I've been maintaining the matrix_api module on Drupal.org since 2016, nearly a decade of it doing one thing well: posting Drupal events into a Matrix room. This year that changed.
02 Sep 2026
Drupal.org aggregator
The Drop Times: Built for TDT, Now Used Beyond It: The Journey of a Drupal Module
A weekend fix built for The DropTimes now supports sites its maintainer may never see, bringing the responsibilities of public module maintenance into focus.
02 Sep 2026 4:31pm GMT
The Drop Times: Your Client Is Not a Ticket
A perfectly completed ticket can still solve the wrong problem. Tom Hollevoet argues that better Drupal delivery begins with understanding the need behind the request.
02 Sep 2026 1:35pm GMT
Drupal Association blog: Take Part in the 2026 Drupal Business Survey
The Drupal Business Survey investigates the trends in the digital market, in particular from service providers involved with the open source Drupal CMS and enterprise platform. Digital agencies from all over the world participate in the yearly survey and the business insights on market share and growth opportunities gained are shared with those who've submitted responses.
Begun many years ago by Drupal Business Network with Janne Kalliola, Michel Van Velde, and Imre Gmelig Meijling, the survey is now administered by the Drupal Association to promote global reach and protect the confidentiality of the information. Moving forward, the Drupal Association will handle the analysis and reporting of the anonymised data from the survey. We're grateful to Janne, Michel, and Imre for their many years of work in shaping and running the survey.
Drupal's open source ecosystem is supported by a strong community of tens of thousands professionals worldwide, working together on the popular digital experience platform. Because Drupal is open source, anyone can work with Drupal or make changes to it. An important part of this community are the agencies that provide Drupal services to end users and drive Drupal's market. The Drupal Business Survey seeks the input from these agencies so that meaningful data for business owners and decision makers can be built into their business strategies.
The Drupal Business Survey has been a valuable guide for digital service providers, even to those working with other technologies than Drupal.
About the Business Survey
The Drupal Business Survey supports Drupal businesses worldwide and is organised by the Drupal Association. The survey was founded by Imre Gmelig Meijling (React Online), Janne Kalliola (Exove) and Michel van Velde (Craftmore), and we're grateful for their years of work in building it into what it is today.
Drupal is the open source Digital Experience Platform used by many organisations worldwide including Nestlé, Lufthansa and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Participate and share your insights
Drupal experts are invited to share their Drupal business insights through the Business Survey anonymously and come to DrupalCon Europe to review the results together.
You can take the Drupal Business Survey 2026 anonymously here. The survey closes on 7 September.
02 Sep 2026 7:58am GMT
01 Sep 2026
Drupal.org aggregator
Metadrop: Fixing missing image alt attributes in Drupal without development
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
Omega8.cc: Your Site Already Said No
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
Aten Design Group: Who Owns the Icon? Building Author-Friendly Icon Systems in Drupal
Who Owns the Icon? Building Author-Friendly Icon Systems in Drupal Joel Steidl Drupal
Icons seem like a small implementation detail until a site has a large design system, multiple authoring workflows, and content that changes independently of the theme.
Then a basic question becomes important: who owns the icon?
For some parts of an interface, the answer is clearly the theme. Alert states, event metadata, and other stable UI patterns should remain predictable.
Other icons behave more like content. Authors may need to choose an icon for a navigation item, card, banner, or other component. In those cases, hardcoding the choice in the theme creates a dependency between content and code that becomes difficult to maintain.
The goal is not to move every icon into Drupal. It is to give the right people control over the right decisions.
Start with ownership
I generally think about icons in two groups: icons whose meaning belongs to a fixed interface pattern, and icons whose meaning belongs to authored content.
An alert is a good example of the first group. Drupal or an author might determine that an alert has a warning status, but the theme should decide which icon represents "warning."
Event metadata works the same way. Date, time, and location have stable meanings within an event teaser. Those icons belong to the component, not to an individual event.
Hardcoding those relationships protects consistency.
