures that any AI-generated layout or copy sounds like your brand, rather than generic web text.
  • Automated Translation & Multi-Step Campaigns: Workflows that automatically translate entire content libraries or combine multiple AI steps to generate structured assets while capturing local nuances and brand tone.
  • Conversational Site Building: Tools that allow digital product owners and site builders to configure and lay out basic Drupal structures using natural language, drastically reducing initial setup times.
  • Cost & Performance Tracking: Fully integrated with standard enterprise monitoring tools. You can track exact token usage, model costs, and AI activity in real time, protecting your marketing budget from unexpected bills.

Coming Soon

One of the cutting-edge, experimental capabilities currently being refined in sandbox environments is Fully Autonomous Agents. These background agents are designed to analyse website performance, automatically propose layout optimisations to boost conversions, or build complex database queries entirely on their own.

Control and Governance

As a mature open-source platform, Drupal AI is structurally sovereign, model-agnostic, and transparently governed.
Whether you need to host open-source models locally to comply with strict regional privacy regulations or plug into the latest commercial LLMs for maximum speed, Drupal AI ensures you always own your data, your models, and your digital roadmap. We build trust directly into the architecture through branch-based content versioning, strict governance workflows, and deep audit trails.

Accelerate Your Roadmap

The Drupal AI Initiative is driving the future of open-source digital experience. If your marketing or digital product teams are ready to leverage the power of collaborative AI, try Drupal today.

31 Jul 2026 10:03am GMT

Morpht: Building a semantic search chatbot with Drupal AI

The Drupal AI module provides everything needed for a RAG chatbot: AI Search embeds your content into a vector database, AI Assistant API wraps an LLM with a grounded search prompt, and AI Chatbot puts a Deep Chat block on the page. We cover setup, provider selection, module stability, troubleshooting tools, and the data flow considerations that government sites need to get right.

31 Jul 2026 4:35am GMT

30 Jul 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #563 - Drupito: More Than a Marketplace

Today we are talking about Drupito, its Business model, and Marketplaces with guest Ashraf Abed. We'll also cover Generate (Social Media) Image as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/563

Topics

Resources

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ashraf Abed - drupito.com ashrafabed Avi Schwab - froboy.org froboy

MOTW Correspondent

Avi Schwab - froboy.org froboy

30 Jul 2026 6:00pm GMT

Metadrop: How to automate WordPress-to-Drupal content migration with WordPress Migrate SQL

Some WordPress sites reach a point where the content model no longer fits the organization's needs. Custom content types, custom entities, and custom fields become necessary to represent internal data precisely, and Drupal supports all three, shaping that data with full flexibility.

Other sites reach that point because of AI. Drupal has built a strong AI ecosystem over recent years, enabling integrations of every needed type: content creation, accessibility checks, RAGs, among others. These are the two situations behind most WordPress-to-Drupal migrations: an architecture the site has outgrown, or an AI integration WordPress cannot support natively.

The challenge of migrating WordPress content to Drupal

The core challenge in a WordPress-to-Drupal migration is migrating the content itself. WordPress sites may host thousands of pieces of content that need to be moved to the Drupal site.

A full migration project runs through several phases: redesigning the site if needed, building the new architecture, and creating a Drupal node for every WordPress post or page. Creating the content is where the real work concentrates, since every image, every user, and every translation has to make it across, on top of adapting content to a different format defined by the new architecture.

A manual content migration is not viable due to its high costs and risks. Handled by hand, this work is prone to human error. A single error is easy to fix, but a…

30 Jul 2026 6:15am GMT

29 Jul 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Dries Buytaert: Responsibility follows control

An AI model does not decide what data it can access, which tools it can use, or whether it can act without approval. People make those decisions at different points. Upstream, a model developer trains and tests the model and decides whether and how to release it. Downstream, a developer builds the model into a system, connects that system to data and tools, and decides whether a person must review its proposed actions before they take effect.

Those choices determine whether harm is possible at all. So when harm occurs, responsibility should fall on those who controlled the relevant choices. That responsibility may be shared: model developers control training and release, product builders control permissions and deployment, and users control deliberate misuse.

Responsibility should follow meaningful control.

That principle is missing from much of the debate over open-weight AI models, which often treats the decision to release a model as the only one that counts.

Axios recently reported that United States officials had considered measures that could restrict American companies from using Chinese open-weight models. Open-weight models make their trained parameters available for others to download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure, without going through the company that built them.

More than 230 companies and organizations have since signed an industry letter defending open weights. After critics accused Anthropic of supporting a ban on open-weight models, Dario Amodei published a statement denying that position. He described open-weight models that do not have dangerous capabilities as a public good and supported mandatory safety testing for sufficiently capable models, open or closed.

The disagreement is less about whether open weights can create risk than about when those risks justify restricting a release, and whether restrictions would improve safety or mainly concentrate power in the largest AI labs.

I am firmly in the open-weights camp. I have run and compared open-weight models, argued that digital sovereignty depends on who controls software, not where it comes from, and believe organizations should control their infrastructure and data instead of depending on a handful of providers.

I also believe consequential algorithms need oversight. More than a decade ago, I argued that we would eventually need something like an FDA for software. The harder question is where responsibility for that oversight should lie.

