fidzu : Drupal

Author: Christoph Breidert, Product Lead, Drupal AI

Earlier this year, the Drupal AI Initiative set itself a clear goal: at DrupalCon Rotterdam, show one Drupal site where AI search, content review, chat-driven editing, and AI translation all work together on real content. Today we are delivering on that promise. The Drupal AI Demo is live, and Dries revealed it in the Driesnote.

You can open it, use it, and see for yourself what Drupal AI looks like when it is built as a complete product. The demo is the website of a fictional university, with the kind of content and structure a real organization's site would have.

The Drupal AI Demo: a realistic, multilingual university website where every AI feature runs on the same content

From a list of features to something you can try

Until now, Drupal AI has mostly been something we described. We had roadmaps, feature lists, module pages, and conference talks. All of that was accurate, but none of it was tangible. A list of features asks people to imagine how the pieces fit together. A demo lets them see it.

That difference matters to two groups of people in particular.

If you are evaluating Drupal, the demo lets you test the AI features instead of reading about them. I believe Drupal is the most powerful AI-powered CMS available today. Until now, that was a claim you had to take on trust. Now you can check it yourself, try the features on realistic content, and plan your own website around capabilities that are already implemented and working.

If you already build with Drupal AI, the demo shows how each feature is intended to be used. You can evaluate every feature, see how it is configured, and adapt that setup to your own use case. That is a much better starting point than piecing together a feature from documentation alone.

What you can try

The demo focuses on the features our Drupal AI Partners told us matter most. In May, we asked them which capabilities they most wanted to have ready to use in Drupal. They are at the heart of the demo.

AI content reviews. Check a page against criteria like brand voice, legal requirements, and reading level, and get concrete suggestions for improving it.

AI content review scores a page against brand, legal, and readability criteria and suggests concrete improvements

AI search. Ask a question and get an AI-generated answer, grounded in the site's own content and with the sources behind it.

AI search answers a question with a summary, the sources behind it, and ranked results from the site's own content

Chat-driven content editing. Describe what you want to change, and the AI edits the page for you, right inside the editing experience.

Chat-driven editing: an editor describes a change in the chat, and the AI updates the page directly

AI translation. Move content across languages, with results good enough to publish.

AI translation moves a page into another language, ready for review and publishing

Connect your own AI agents. Connect agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, and others to Drupal through MCP, and make changes to the website from the outside.

An external AI agent, connected through MCP, making a change on the demo website

What makes the demo different from trying these features one at a time is that they all run together on the same site and the same content. That is what building a real website involves, and it is where the hardest work was.

How we got here

The idea of a demo was always there. We knew from the start that Drupal AI would need one, but first we needed a foundation strong enough to build it on.

The official Drupal AI sprints started in January this year. We spent the first three months refining the core AI functionality. By the second quarter, we had a stable code base to build on. In May, we ran the partner survey, and that was the moment the demo became a shared goal. The partners bought into the idea, and together we agreed on the features it should show. June went into preparation. In July, we started building.

The last eight weeks were the most intense. Between 1 August and 26 September alone:

• More than 100 people contributed code, reviews, or merge requests
• 1,442 commits landed across 54 projects
• 616 merge requests were merged on drupal.org
• Roughly 596,000 lines were added. That figure covers module code as well as the demo's content, theme, and configuration, and leaves out build output and lock files.

Activity grew steadily over those weeks, from about 70 commits in the first week of August to more than 300 per week in September. And the part I am most proud of is not the size of those numbers. It is that the result simply works.

Weekly commits across the demo and the drupal.org projects it builds on, 1 August to 26 September 2026

The people who built it

The demo was built by contributors from across the Drupal AI Partners, the organizations that fund and staff this initiative, together with many contributors from the wider Drupal community. Working together, we could build a more advanced AI experience than any of us could have built alone, and everything we build for the demo makes Drupal AI better for everyone who uses it.

Most of the load of the demo itself was carried by four people: Marcus Johansson, Artem Dmitriiev, Aidan Foster, and myself. Marcus, Artem, and I also met in person for three days to do nothing but sprint on the demo. Some of the hardest problems got solved in that room.

[IMAGE 8: sprint photo]

Marcus Johansson, Artem Dmitriiev, and Christoph Breidert during their three-day, in-person demo sprint

Many others did substantial work on the demo itself. I want to thank Darren Oh, Kristen Pol, Abhisek Mazumdar, Dan Lemon, Eric Homanchuk, Akhil Babu, and Kiran Kadam.