A site menu is different. Authors add, remove, rename, and reorder menu items. If an icon describes the purpose of a particular link, it should usually travel with that link rather than with its position in a template.
Component-based authoring introduces the same issue. An author might select an icon for a card or a decorative treatment for a banner. If that component moves or is reused, the visual choice should move with the content.
Most interfaces contain both models at once. A card might have an author-selected icon and a hardcoded arrow that communicates that the card is a link. A menu item might have an author-selected icon on the left and a fixed chevron on the right when it has children.The useful boundary is not Drupal versus the theme. It is which part of the system owns each decision.
When authored icons live in code, things get brittle
Menus make the problem especially visible.
A developer can attach an icon to the second menu item with CSS, but that relationship breaks as soon as an author inserts another link above it. Targeting a specific menu item identifier is more stable, but it still creates a developer-maintained connection between content and theme code.
A select list is another common approach:
For a small icon set, this can be perfectly reasonable.
The problem appears as the library grows. Authors are asked to understand the design system through filenames. The distinction between calendar, calendar-outline, and calendar-filled may be obvious to the developer who added them and much less obvious to someone building a page later.
Adding a new option may also require a theme change and deployment.
From the author's perspective, this is a content problem. From the developer's perspective, it is a theme problem.
Drupal already has a better interaction model for choosing visual assets.
Use Media when the icon is an authored choice
When authors choose an image, we do not normally give them a dropdown containing every filename on the site. Drupal's Media Library gives them visual previews, search, filtering, reuse, and asset management.
That interaction makes sense for icons too.
With SVG Image, SVG files can participate in Drupal's image field ecosystem and can be rendered as image elements or inline SVG markup.
Once icons become Media entities, they can also use Drupal's normal content model. They can have useful names, categories, permissions, and usage guidance. Views and reference configuration can limit which assets authors see in a particular context.
That matters because an icon library is rarely one undifferentiated collection.
Graphical UI icons used in menus or calls to action likely aren't used in the same way more decorative accents are. The overhead of deciding which icon type should be used in which context shouldn't be left to the author if we can provide clear guardrails.
This is where Media becomes more than a nicer picker. It provides a governance model.
Menus can gain Media reference fields through tools such as Menu Item Extras. Component systems based on Paragraphs can attach icon choices directly to the structured component. Style Options - Media Reference provides another way to expose Media selections in component configuration.
The exact implementation will vary by project. The important part is that once an icon becomes an entity, Drupal's existing fields, permissions, and filtering tools can manage it without requiring a custom icon picker.
Keep rendering predictable
Moving icons into Media improves the author experience, but the theme still needs a reliable rendering model.
The rule I use is simple:
HTML chooses the icon. CSS styles it.
Drupal or Twig should determine whether an icon exists and which icon it is. CSS should handle size, spacing, alignment, color, and interaction states.
That separation works particularly well with inline SVG. The SVG can inherit color from the component, respond to interaction states, and remain part of the markup rather than being hidden inside a stylesheet.
It also keeps accessibility decisions closer to the rendered interface. Decorative icons can be hidden from assistive technology, while meaningful controls can rely on appropriate accessible names rather than asking the icon itself to carry all of the meaning.
I previously built a small Twig helper in the Utility Belt module to make theme SVG rendering easier. It solved a practical problem, but Drupal's newer Icon API offers a more standardized direction.
Drupal 11.1 introduced an Icon API that allows themes and modules to expose icon packs through a common rendering system. Contributed projects such as Icon Media Pack are exploring how Media bundles can participate in that model.
That creates an interesting division of responsibility: Media can handle author-facing governance, while the Icon API can provide developers with a predictable rendering path.
There are still exceptions.
Native form controls sometimes need icons as CSS backgrounds or masks because their markup cannot easily contain rendered SVG children. In those cases, keeping a small set of duplicate assets in the theme can be a reasonable tradeoff.
The point is not to eliminate every exception. It is to make the boundary intentional.
Give each part of the system the control it needs
An author-friendly icon system is not one where authors can change every icon.