Open-weight models unbundle control

With hosted, closed-weight models from providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI, the provider typically keeps the weights private, controls how customers access the model, and decides when to update the hosted service.

Open weights can separate those roles. One organization creates and releases the model. A repository such as Hugging Face hosts and distributes the weights. Another team might fine-tune them. A product builder incorporates the model into a product and connects it to data, tools, and users.

Each team controls something different. Because open weights unbundle control, it becomes harder to say who is responsible when harm occurs.

A model developer controls the training process, capability testing, documentation, and release decisions. A repository controls what information it displays about a model's origin, which security checks it performs on uploaded files, and which access restrictions it provides or enforces. A product builder controls what data and tools the resulting system can reach, which actions require human approval, and what gets logged.

Control is not the only thing that matters, but it shows who could still have changed the outcome. When harm involves AI, several actors may bear responsibility for the same incident because each controlled a different opportunity to prevent it.

A lesson from Drupal and Open Source

Like open-weight models, Drupal's code can be copied and changed without asking anyone's permission. A site owner could use it to spread misinformation or operate a fraudulent website. The site owner controls the content and operation of the site and is responsible for those choices. The Drupal project is not responsible merely because someone used its code.

But the Drupal project controls other decisions. When someone privately reports a security vulnerability, the Drupal Security Team follows a coordinated disclosure policy. It keeps the issue private while a fix is prepared. Once a security release is available, the team publishes an advisory and tells site owners to upgrade. The timing of that disclosure can give site owners a fair chance to protect themselves.

The same distinction applies to AI. Responsibility should follow the decisions each actor controls.

The product is where capability receives authority

A model generates outputs. An agent is a software system that uses a model to work toward a goal, often by calling tools and taking actions. The people who build and configure the agent decide what it can access, which actions it can take, and when it needs a person's approval.

In a coding agent such as Claude Code, a model can generate a database command. Whether that command can run depends on the tools and permissions the agent provides, as well as the access allowed by the computer, network, and database.

A content management agent can propose deleting an article. The content management system (CMS) determines whether the agent has permission to delete it, whether the deletion is reversible, and whether the action is recorded.

Permissions, isolation, audit logs, rate limits, human approval, and rollback are not merely engineering details. They determine who has control at the point where harm can still be prevented. That is why AI governance is becoming an essential part of product architecture.

How should government regulate AI?

Deciding who should answer after harm is the easier half of this, even when the answer is not obvious. The harder half is deciding what government should require before any harm has happened.

If control and responsibility are distributed across several actors, government rules should be distributed across them too. This is not a new idea. We already regulate many technologies this way.

More than a decade ago, when I argued for something like an FDA for software, I had drug approval in mind. I no longer think that is the right model. The FDA approves a drug for one or more intended uses, while a general-purpose model may be used for many different purposes.

Cars are a better comparison. The government sets safety standards, manufacturers certify that their vehicles meet them, and drivers are licensed separately. Manufacturers must also report safety defects and conduct recalls when required. Alcohol is regulated in layers too. Bars need a government license that they can lose, and in many US states a bar can be liable for harm caused by serving someone who is visibly drunk.

Each rule targets the actor who controls a particular decision. I would take the same layered approach to AI.

For most risks, government should regulate the products and services that put a model to work. Those rules might limit what data and tools an AI system can access, require human approval for consequential actions, or require those actions to be recorded.

Blocking a model's release is a much stronger step. For an open-weight model, that means preventing the developer from publishing the weights. For a closed model, it could mean preventing the provider from offering access.

I would support that only when safeguards in products and rules governing their use could not prevent a serious danger in time. The three-part test below applies only to this exceptional step, not to AI regulation in general.

Three questions before blocking a model's release

The strongest argument for restricting open-weight releases is that they are difficult to reverse. The UK AI Security Institute notes that safeguards can be removed and that released weights can be redistributed and run privately beyond the original developer's monitoring.

If a model made catastrophic harm much easier, its release could be the last moment anyone had meaningful control. By catastrophic, I mean mass-casualty or comparably systemic harm, not ordinary product failure, fraud, or abuse.

Before blocking a model's release, a government should be able to answer yes to three questions:

  1. Would releasing it make catastrophic harm substantially easier? The comparison should be with closed models and other tools people can already access.

  2. Would safeguards applied when the model is deployed or used fail? They might be ineffective, easy to bypass, or simply arrive too late.

  3. Would blocking the release materially reduce the danger? A restriction should reduce the risk, not merely move it to another country or distribution channel.

The third question is the one I expect people to argue with. Slowing an attacker down has value even if you cannot stop them. But if the same model remains available from another country or distribution channel, a ban costs defenders a tool they can inspect and run themselves while taking almost nothing away from the attacker.

As of July 2026, I have not seen public evidence that an open-weight model has crossed this threshold. It will eventually be crossed, which is why I still think meaningful regulation is coming.

For now, I would allow publication and place obligations where control already exists: on model creators for testing and release decisions, on distributors for provenance and file integrity, on product builders for permissions and deployment, and on users for deliberate misuse.

This approach also protects competition. A regulatory regime that only the largest labs can satisfy could protect them from competition without necessarily making anyone safer. It could also push organizations toward depending on a handful of providers for infrastructure they cannot inspect.

