fidzu : Drupal

Zoocha has unveiled a new brand identity to reflect its transition from a Drupal development agency to a digital experience agency powered by Drupal. The rebrand responds to client demand for broader creative and strategic capabilities and positions the company for a market increasingly shaped by AI-driven digital experiences.

28 Jan 2026 2:10pm GMT

28 Jan 2026 3:13am GMT

Setting up a local Drupal development environment requires tools that handle web servers, databases, and PHP configuration. DDEV provides a Docker-based solution that simplifies this process while maintaining flexibility for different project requirements.

In the video above, you'll learn how to install and configure DDEV, create a new Drupal project, use essential commands for daily development, import and export databases, set up debugging with Xdebug, and extend DDEV with add-ons and custom commands.

27 Jan 2026 8:20pm GMT

Are you building your business on rented land? We all have 'digital landlords' but are we conscious to the risks they pose?

27 Jan 2026 5:15pm GMT

Europe's push for digital sovereignty is gaining momentum, but much of the conversation remains superficial. Drawing on the recent analysis by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, the real issue is not whether governments use European or non-European vendors-it's whether they retain meaningful control over the software that underpins public services. Dependency, not geography, is the risk. Several public institutions are beginning to act on this insight, but the structural implications remain largely unaddressed.

Dries' argument reframes open source from a technical preference into a governance imperative. Open source offers auditability, portability, and independence that proprietary systems cannot. Yet, while Europe's public sector heavily relies on open source, it consistently fails to invest in its foundations. Procurement practices continue to channel funding toward large integrators and resellers, leaving the maintainers who secure and evolve the software underfunded and overstretched.

The result is a stark mismatch between policy ambitions and spending realities. Governments pay for delivery and compliance but neglect the upstream work that ensures long-term security, resilience, and innovation. As Buytaert makes clear, digital sovereignty won't be achieved through strategy papers alone. It demands procurement policies that treat open-source contributions as a core public value-not an optional extra.

With that, let's move on to the important stories from the past week.

DRUPAL COMMUNITY

• Is MySQL Still Right for Drupal? Andrés Torres Russo Urges a Rethink

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Drupal Migrate Plus 6.0.9 Requires PHP Attributes Over Annotations
• Drupal AI Adds mittwald Provider v1.0 to Support Hosted AI Models
• Display Builder Beta 1 Unifies Layout Interfaces for Drupal Site Builders
• Augusto Fagioli Releases Business Identity 1.0.0 to Streamline Company Data in Drupal
• Creodrop Promises One-Click Drupal Hosting Without the DevOps Headache

EVENT

• Upcoming Zoocha Webinar Showcases Global Touring's Drupal Success
• Drupal Powers EU Open Source Week 2026 With Policy, Innovation, and Community Events
• AmyJune Hineline Announced as Featured Speaker for Florida DrupalCamp 2026
• DrupalCamp Grenoble 2026 Opens Sponsorship Packages
• Dripyard and Lullabot to Deliver Future‑Proof Theming Training at DrupalCon Chicago 2026
• Drupal Iberia 2026 Set for 8-9 May in Braga, Tickets Now Available

FREE SOFTWARE

• Dries Buytaert Urges Europe to Fund Open Source Maintainers for Digital Sovereignty

TRAINING

• Architect Accelerator Course Challenges the Limits of Traditional Drupal Training

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now. To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn , Twitter , Bluesky , and Facebook . You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes .

Thank you.

Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor
The DropTimes

27 Jan 2026 3:36pm GMT

Planning to scale Drupal? Understand consulting costs, what great Drupal consulting covers, and how to pick a partner who improves speed, security, and maintainability.

27 Jan 2026 12:43pm GMT

Commerce Referral
Provides a referral system for Drupal Commerce that allows customers to refer friends and receive rewards.

27 Jan 2026 11:48am GMT

27 Jan 2026 9:05am GMT

27 Jan 2026 8:42am GMT

When we think of robots, we often picture shiny machines whirring around in sci‑fi movies, or perhaps we think of something that is gradually becoming part of our reality. But not all robots are mechanical. In the world of SEO, search engine bots are tiny robots exploring your Drupal website, and with the right guidance, you can make sure they stick to the paths that matter.

27 Jan 2026 4:29am GMT

drunomics joins the Drupal AI Initiative as Silver Maker

wolfgang.ziegler Mon, 26 Jan 2026 - 21:50

26 Jan 2026 8:50pm GMT

Today we are talking about Integrations into Drupal, Automation, and Drupal with Orchestration with guest Jürgen Haas. We'll also cover CRM as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/537

Topics

• Understanding Orchestration
• Orchestration in Drupal
• Introduction to Orchestration Services
• Drupal's Role in Orchestration
• Flexibility in Integration
• Orchestration Module in Drupal
• Active Pieces and Open Source Integration
• Security Considerations in Orchestration
• Future of Orchestration in Drupal
• Getting Involved with Orchestration

Resources

• Orchestration
• N8N
  • https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-21877
  • https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-21858
• Drupal as an application
• Tools
  • Orchestration
  • ECA
  • Maestro
  • AI
  • Flowdrop