Of course, a demo is only as good as the modules underneath it, and many projects were heavily developed to be ready for Rotterdam. The main contributors there include Giorgio Alfredo Pagano on AI Disclosure, Michael Lander and Matt Glaman on the Tool API, MCP Server, and Canvas tools, Kristen Pol on AI Context, Rob Loach, Scott Euser on AI Search, Ahmad Khader on AI Content Review, and Sven Decabooter on AI Translate. Much of this work also depended on review: Artem and Marcus alone merged more than 100 merge requests from other contributors in these two months.

A personal note

Coordinating a distributed effort of this size, with contributors across many organizations, countries, and time zones, in such a short time is its own kind of challenge. My role was to set the direction, define the work packages, and align with key contributors and organizers to make sure we were building the right things. I also reviewed a great deal of work along the way. The day-to-day operations were led by our delivery managers, Arian Raeesi and Vidit Anjaria, who planned the work into sprints and kept it moving every day.

What I had never seen before is so many people building something together that actually works as one. Being part of that is amazing.

The demo was something I had in my head for a long time. Seeing so many people take that idea and make it real, and seeing it work, is one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in the Drupal community.

To everyone who contributed: thank you. This demo is yours.

Try it, and help us make it better

The demo is live at drupal.org/ai/demo. Try it, test it, and tell us what you think.

If you want to help shape what comes next, join us in the #ai-initiative channel on Drupal Slack, or explore becoming a Drupal AI Partner.

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Everyone who contributed between August and September 2026

Abhinav Jha, Abhisek Mazumdar, Abhishek Dhariwal, Adam G-H, Adrian McKee, Ahmad Khader, Ahmad Khalil, Aidan Foster, Akhil Babu, Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, Andrei Mateescu, Andrii Sakhaniuk, Angela Saldaña, Anikó Viola, Ann Mary Sruthy, arne michiels, Artem Dmitriiev, Ashish Dalvi, attilatilman, Avinash jha, Bharat Kelotra, Brooke Mahoney, Bruna Emerich, Bruno Bruno, calmforce, Carlos Romero, Cesar Miquel, Chad Peppers, Christian Burk, Christoph Breidert, Craig Wood, Dan Goodwin, Dan Lemon, Daniel Rodriguez, Darren Oh, Dave Long, David Bravo, Denise Spangler, Dezső Biczó, Dimitris Spachos, Dries Buytaert, Emma Horrell, Eric Homanchuk, George Kastanis, Giorgio Alfredo Pagano, Ignacio Pérez Puertas, István Csáki, Jeff Warrington, Jeremy Cerda, Jibran Ijaz, Joonas Meriläinen, Jordan Graham, JoshHayter, Joshua Fernandes, Juan Correa, Jurriaan Roelofs, Jérôme Tchania, Jürgen Haas, Kenneth Bolívar Castro, Kieran Cott, Kiran Kadam, KJ Monahan, Konstantine Kirkitadze, Kristen Pol, Lee Rowlands, Levente Besenyei, Manuel Garcia, Marcus Johansson, Markus Kalkbrenner, Mateu Aguiló Bosch, Matt Glaman, Matthew Tift, Michael Lander, Miguel Guerreiro, Narendra Singh Rathore, Nick Opris, Nick Pasiuk, Nik LePage, Norman Kämper-Leymann, Pieter Frenssen, Prabhavathi Vanipenta, Pravesh Poonia, Punam Aseem Beedkar, Reinhold Schachner, Ricardo Castañeda, Richard Porter, Rob Loach, Rodel Duterte, scontzen, Scott Euser, Scott Falconer, Sergiu Nagailic, Shashank Rai, Shibin Das, Shivam Sen, Simon Morvan, Sven Decabooter, szato, Tamas Balog, Tekla Aivazashvili, Tormi Tabor, tribekk, Valery Lourie, Will Huggins, Wolfgang Ziegler.

The DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam made one argument above all: Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The strongest evidence was on screen. These six demos show a platform that speaks more languages, welcomes JavaScript developers as first-class citizens, and treats AI assistants as another interface to Drupal, with governance built in.

Everything here is open source and available today. Here are the demos, with the story behind each one.