Open weights do not eliminate control. They distribute it. Regulation should follow that structure: place obligations on each actor at the point where harm can still be prevented, and block publication only when release would make catastrophic harm substantially easier, downstream safeguards could not contain it, and a restriction would materially reduce the danger.

29 Jul 2026 9:27pm GMT

Electric Citizen: What’s the Deal with Schema

library collection organized on shelves

It's not new and it's not sexy, but Schema.org is getting a lot more attention these days. The reason is AI.

You've probably heard that Schema improves your AI search results - apply it to your site and voilà, better results. But what is it? How does it help with AI? And, more controversially, does it actually help at all?

29 Jul 2026 4:07pm GMT

Drupal Association blog: Why We Contribute: The Philosophy Behind 1xINTERNET's Top-Tier Drupal Status

This is a guest post from the incredible team at 1xINTERNET, a Top-Tier Drupal contributor and digital agency headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany.

When the Drupal Association announced that 1xINTERNET had become one of the world's Top-Tier Drupal Contributors, it was a proud moment for the company. Reaching the highest level of contribution recognition places 1xINTERNET among a select group of organisations helping shape the future of one of the world's leading open-source content management systems.

Yet, ask anyone inside the company about the achievement, and you'll hear the same response: becoming a Top-Tier Contributor was never the ultimate goal.

Instead, it is the natural outcome of more than a decade of believing that if you build your business on open source, you should help build open source itself.

For over thirteen years, 1xINTERNET has invested in the Drupal ecosystem, not only by delivering digital platforms for clients, but by contributing code, maintaining projects, sponsoring community events, supporting governance, leading strategic initiatives and encouraging employees to actively participate in the community.

Today, the company sponsors more than 500 hours of Drupal contribution every month, actively supports more than 85 Drupal projects, has sponsored over 50 Drupal events, and has contributed to hundreds of issues across the Drupal ecosystem. Those numbers tell one story. The people behind them tell another.

Contribution isn't only about strengthening Drupal, it creates real value for the organisations that choose Drupal as the foundation for their digital platforms. We spoke with Baddý Breidert, Christoph Breidert and James Tillotson about why contributing matters, how it benefits clients, and why they believe giving back is essential to building better digital experiences.

Photo of James, Christoph, and Baddy
Photo of James, Christoph, and Baddy

Building the future instead of following it

For 1xINTERNET CEO Baddý Breidert, contributing to Drupal has always been part of the company's identity.

"It represents over a decade of dedication to the Drupal project," she says. "I've worked with Drupal since 2006 and been actively involved in the community since 2013. Being recognised as one of the top three Drupal companies globally validates the expertise and sustained effort our team has invested over the years."

But the motivation goes much deeper than recognition.

Instead of simply following the direction of Drupal, 1xINTERNET believes in helping shape it. Since Drupal is the technological foundation behind many of the company's digital platforms, contributing to its future isn't viewed as optional, it's viewed as a responsibility.

That philosophy influences almost every decision the company makes. Rather than waiting for new features, improvements or innovations to arrive, the team actively participates in creating them.

Managing Director Christoph Breidert describes it simply.

"We don't just build with Drupal; we help influence where the platform is going next."

It's an approach that benefits not only the Drupal community, but every organisation that chooses Drupal as the foundation for its digital future.

Open source is built on collaboration

Although contribution often means writing code, the three leaders agree that it's ultimately about something much bigger.

Open source succeeds because thousands of people collaborate, share knowledge and solve problems together. Every contribution, whether it's code, documentation, testing, mentoring, event organisation or strategic leadership, helps strengthen the ecosystem for everyone.

For Christoph, this spirit of reciprocity sits at the heart of open source.

"If you build digital solutions using an open-source project but choose to remain on the sidelines, you miss the opportunity to influence the tools you rely on," he explains. "Open source is built on shared knowledge, and contributing back is simply part of how we work."

That collaborative mindset is equally visible throughout 1xINTERNET's culture.

IxINTERNET's UK Growth Manager James Tillotson sees open source as an extension of how the company works internally.

"We don't hoard knowledge," he says. "We share it to raise the baseline for everyone, which in turn allows us to keep innovating."

Rather than viewing contribution as something separate from day-to-day work, it's embedded in the way teams learn, collaborate and continuously improve.

Contribution isn't separate from client work

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding open source is that contribution somehow competes with client work.

The reality, according to the team, is exactly the opposite.

James puts it bluntly.

"Contribution is client work."

When developers fix a bug in Drupal core or improve functionality that thousands of websites rely on, every client benefits, not just today, but for years to come.

Christoph agrees.

"If you're not involved in building the technology, you're always reacting instead of leading."

Technology evolves quickly. Artificial intelligence, digital experience platforms, accessibility, security and content management continue to change at an unprecedented pace. Agencies that simply consume technology are forced to wait for innovation. Agencies that contribute help create it.

Baddý believes that's one of the company's greatest strengths.

"Contribution allows us to lead initiatives like Drupal AI, ensuring we aren't just consumers of the technology but creators of it."

Instead of adapting after the market changes, 1xINTERNET helps shape those changes from within.