It is one where authored decisions are actually authorable.
If an icon belongs to a stable interface pattern, keep that relationship in the theme. If the icon represents something an author is creating or organizing, consider modeling that choice in Drupal.
Media can provide the visual browsing and governance authors need. The theme can continue to protect rendering and presentation.
That division is more maintainable than treating icons as entirely theme code or entirely content, and it better reflects how complex Drupal sites actually operate.
01 Sep 2026 5:34pm GMT
Droptica: Why Drupal works for structured content operations at scale
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
Drupal Association blog: The work that just happens: the DA Insider for August 2026
This post is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox each month.
Straight from Ryan's desk
To the Drupal community,
As northern hemisphere summer winds down, DrupalCon Rotterdam is rapidly approaching - and if you haven't booked yet, today is your last chance at Regular pricing. Late Rate kicks in at midnight CEST, so this is my friendly nudge to save yourself €270 and register now.
Rotterdam isn't the only Con on the horizon. DrupalCon Orlando Early Bird registration opens 14 September, and paid Early Bird tickets come with a limited-edition DrupalCon elePHPant - once they're gone, they're gone.
Elsewhere in this edition: the 2026 Drupal Business Survey is open until 7 September (your answers shape where we focus next), the engineering teamhas completed the migration of Drupal's security issue tracking to GitLab, and we're delighted to welcome Janna Malikova to the Drupal Association Board.
As always, thanks for being part of it. See you in Rotterdam!
Ryan Witcombe, Director, Product Marketing
The 2026 Drupal Business Survey Is Open
Your input shapes an anonymized report that helps the whole community. You'll see how your pipelines, win rates, and revenues compare to global peer data, share what's actually working, and directly influence where the Drupal Association focuses next.
Take the survey by 7 September 2026 at 23:59 UTC. Responses are strictly confidential and fully anonymized. Everyone who completes the survey receives the full report by email.
DrupalCon Rotterdam is almost here
Join Drupal experts and community members to discover what's next for Drupal and the open web, exchange ideas, and build connections across the ecosystem in Rotterdam from 28 September to 1 October.
The regular rate is now closed, but registration for DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 is still open. Register here.
All You Need To Know About DrupalCon Orlando
Early Bird Registration Opens September 14
The Early Bird registration for DrupalCon Orlando 2027 opens Monday, 14 September 2026 at 8:00 am EST, with tickets available for $650. And Early Bird comes with a special perk. Paid Early Bird DrupalCon tickets include a limited-edition DrupalCon PHP elePHPant named Drupy (Elephpas hypertextus drupalensis primus in Latin), available exclusively during the Early Bird registration period.
Free tickets do not include an elePHPant, but you'll have the option to purchase one during registration while supplies are available.
Summits & Training
Kick off DrupalCon Orlando on Monday, 22 March 2027 with a full day of deeper learning and industry-specific discussions, all available as add-ons to your registration.
Summits (Add-on $350)
Choose from six summits tailored to your interests: AI · Government · Higher Education · Nonprofit · Healthcare · Community.
Two summits with special pricing: the Community Summit is free for all DrupalCon registrants, and the Nonprofit Summit is free for Nonprofit ticket holders.
Full-Day Training (Add-on $550)
One focused training on offer: AI Inside Drupal: From Smart Editorial Workflows to Canvas Agents That Build Pages, presented by DrupalEasy.
Community Party + The First-Ever DrupalCon Talent Show
Save the Tuesday night, 23 March 2027, for the DrupalCon Community Party, featuring something brand new for Orlando: the first-ever DrupalCon Talent Show!
It's FREE, and opting in helps us plan for everyone who wants to join us Tuesday night.
More details are coming soon.
Call for Speakers Is Still Open
There's still time to help shape the DrupalCon Orlando 2027 program! We're accepting speaker submissions through 20 October 2026.
Submit your DrupalCon Orlando session.
Where In The World Is Bytes?
Bytes the Gator is making his way around the Drupal community and you can join the fun for a chance to win a free registration to DrupalCon Orlando 2027. Can't attend a Drupal event or find Bytes? Another alligator works too, preferably not a live one!