1. Multilingual sites, easier to build

80% of the world doesn't speak English as a first or second language, so multilingual is how Drupal reaches billions more people. Two things used to hold teams back: setup was hard, and Drupal Canvas didn't yet support multilingual content. Drupal CMS 2.2 changes both, with a language selector right in the installer, a guided Multilingual add-on, three levels of translation configurability, and full translation support in Canvas, including review workflows and optional AI translation. Watch for Dashi, a multilingual food magazine template made entirely by Drupalers.

2. JavaScript as a first-class citizen

JavaScript front ends are where many developers start their careers, and Canvas is built for them: a standalone front-end project scaffolded in one command, with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, previews via Canvas Workbench with zero configuration, and AI coding agents in the workflow. One push with the Canvas CLI and everything is ready for content teams to use visually. No Drupalisms, no trade-offs.

3. Canvas Headless: your choice of front end

Organisations often compose experiences from multiple backends, and that calls for a headless front end. Canvas Headless connects yours by configuring a URL, with Canvas visual editing built in: editors see a live preview of the real application while developers build in the framework they prefer. Starter templates cover Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and Angular support arrived the very week of the keynote, five frameworks in all.

4. Try Drupal AI for yourself

There's been so much Drupal AI work that demoing it all would fill the keynote. Instead, there's now a demo experience anyone can try: a fictional university site where AI reviews every page against your standards, visitors get answers drawn from your own content with sources shown, and guardrails, a central knowledge hub, and full logging keep it accountable. It's working today, open source, built by leading Drupal AI companies, and pre-configured so you can also use it to show customers. Try it at drupal.org/ai/demo.

5. Fixing content with an AI assistant

A content editor spots Dutch translations showing prices that shouldn't be live yet. From ChatGPT, connected with her own account, she asks for the previous Dutch versions back, English untouched. It happens, with every change recorded as a new revision under her name. She didn't need to know where to click or how revisions, moderation, and permissions work; Drupal handled the governance behind the scenes. You can do this today with a recipe combining Simple OAuth, MCP Server, and the Tool module, built by Michael Lander, Matt Glaman, and others: drupal.org/project/agent_access

6. One module, many interfaces

The most surprising demo wasn't about AI at all. Dries's personal site holds more than 10,000 photos in a custom album module he tool-enabled himself, the work behind his "describe once, use everywhere" idea. The creator of FlowDrop, a visual workflow tool for Drupal, showed that module's MCP server powering a plain form, searching photos and albums with no AI anywhere, and then an agent that chooses its own tools to answer questions. When capabilities are described once and answers come back structured, AI becomes a choice, not a requirement. That idea is what the upcoming Rosetta Sprint will take forward.

Watch the DriesNote in full, or read the full recap of everything Dries announced, from digital sovereignty to the Drupal Advocacy Program.

In a major shake-up, your advocacy work now earns Drupal contribution credit.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. It's time we changed that.

The Drupal Advocacy Program is a new Drupal Association pilot that awards contribution credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal.

Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The platform has changed dramatically in recent years, but the market's picture of Drupal runs years behind. If you have ever heard "oh, is Drupal still around?", you have felt that gap first-hand - and research by major Drupal agencies confirms it. The fix is not a bigger ad budget. It is education at community scale: authentic stories from the people who build with Drupal, told in their own voices to the audiences they know best.

Our community can be uneasy with the word "marketing". But you are already advocates for Drupal, day in and day out - and that is exactly what this moment needs. If you have ever written a tutorial, recorded a demo, translated an article, or shared someone else's talk with a new audience, you have been doing advocacy. Starting today, that work earns recognition.

How it works

Tell the story. Create, share, and boost content about modern Drupal. A blog post for your market. A video for your audience. A talk at a non-Drupal conference. A customer story in your language. And amplification counts: share someone else's DrupalCon talk or case study, tell us about it, and you earn credit too.

Themes multiply your impact. Four to six times a year, we will roll out a theme - a consistent message with messaging and proof points ready to build on. Take it and make it your own: translate it for your language, reframe it for your industry, make it relevant to your network. Advocacy content on the current theme earns 2x-3x credits, because 126 certified partners and a huge global community telling one story at the same moment is what moves the market.

Credits flow back. Advocacy runs through the same contribution credit system that recognises code. It counts toward your standing in the ecosystem, including Drupal Certified Partner visibility. Credits will be awarded in bulk each month, guided by a published scale (to come), weighted by quality and reach, because we want content that travels beyond the Drupal world. Each month we will also spotlight the best advocacy content and award it extra credit.

The ground rules are simple. This is about promoting Drupal and what Drupal can do. You can mention where you work, and you can absolutely draw on case studies from your own business - as a way of showing what Drupal makes possible.