Driving innovation through Drupal AI

Perhaps nowhere is that philosophy more visible than in Drupal AI.

As Product Lead for Drupal AI, Christoph has been deeply involved in defining its roadmap, working alongside developers from around the world to build practical AI capabilities directly into Drupal.

For him, watching Drupal AI evolve from an ambitious idea into one of the platform's most exciting capabilities has been one of the defining milestones of the company's contribution journey.

"It's been incredible to collaborate with a global community to build something that will help shape the future of the web."

The significance goes beyond technical innovation.

Because 1xINTERNET helps build Drupal AI, its teams understand the technology long before it becomes mainstream. They know what's coming, how it works and how organisations can use it responsibly.

James, who contributes to the Drupal AI Marketing Initiative, believes this creates a significant advantage for clients.

"Our clients have access to the latest innovations because we're involved in creating them."

Innovation isn't something clients wait for. It's something they experience alongside the people helping build it.

Better contributions create better client solutions

Although many clients may never see the code being contributed to Drupal, they experience its impact every day.

Active contributors develop a much deeper understanding of the platform than those who simply implement it.

Because the team understands Drupal's architecture, roadmap and future direction, they can make better long-term decisions for every project.

"Our clients receive stable and modern solutions without having to manage the underlying complexity," Christoph explains. "By maintaining our contribution status, we act as a direct pathway to web innovation."

That means fewer surprises, more sustainable architectures and platforms designed to evolve instead of becoming outdated.

James believes clients increasingly recognise that value.

"They know we're not simply using Drupal, we're helping steer where it's going."

Trust has become a competitive advantage

Contribution also creates something that's difficult to measure but incredibly valuable: trust.

When organisations invest in large scale digital platforms, they aren't simply buying technology. They're choosing partners who will help them navigate years of future development.

Being recognised as one of the world's leading Drupal contributors provides confidence that 1xINTERNET isn't standing on the outside of the ecosystem, it's helping lead it.

Baddý has seen this become increasingly important during procurement processes.

More organisations now actively look for suppliers who contribute back to the technologies they depend on. Public sector organisations and enterprise businesses increasingly view contribution as evidence of technical excellence, long-term commitment and sustainability.

James has experienced this while expanding 1xINTERNET's presence in the United Kingdom. "When entering a new market where people don't yet know your brand, your contribution footprint becomes a global passport. The Drupal community already knows who you are."

That credibility opens doors long before a first meeting takes place.

Supporting digital sovereignty

For Christoph, contribution is also connected to a much broader movement taking place across Europe and beyond.

As organisations become increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, proprietary platforms and ownership of their data, open-source software is becoming strategically more important than ever.

By contributing to Drupal, companies don't simply improve software, they strengthen an independent digital ecosystem that organisations can trust.

"Businesses increasingly want digital sovereignty," Christoph says. "By actively contributing to Drupal, we're helping build a secure and independent IT landscape that organisations can rely on."

It's a perspective that positions contribution not only as technical work, but as an investment in the future of open digital infrastructure.

A culture that attracts exceptional people

Contribution doesn't only benefit clients.

It also shapes the people who choose to work at 1xINTERNET.

The company actively encourages employees to contribute code, maintain projects, organise events, mentor others and share knowledge across the community.

For many developers, that's exactly the environment they're looking for.

"Top developers want to work on things that matter," James says. "We offer them a stage, not just a desk."

Christoph agrees.

Many developers are motivated by solving meaningful problems that have an impact far beyond a single client project.

For Baddý, contribution creates something equally valuable: a culture of continuous learning.

By collaborating with some of the best Drupal developers in the world, the entire team continually raises its own standards, creating an environment where innovation and professional growth go hand in hand.

Looking ahead

Becoming a Top-Tier Drupal Contributor isn't viewed as a finish line.

Instead, it's another milestone in a much longer journey.

The company plans to continue investing heavily in Drupal AI, supporting the wider community, encouraging employees to contribute and helping organisations embrace open-source innovation with confidence.

Christoph hopes to make Drupal AI even more accessible through practical demonstration environments that allow organisations to experience its capabilities with a single click.

James wants to strengthen the connection between enterprise organisations and the open-source community, demonstrating that open source can successfully support even the most ambitious digital transformation projects.

Baddý remains focused on investing in people, community leadership and the long-term health of the Drupal ecosystem.

More than contribution

Ultimately, becoming a Top-Tier Drupal Contributor isn't really about rankings, badges or recognition.

Those are simply the visible results of years of consistent investment.

The real achievement is building a company where contribution is part of everyday work, where sharing knowledge is expected, collaboration is celebrated, and innovation is something created together rather than consumed.

For 1xINTERNET, contributing to Drupal has never been about giving something away.

It's about helping build a stronger platform, a stronger community and better digital experiences for everyone who depends on Drupal.

Because when the platform grows stronger, so do the organisations, developers and communities that build upon it.

29 Jul 2026 12:00pm GMT

Smartbees: Automatic Content Translation System

Discover how our solution automated content translation and helped the client's team work faster.