Guests

Jürgen Haas - lakedrops.com jurgenhaas

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted a Drupal-native way to store, manage, and interact with people who might not all be registered users? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • CRM - Contact Relationship Management
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2007 by Allie Micka, but the Steve Ayers aka bluegeek9 took over the namespace
  • Versions available: 1.0.0-beta2, which works with Drupal 11.1 or newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release just a day ago
  • Security coverage: opted in, but needs a stable release
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 73 open issues, but all bugs have been marked as fixed
• Usage stats:
  • 10 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Listeners may remember some mention of the CRM module in the conversation about the Member Platform initiative back in episode 512
  • As a reminder, something other than standard Drupal user accounts is useful for working with contact information for people where you may not have all the criteria necessary for a Drupal user account, for example an email address. Also, a dedicated system can make it easier to model relationships between contacts, and provide additional capabilities.
  • It's worth noting that this module defines CRM as Contact Relationship Management, not assuming that the data is associated with "customers" or "constituents" as some other solutions do
  • At its heart, CRM defines three new entity types: contacts, contact methods, and relationships. Each of these can have fieldable bundles, and provides some default examples: Person, Household, and Organization for contacts; Address, Email, and Telephone for contact methods; and Head of household, Spouse, Employee, and Member for relationships
  • Out of the box CRM includes integrations with other popular modules like Group and Context, in addition to a variety of Drupal core systems like views and search
  • As previously mentioned CRM is intended to be the foundational data layer of the Member Platform, but is also a key element of the Open Knowledge distribution, meant to allow using Drupal as a collaborative knowledge base and learning platform

26 Jan 2026 7:00pm GMT

Which hosting to select for Drupal? This is one of the most frequently asked questions among people starting their work with this CMS. In this article, I'll explain what to pay attention to when choosing Drupal hosting and provide a brief overview of available options - based on 15 years of experience implementing Drupal for clients from Poland and abroad. I invite you to read the post or watch the [ from the Nowoczesny Drupal series.

26 Jan 2026 2:04pm GMT

…and now I'm recovering

theodore January 26, 2026

26 Jan 2026 12:44am GMT

On January 15, Drupal turned 25 years old. What began in 2001 as a simple open source experiment by founder Dries Buytaert in Antwerp is now one of the most powerful frameworks for complex digital platforms worldwide. Drupal has grown up. And with it, the requirements for digital products.

25 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

This note is mostly for my future self, in case I need to set this up again. I'm sharing it publicly because parts of it might be useful to others, though it's not a complete tutorial since it relies on a custom Drupal module I haven't released.

For context: I switched to Markdown and then open-sourced my blog content by exporting it to GitHub. Every day, my Drupal site exports its content as Markdown files and commits any changes to github.com/dbuytaert/website-content. New posts appear automatically, and so do edits and deletions.

Creating the GitHub repository

Create a new GitHub repository. I called mine website-content.

Giving your server access to GitHub

For your server to push changes to GitHub automatically, you need SSH key authentication.

SSH into your server and generate a new SSH key pair:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/github -N ""

This creates two files: ~/.ssh/github (your private key that stays on your server) and ~/.ssh/github.pub (your public key that you share with GitHub).

The -N "" creates the key without a passphrase. For automated scripts on secured servers, passwordless keys are standard practice. The security comes from restricting what the key can do (a deploy key with write access to one repository) rather than from a passphrase.

Next, tell SSH to use this key when connecting to GitHub:

cat >> ~/.ssh/config << 'EOF'
Host github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github
  IdentitiesOnly yes
EOF

Add GitHub's server fingerprint to your known hosts file. This prevents SSH from asking "Are you sure you want to connect?" when the script runs:

ssh-keyscan github.com >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

Display your public key so you can copy it:

cat ~/.ssh/github.pub

In GitHub, go to your repository's "Settings", find "Deploy keys" in the sidebar, and click "Add deploy key". Check the box for "Allow write access".

Test that everything works:

ssh -T git@github.com

You should see: You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

The export script

I created the following export script:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

TEMP=/tmp/dries-export

# Clone the existing repository
git clone git@github.com:dbuytaert/website-content.git $TEMP
cd $TEMP

# Clean all directories so moved/deleted content is tracked
rm -rf */

# Export fresh content older than 2 days
drush node:export --end-date="2 days ago" --destination=$TEMP

# Commit and push if there are changes
git config user.email "dries+bot@buytaert.net"
git config user.name "Dries Bot"
git add -A
git diff --staged --quiet || {
    git commit -m "Automatic updates for $(date +%Y-%m-%d)"
    git push
}

rm -rf $TEMP

The drush node:export command comes from a custom Drupal module I built for my site. I have not published the module on Drupal.org because it's specific to my site and not reusable as is. I wrote about why that kind of code is still worth sharing as adaptable modules, and I hope to share it once Drupal.org has a place for them.

The two-day delay (--end-date="2 days ago") gives me time to catch typos before posts are archived to GitHub. I usually find them right after hitting publish.

The git add -A stages everything including deletions, so if I remove a post from my site, it disappears from GitHub too (though Git's history preserves it).

Scheduling the export

On a traditional server, you'd add this script to Cron to run daily. My site runs on Acquia Cloud, which is Kubernetes-based and automatically scales pods up and down based on traffic. This means there is no single server to put a crontab on. Instead, Acquia Cloud provides a scheduler that runs jobs reliably across the infrastructure.

And yes, this note about automatically backing up my content will itself be automatically backed up.

24 Jan 2026 1:54pm GMT