Meet Bytes and learn how to enter the mascot contest.
The Engineering Team Has Been Busy
This month the team completed the migration of Drupal's security issue tracking to git.drupalcode.org, making the volunteer Security Team faster and easier to grow.
The broader issue migration now covers 90,000+ issues across 7,200+ projects. Release packages were re-signed for 3,200+ projects through Rugged, our new package signing pipeline.
localize.drupal.org and jobs.drupal.org have moved to modern cloud infrastructure, and the Drupal 11 upgrade of the new Drupal.org platform is underway.
Next up: porting community events to new.drupal.org so we can retire groups.drupal.org.
The Drupal Association At-Large Board Election Winner Is Announced
We are excited to announce the winner of 2026 Community At-Large Board Elections. We would like to congratulate and welcome our newest board member, Janna Malikova, for winning the community-elected seat.
We are grateful to Alejandro Moreno for their service and dedication to Drupal and the community, and to all the candidates who applied this year. Read the full announcement here.
This roundup is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Want it in your inbox? Subscribe to email communications and browse previous editions.
01 Sep 2026 1:02pm GMT
Specbee: Canvas Page Metatag Module: How to restore full SEO controls to Drupal Canvas pages
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
Gspikes: The Complete Drupal 7 → Drupal 11 Migration Checklist: 52 Steps, In Order
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
31 Aug 2026
Drupal.org aggregator
Omega8.cc: Pull Your Site into DDEV
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
Freelock Blog: Drupal Meets Matrix part 1: Setting up Matrix API
Drupal Meets Matrix part 1: Setting up Matrix API
31 Aug 2026 9:30pm GMT
A Drupal Couple: Drupal could be a great answer for vibe coding
Imagen
When you vibe an application, the AI picks the stack, and both projects I've looked at came back with the same one. I know Drupal and I contribute to it, so weigh everything here against that bias. But what a vibe-coded application ends up needing, Drupal already has, and the piece still missing is one this community could build. There may be better fits out there. This one is mine.
Add new comment
31 Aug 2026 5:54pm GMT
The Drop Times: When Websites Become Interfaces for Machines
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
Acquia.com - Drupal Blog: Two Keynotes, One Question: Building Through Disruption at Drupal GovCon
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
Drupal Association blog: The Drupal Association Announces 2026 Board Election Winner
The Drupal Association is excited to announce the winner of 2026 Community At-Large Board Elections.
We extend a sincere thank you to Alejandro Moreno for his service and dedication, not only to Drupal, but to the Drupal community. Your time spent on the board made such a difference to the future of the Drupal project, and we thank you all for participating with grace, thoughtfulness, and insightful contributions.
We would like to congratulate and welcome our newest board member, Janna Malikova, for winning the community-elected seat during our 2026 At-Large Board Elections.
We cannot wait to see all the amazing things Janna will accomplish while on the Drupal Association Board.
Detailed Voting Results
There were 8 candidates in this year's At-Large board member election. 307 voters cast their ballots out of a pool of 1274 eligible voters. Eligible voters are active Drupal Association members, known as Ripple Makers, whose membership must have been active at least 24 hours before voting opened.
Under Approval Voting, each eligible voter can give a vote to one or more candidates.
The final total of votes were as follows:
|
Candidate |
Votes |
|
Scott Falconer |
74 |
|
James Abrahams |
131 |
|
Bert Boerland |
120 |
|
Chris Kelly |
26 |
|
Darren Oh |
57 |
|
Janna Malikova |
141 |
|
Helge Notø |
74 |
|
Matthew Saunders |
128 |
On behalf of all the staff and board of the Drupal Association, a heartfelt Drupal Thanks to all of you who stood for the elections this year. It truly is a big commitment to contribution, the Drupal Association, and the community, and we are so grateful for all of your voices. Thank you for your willingness to serve, and we hope you'll consider participating again in 2027!
31 Aug 2026 11:38am GMT