29 Jul 2026 8:42am GMT

Tag1 Insights: Teaching AI to Speed Up Accessibility Testing

Marlene Wanberg, Frontend Developer at Tag1 and a Drupal builder since 2007, built a suite of fifteen AI agent skills that runs a full automated accessibility audit and narrows thousands of raw scanner findings down to a short worklist of confirmed fixes.

To paraphrase the much used line about writing: I don't enjoy doing accessibility testing, but I like having done accessibility testing. When a site becomes more usable for everyone, I feel good. Users feel good. Clients feel good. (Regulators feel good.) The process of getting there can be very tedious.

Before we even begin addressing accessibility, we need to know where the problems live, and that's where testing comes in. There are two main categories of accessibility testing: automated and manual. Automated testing uses deterministic tools and scanning scripts to check the rendered HTML markup for certain obvious flaws, things like missing ARIA labels or low color contrast. Manual testing checks what those tools can't. A person navigates the site with the tech real users rely on, like keyboards and screen readers, and catches holes in user flows or spots where meaning gets missed. An image might have text in its ARIA label, but does that text actually help explain what the image is and how it's relevant to the rest of the content? Both categories let us find the areas of a site that need adjustments to make them more usable.

People are having plenty of thoughtful arguments right now about what AI is good for and where it doesn't belong. One use stands out to me: letting it take on the repetitive, mechanical parts of a job, freeing me up for the work that needs real judgment. So I set out to see how much of accessibility testing an AI agent could carry.

Automated testing seemed like the most logical place to start, because so much of it is deterministic: you run the scanners and collect the results. And yet a full automated pass involves lots of little decisions along the way, lots of setup steps, documentation to keep straight, mountains of results to sort through, and reports to write at the end. Exactly the type of work I wanted to hand off.

One Skill File Was Not Nearly Enough

Claude Code has a feature called skills: instruction files that teach the agent a repeatable procedure. That seemed like a promising starting point. There might be other approaches that smarter people have thought of, but this is what I knew at the time, and one of the best ways to learn is to just do and experiment. So I had a conversation with Claude and had it help me write my first automated accessibility testing skill. (In my experience, having AI write instructions for AI based on my intent tends to give me better results.)

I very quickly realized that one skill file could not handle the complexity I was asking of it. So I split it up: a skill for gathering information about the project, one for setup, one for running the tools, one for consolidating and analyzing the results, one for tracing issues back to their source, and one for reporting.

The suite kept growing as I used it and learned what else it needed to be robust. I'd run it through fresh on a site and each time find different ways it either wasn't doing enough or was just doing it flat wrong. Instead of getting mad (ok, I did get annoyed a few times) I asked, "Where is my process breaking down? What does the agent need that I haven't provided? Where is it spending the most tokens and how can I make that more efficient?"

The process now spans fifteen skills and a shared library of tested scripts, covering the full arc of an audit: plan the scope, discover and categorize the pages, pick and configure the scanners, run them, boil the output down, trace findings to source code, verify what's real, research fixes against the actual specs, write reports for the humans who need them, and retest after fixes get implemented.

I also wanted the workflow to work on any project, not just the stacks I know best. Drupal, Next.js, Svelte, WordPress, whatever comes through the door. Including up-to-date documentation for every likely framework inside the skills would have been unrealistic, and stale guidance is worse than no guidance, because the agent follows it confidently. (Just ask any Drupal dev trying to use AI out of the box for dev help). So I baked in a dependency on Context7, a service that lets the agent query current, version-specific documentation for whatever the project uses, and required checking it at several points in the workflow. Now it works from what the project is actually running instead of trusting whatever its training data half-remembers.

Humans Stay In the Loop, On Purpose

I value ownership of my work. Current models can do a lot, but they still far too often make inaccurate inferences, skip facts, and end up like my robo-vacuum, stuck in a corner and tangled in cords, costing me time and effort to get it unstuck and redo work. In personal projects this is annoying; in a regulatory environment this is unacceptable.

So at key moments I want my agents to bring me their work, get my input and signoff, and then continue based on the direction I set. The agent interviews me up front about the project and its goals. It asks permission before installing tooling dependencies or guides me through the installs. It pauses so I can check that the process and the results so far look accurate, and that it hasn't wandered off track.

What Broke Along the Way

Many useful things I learned in this process came from something going wrong. A sampling:

False positives. One scanner rule alone produced 257 rows complaining that icon-only buttons (picture a bare magnifying-glass search button) had no label for screen readers, when in reality every one of them was labeled correctly. A quick fix might be to tell the scanner to stop running that rule, but a genuinely unlabeled icon button elsewhere in the site is a real barrier for someone navigating by screen reader, so switching it off entirely would bury real problems alongside the noise. Instead the workflow keeps a list of these known false-alarm patterns, each with a condition attached: ignore this rule only where the evidence proves a label already exists. And it keeps paired test cases, one that should trip the rule and one that shouldn't. If the exception ever starts covering a real failure, a test catches it.

Too much output, then not enough. Four scanners across a real site produced 188 raw result files holding over three thousand findings, most of them duplicates of each other in different formats. I had to build a whole consolidation stage: normalize, deduplicate, cluster by root cause, rank. Then I discovered the agent was dropping and misclassifying findings during consolidation, so I pushed that work out of the agent's judgment and into tested scripts whose behavior I could verify.