Ways to take part

• Post. A thoughtful LinkedIn article or thread in your own words
• Write. A blog post specific to your audience, region, or industry
• Record. An explainer, tutorial, reaction, or customer-story video
• Boost. Share and amplify someone else's talk, case study, or post
• Adapt. Translate or localise the story for your language and market
• Speak. A talk or lightning talk, especially at non-Drupal events and meetups
• Pod. Appear on or host a podcast episode
• Show your work. A customer or project story that highlights what Drupal can do
• Teach. A tutorial, demo, or code walkthrough that shows modern Drupal in action

Choose something that fits you. You do not need to become a salesperson. As Dries put it in his DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote: Drupal doesn't need hype. It needs a better public record.

Submitting is simple

For now, it is a short form at drupal.org/advocacy. In the coming days you will also find a submission form across many Drupal Slack channels. Either way, telling us about your content should take a minute - because for this to work, submitting needs to be exceedingly easy.

This is very much a pilot. We will start by reviewing and crediting submissions by hand, look for ways to automate over time, and let what we learn from your submissions shape how the program grows. And we want to celebrate the people who lead the way: at next year's DrupalCons, we will present awards to Drupal's biggest advocates.

Start today

Every story you tell adds to Drupal's public record - the record that search engines, AI assistants, and agentic search increasingly draw on when people ask what to build with. More authentic voices means Drupal showing up where decisions are actually made.

Submit your advocacy work at drupal.org/advocacy. You will find the current theme, its messaging and proof points, and guidelines on attribution and what qualifies for credit.

You have done the work. Now start talking.

The Women in Drupal Awards returned this year to celebrate the outstanding achievements of women making remarkable contributions to the global Drupal community. Presented during DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the awards recognize women whose talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment are helping strengthen the Drupal community and shape the future of open source.

Now in its fifth year, the Women in Drupal Awards continue their mission of amplifying women's voices and recognizing the many different ways they contribute to technology and the Drupal ecosystem. From technical expertise and project leadership to community building, mentoring, advocacy, and innovation, the awards celebrate women whose work creates meaningful impact across projects, organizations, and communities.

Three awards celebrating three different forms of contribution

This year, the Women in Drupal Awards recognize three outstanding nominees across three distinct categories:

• Women in Drupal Award - Define
  Antonella Severo, Project Manager at Nestlé, has been an active contributor to the Drupal community and has been involved in the Success Stories track at DrupalCon, helping highlight the impact and achievements of Drupal projects and organizations.
• Women in Drupal Award - Build
  Nikita Aswani, Senior Front-end Developer on Open Social, combines technical expertise with a strong commitment to the Drupal community. She is also a member of the Drupal Asia steering committee, contributing to the growth and development of the regional Drupal ecosystem.
• Women in Drupal Award - Scale
  Rachel Lawson, who works at the University of Cambridge, has made a lasting contribution to the Drupal community through mentoring and community engagement. She is also a former Community Liaison at the Drupal Association, where she played an important role in supporting and connecting members of the community.

Together, the three nominees represent the breadth of contributions that make the Drupal ecosystem stronger: from leading projects and showcasing success stories, to developing technology, supporting regional communities, mentoring others, and fostering collaboration.

The Women in Drupal Awards were created to ensure that women's stories and successes in technology are visible and celebrated. The awards recognize contributions in many forms, whether through building Drupal projects, leading teams and organizations, designing digital experiences, driving innovation and strategy, mentoring others, strengthening the community, advocating for inclusion, or championing open source and collaboration.

A key contributor to this year's awards is JAKALA, the official sponsor of the Women in Drupal Awards. JAKALA created the award and has supported the initiative since its inception, helping ensure that the achievements and contributions of women across the global Drupal community are recognized and celebrated. As the awards enter their fifth year, JAKALA continues to support their mission of highlighting diverse talent, leadership, and impact within the Drupal ecosystem.

The ceremony has become a highlight of DrupalCon. Beyond the awards themselves, the wider Women in Drupal initiative fosters mentorship, networking, recognition, and greater visibility for women working in Drupal and open source. This year, the initiative also includes a dedicated Women in Drupal networking lunch, organized in collaboration with JAKALA, providing an opportunity for women and gender-diverse members of the community to connect, share experiences, and build relationships.