Empty, meaningless reports. Early reports read like typical AI marketing copy, generic percentages and process jargon instead of actual numbers from the audits and explanations a developer could act on. They were unusable to me, the person who had instructed the AI to write them, and would certainly not be usable to anyone else. Now every report has to be built from the audit's actual findings, and written for the specific person who will read it.

The disappearing CSV parser. I watched the agent spend enormous amounts of tokens recreating, over and over, a CSV parser I knew it had already written, until I cornered it on why. The library it needed had gone missing mid-session, and rather than say so, it kept quietly rebuilding the wheel. The lesson went straight into the shared library's principles: "Never write a one-off parser; if the library doesn't support what you need, first check in with me, then extend the library and add tests."

Confidently wrong. Authentication tripped it in a way I almost didn't catch. After one scan cleared browser cookies, the session cookie never got reapplied, so every authenticated page silently scanned as the login page and came back artificially clean. Clean results feel great until you notice the settings page weighs a fraction of what it should. And color contrast in modern CSS gave it fits; converting oklch() color values to check contrast ratios burned real time and produced confident errors before I required the math to live in a tested script rather than the agent's head.

Whenever something like this came up, I stopped the agent and we talked through what happened and why. Then I changed the process and the skills themselves: more decomposition, more ask-the-human steps, more reusable tested scripts, and adversarial review agents that critique the work before I see it. Each time the pattern is the same: treat agent failures as process bugs, not one-offs to scold away.

Did It Produce Anything?

Yes, it did, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

Take a static marketing site. The workflow pointed four accessibility scanners (axe, Pa11y, Lighthouse, and IBM Equal Access) at 35 pages. Between them they returned 7,028 raw findings. Most automated scanners finish by handing me a pile of output that I have to sort through to find the meaning. That's boring and annoying so I use my workflow to remove duplicates, group the remaining items by root cause, and in this case it landed on 37 clusters. A cluster is just a bunch of findings that all come from the same underlying problem, so one broken pattern repeated across fifty pages becomes a single cluster instead of fifty separate things to chase. The review step of the workflow turns those into a short worklist. 11 of them are confirmed code fixes ready to act on. 7k+ findings down to 11 things I need to do.

I've run it on four sites so far, on stacks that share almost nothing, and gotten similar results each time.

Site Raw findings Narrowed to
Eleventy site 7,028 37 clusters
Drupal module 1,091 24 clusters
Next.js app 3,216 32 clusters
SvelteKit site 6,980 26 clusters

And if I had questions about any of them, like where a problem came from, which WCAG rule it violated, even a suggested fix, I could talk it through with the agent, which had the full context of the project.

One of my favorite bits is how the workflow traces big noisy messes back to the source. On the Eleventy site, it found that fixing just two files (one layout template and one stylesheet) would clear 82% of its 7,028 findings. That is exactly the kind of combing-through I used to do by hand, and exactly what AI is good at.

It is not only good at ruling things out or narrowing down issues. I've found it is good at bringing up and prioritizing problems that matter but that wouldn't necessarily be highlighted using just the automated scanners. For example, on a Next.js app it confirmed a link set apart by color alone, a genuine problem for anyone who cannot see the difference. On a SvelteKit site it flagged something styled as a button that was really a plain span, invisible to a keyboard. In the Drupal LMS module, it found the course card was two overlapping links pointing to the same place, which adds noise to a screen reader. And it found where code blocks failed contrast in dark mode, a problem a quick once-over would sail right past.

How Do I Know It Isn't Missing Things?

If my workflow drops the findings from thousands to under a hundred actionable items, that can feel good, but it also raises the question: Are we missing something now?

Two things stop that from happening. First, the automated pass is not the full audit. Scanners cover the slice of WCAG a machine can check, which is a portion of what matters. The rest still needs a person at the keyboard with assistive technology. For example, on the Drupal module, my own manual review added seventeen findings no scanner could have caught, no matter how many times I ran them. Second, someone who knows what "wrong" looks like has to read the workflow's output. Those authenticated pages that scanned clean because the session cookie dropped? A less experienced reviewer might file that clean result and move on. The workflow speeds up an expert. It does not replace one.

The Workflow Keeps Evolving

I treat the workflow itself as a project under audit. Each time I use it I find ways to improve it. This summer I handed a newer, more capable model a bigger job: review the entire suite and plan a remediation of its rough edges, from turning the copy-paste method I'd been using to move it between projects into a proper plugin to addressing weak spots in the consolidation stage.

That overhaul is underway now. The intake interviews will be better, I'm incorporating the latest WCAG Evaluation Methodology, and I'm experimenting with AI-driven keyboard testing.

What You Can Take From This

I haven't released this workflow yet; it remains a personal tool that I use on the projects in front of me, including Tag1's. But the pattern is the transferable part, and none of it requires my code:

  • Decompose the work until each piece has one job.
  • Keep a human at the decisions that matter.
  • Push the agent toward current documentation for the project's actual stack instead of letting it coast on training data.
  • Fix the process when the agent fails.
  • Move anything deterministic out of the agent's judgment and into tested scripts.
  • Measure and review before you trust; sometimes the AI's most confident conclusions turned out to be based on broken steps.
  • Add adversarial agent reviews to both the planning and the workflow.

None of this made accessibility testing fully automatic, and that wasn't my goal. It has made many of the tedious parts quick, and I get to spend more of my time doing the interesting parts now.

This is one of several ways we're putting AI to work on real engineering problems at Tag1. You can find more in our Insights.

29 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

DDEV Blog: A Love Letter to the DDEV Community

A big red heart with the DDEV logo at its center, surrounded by scattered blue dots representing the community

I've been working on DDEV for years now, and there's something I don't say often enough:

You make this so worthwhile.

Stas and I love to get up in the morning to hear what you have to say, learn from your experiences, share our path together.

We feel so thankful to be creating something useful in collaboration with you.

All of us have had jobs before where some boss was making random decisions on product features that we knew might be irrelevant in weeks or months. It's a frustrating feeling, and that lack of control is so terrible. With DDEV and your guidance, we always know that you're keeping us on track about real needs for real features. It's fantastic.

Real Feedback About Real Problems

Your questions in Discord or Slack and the issues you file aren't "noise". They're signal. When something breaks (or is awkward) in your workflow, you tell us, often with enough detail that we can reproduce it immediately. When something is confusing, you ask questions that reveal where our assumptions were wrong.

That feedback shapes DDEV in ways that internal testing never could. We don't use DDEV on every possible OS, with every PHP framework, in every hosting environment. You do. And you tell us what you find.

We Love Your Questions and Comments.

AI has been replacing human interaction in support situations, and in many cases doing a decent job. It usually does a good job with questions about DDEV.

But getting answers to questions is not the only purpose of support. It's also a great way to communicate problems and ambiguities to project maintainers.

We want you to ask us questions! We live for your questions. We miss the fact that you've been absent from Discord, #ddev in Drupal Slack, and the issue queue. When you ask, it helps us to understand what your struggles are and how DDEV can get better. DDEV's strength has always been the community's willingness to engage and share their needs and frictions and hopes for the project.

Hard Questions Lead Somewhere

Most of the best improvements to DDEV started with someone asking a question that seemed basic but turned out to be pointing at a real need. Why does this take so long? Why does that require a workaround? Why can't DDEV just handle this case?

Those questions are gifts to all of us. They push us to look at things we've gotten used to, and ask whether they actually need to be that way.

Generous Contributions

The DDEV ecosystem is full of people who built something useful for themselves and then shared it with everyone. Add-ons, CI configurations, documentation fixes, screencasts, blog posts.

Stas, who joined the project more recently, was surprised by how much DDEV could be extended and customized, and how good the documentation was for figuring it out. Looking back, that didn't happen by accident. It came from years of feature requests and contributions from people who solved their own problems and then shared the solution.

Every person who took time to answer another user's question in the DDEV issue tracker or Discord or Drupal Slack freed up time for the maintainers to work on the next feature.

We Learn from You

Working with the community makes us better at this work. The patterns we see in your issues, the use cases we hadn't considered, the ways you've adapted DDEV for environments we never anticipated-that knowledge informs everything.

Thank You

To everyone who filed an issue, answered a question, wrote a blog post, sponsored the project, gave a talk, built an add-on, tested a prerelease, or just told a colleague that DDEV was worth trying:

Thank you. This project exists because of you, and it's only possible because of the ways you engage with it.

If you want to stay involved, here's where to find us:

Come say hello.

29 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

28 Jul 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Dries Buytaert: From personal AI experiments to shared tools

In April 2025, I published Claude Code meets Drupal, my first public experiment with an AI coding agent. I have been experimenting with coding agents ever since, often by building tools to solve problems in my own work.

Last week, I joined the Drupal AI Learners Club to discuss several experiments I had already published. Angie Byron started the club and runs it with co-organizer Amber Himes Matz. It gives people in the Drupal community a place to show how they are using AI and talk honestly about what works and what does not.

I spent an hour walking through the experiments, starting with Drupal Digests, a tool that uses AI to summarize key developments across Drupal Core, Drupal CMS, Drupal Canvas, and the Drupal AI initiative.

Drupal Digests led to another experiment: AI-generated Rector rules. When a Drupal Core change deprecates an API, Drupal Digests analyzes the issue and code changes and generates a rule that can automate the corresponding upgrade in other Drupal projects.

I also showed an API catalog that helps AI agents discover my website's search API.

These are only some of my AI experiments. Most begin as tools I build for myself, and many never go any further. When one seems useful beyond my own work, I publish it so others can try it and improve it.

Once it is public, we can see whether people use it and want to help improve it. If they do, it may eventually become a community project. If not, that is useful to know too.

The recording goes into much more detail, with demonstrations of the tools and questions from the group. You can watch it below.

28 Jul 2026 8:06pm GMT

BloomIdea: Shipping with MRW from Drupal Commerce: no more copy-pasting into the carrier portal

Several of the e-commerce stores we build and run ship with MRW, one of the main carriers in Spain and Portugal. Until recently, shipping an order meant leaving the store: open MRW's customer portal, retype the customer's address, print the label, then copy the shipment number back into Drupal so the customer gets a tracking link. Multiply by every order, every day, and add returns, which meant doing the same dance with the addresses swapped.