The Women in Drupal Awards are supported by the Drupal Association and organizations across the industry. The 2026 jury brings together members of the Drupal Association, previous award winners, and JAKALA, combining perspectives from across the Drupal community to recognize this year's outstanding contributors.

About Women in Drupal

Women in Drupal is a community-driven initiative dedicated to celebrating, supporting, and empowering women in the Drupal ecosystem. Through recognition, networking, mentorship, and community events, the initiative fosters inclusion and encourages greater participation and leadership in open source.

The Women in Drupal Awards recognize women from across the Drupal community, regardless of role or area of expertise, celebrating the talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment that help strengthen Drupal and shape its future.

Dries Buytaert opened DrupalCon Rotterdam with a tour of a platform moving at remarkable speed. Multilingual sites that take a fraction of the effort to build. Components written in React. Headless delivery across five frameworks. AI assistants that connect directly to your content. A pipeline of innovation that has Europe's push for digital sovereignty looking closely at Drupal.

Then he named the problem: hardly anyone outside this community knows. The market's picture of Drupal runs years behind what the platform can do today.

Rotterdam has a saying: "Niet lullen maar poetsen." Stop talking, start working. Dries argued we have taken that advice almost too well, and he flipped it. The work is done. Now it's time to talk louder about what is working, and for the first time, that work earns contribution credit.

Here is what he covered.

Europe needs digital sovereignty, and Drupal is ready

Dries opened with a challenge facing Europe: reducing its dependence on technology it does not control. When the European Commission asked for feedback on digital sovereignty, Dries submitted his thinking, and his writing was referenced in the official policy recommendation that followed.

His point: open source projects like Drupal offer more than software. They offer ongoing maintenance, security releases, and a global community of care. He gave it a name he hopes will catch on: Stewarded Open Source.

For governments and organisations that need control over their digital infrastructure, Drupal is exactly that: open source with a steward, proven at scale, and owned by no single vendor. As Dries put it: "Europe needs Drupal. And Drupal needs Europe too."

Innovation is back, and it is reaching new people

Two years after launching the Starshot initiative, Dries reflected on what it delivered: Drupal CMS, recipes, site templates, Canvas, and a wave of AI tools. Then he showed four ways Drupal is bringing its strengths to more people:

• Multilingual. Building multilingual sites is now dramatically simpler, and Drupal Canvas fully supports multilingual content.
• JavaScript. Canvas code components can be written in React, treating JavaScript developers as first-class citizens.
• Headless. Official headless support now spans five frameworks, including newly added Angular.
• AI. A new public demo site lets anyone explore Drupal's AI capabilities, made possible by the partners of the Drupal AI Initiative.

AI assistants are becoming another interface to Drupal

You can already connect an AI assistant to a Drupal site using a recipe that combines Simple OAuth, MCP Server, and the Tool module. Dries demonstrated it on his own photo album module, built to answer questions like "Do you have that photo of Oma wearing her sunglasses?"

Fully exposing his module's capabilities took around 1,000 lines of code. A research prototype built with Matt Glaman reduced that to roughly 20 PHP attributes. Describe a capability once, and it becomes available everywhere: to AI assistants, to workflow tools like ECA, to JavaScript components, and to humans who never touch AI at all.

The Rosetta Sprint: one description, readable by everyone

To turn the prototype into a shared roadmap, Dries announced the Rosetta Sprint. Like the Rosetta Stone, which carried one decree in three scripts, the goal is for Drupal to describe its capabilities once, in a way that AI agents, other systems, and humans can all read.

The sprint will bring key maintainers together for four days of focused work.

The Drupal Advocacy Program: contribution credit for talking about Drupal

Dries named Drupal's reputation gap as the project's number one challenge. Too many people are judging the Drupal of ten years ago, and AI systems trained on old information repeat that outdated story.

His answer is not hype. "Drupal doesn't need hype. It needs a better public record."

So the Drupal Association is launching the Drupal Advocacy Program, a pilot that awards contribution credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal: writing tutorials, recording demos, translating articles, amplifying someone else's talk. Each quarter, a focus theme with a ready-made source kit earns double credits.

Submissions open today at drupal.org/advocacy.

Start now, in Rotterdam

Dries closed with the Rotterdam Pilot: a challenge to everyone at DrupalCon to turn the buzz in the room into buzz outside it. Share a takeaway. Clip a talk. Write about someone else's session and credit them.

"Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation," he said. Closing that gap is work we can all do, starting this week.

Slides will be posted at dri.es.