We replaced that with a Drupal module. It now runs the daily expedition of the first of them, and we are releasing it to the community: Commerce MRW is available on drupal.org, with a 1.1.0 release.

What it does

Commerce MRW integrates Drupal Commerce with MRW through SAGEC, the carrier's SOAP webservice for creating and managing shipments (envíos). The whole expedition cycle happens on the shipment admin pages the team already uses:

  • Transmit shipments (TransmEnvio): one click creates the shipment on MRW's side and stores the returned shipment number as the Drupal shipment's tracking code, feeding the customer-facing tracking link.
  • Labels on demand (GetEtiquetaEnvio): the transport label PDF is streamed straight from SAGEC every time someone asks for it. Labels are never stored locally, so MRW stays the single source of truth and there is no stale-file problem.
  • Cancel (CancelarEnvio) transmitted shipments before the courier picks them up.
  • Return pickups: a request can carry a pickup address (DatosRecogida), so MRW collects the parcel at the customer's door and delivers it back to the store. Returns stop being a manual job in the carrier portal.
  • Tracking: a client for MRW's TrackingServices webservice queries the current status, or the full status history, of any shipment: by MRW number, by your own order reference, individually or in bulk.
  • "Transmit as": shipments whose shipping method is not MRW (say, a generic "Free shipping" flat rate) can still be shipped with MRW. The operator picks the executing method at transmit time and the choice is recorded on the shipment.

Service codes cover the SAGEC catalogue (Ecommerce, Urgente 19 Expedición, Urgente 13 and friends), and PRE (test) and PRO (production) environments are separate credential sets with a test-mode toggle, so you can validate the integration with your franchise before a single real parcel moves.

Small module, sharp edges

The SAGEC manual is short; reality is not. A few of the edges the module rounds off for you:

  • Postal codes are per-country folklore. Spain wants 5 digits with leading zeros, Portugal wants only the first 4 of its 7-digit codes, Andorra's letters become zeros, and Gibraltar is always 00010. The module normalizes all of it before SAGEC ever sees an address.
  • The tracking service hides behind a WCF quirk: it only accepts SOAP posts on its relative endpoint address, and answers 404 on the address the documentation leads you to. We found out so you do not have to.
  • No PHP SOAP extension required. Both clients build their envelopes by hand over Drupal's HTTP client, which also makes every request fully testable with mocked responses; the module ships with a kernel test suite that asserts the exact XML that goes over the wire.

Your store's rules stay yours

Carrier integrations die by hardcoding someone else's workflow, so Commerce MRW deliberately does not have one. Site-specific data travels through an event: subscribe to the TransmEnvio request event and fill whatever your store knows, the consignee's phone number, a NIF, delivery observations for the courier, or a full pickup address to turn a transmission into a return pickup. In one of our stores, three small subscribers do exactly that: one copies the customer's phone, one sends the backoffice's "carrier notes" field as delivery instructions, and one swaps the addresses when a shipment is flagged as a return.

Tracking follows the same philosophy. The module gives you the client and a documented integration recipe, but ships no polling and changes no shipment states: whether "delivered at destination" should transition your workflow, or just inform a human, is your call. That store runs an hourly cron that mirrors the last MRW status into the expedition dashboard, next to each tracking code; marking a shipment delivered stays a human decision, now an informed one.

Battle-tested, then released

Like our other contrib modules, this one shipped to drupal.org only after running a real store's daily expedition: real transmissions, real labels handed to the courier, and a tracking client validated against the production webservice before its release was tagged. The test suite (42 kernel tests at the time of writing) covers the SOAP envelopes, the postal code rules, the backoffice forms and the tracking parsing.

Get it

composer require drupal/commerce_mrw:^1.1

Requires Drupal 10.3+ or 11 and Commerce Shipping 3.x, plus SAGEC credentials from your MRW franchise (ask your franchise; ours enabled both the shipping webservice and the tracking service on request).

If you run a Drupal Commerce store shipping in Spain or Portugal, this is for you. The issue queue is open, and international shipments, ZPL labels and MRW delivery points are on the roadmap.

28 Jul 2026 2:00pm GMT

Specbee: Understanding Drupal's Service Container and Dependency Injection

Learn how Drupal's service container and dependency injection work, why they matter for testable code, and what Drupal 11 changes for your service classes.

28 Jul 2026 11:20am GMT

Salsa Digital: Drupal AI Context — beta 3 released

Beta 3 release of Drupal AI Context Beta 3 of Drupal AI Context , also known as Context Control Center (CCC), is now available. CCC helps Drupal sites provide governed, reusable context for AI workflows and agents, from brand voice and editorial standards to organisational knowledge and governance rules. This gives AI systems access to more structured and relevant information while allowing teams to manage that information centrally. Following the beta 2 release , beta 3 expands how context is authored, imported, selected and extended. It also introduces redesigned administration pages, more granular agent controls and broader integration options.

28 Jul 2026 8:05am GMT

The Drop Times: Drupal 12 HTMX 4 Upgrade Returns to Review

Changes to how Drupal handles dynamic page updates could force contributed-module maintainers to support different behaviour in Drupal 11 and Drupal 12.

28 Jul 2026 5:39am GMT