fidzu : Drupal

A common interface cannot settle every question about responsibility. Jürgen Haas examines the choices beneath Drupal's orchestration ambitions.

20 Oct 2026 2:38pm GMT

20 Oct 2026 1:09pm GMT

An AI-generated image can reach a Drupal site with a digital signature attached, and leave it with another one. Three modules sit in between, and each does one job. Here I follow them one by one on a real image, the cover of this article made with ChatGPT, and I say what held up on my test site and where it broke. What an AI image carries and how AI Disclosure, the module I created on drupal.org within the Drupal AI Initiative, labels it is covered in the article on metadata and labels for AI images. Content Credentials reads: it opens the signature of the files an editor uploads and, if it says the file was made with AI, proposes the grade in AI Disclosure. AI Disclosure declares: it keeps the grade the editor confirms, shows the label to readers where the law asks for it and writes the metadata into the copies.

20 Oct 2026 12:00pm GMT

Charter first, price tag later: thoughts on a Drupal Federation

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Jürgen Haas Tue 20 Oct 2026 - 12:50

20 Oct 2026 10:50am GMT

Build a reliable local Drupal environment with DDEV. Follow the steps to start a new site, import an existing project, and export the code, database, and uploaded files needed to recreate it elsewhere.

19 Oct 2026 9:34pm GMT

Working with AI, developer Brandon Thomas says he has recreated seven Adobe applications as open-source alternatives through ArtCraft. His pitch promises familiar tools without subscriptions, with code people can inspect, modify and keep. For users frustrated by proprietary terms, the attraction is a credible alternative they can make their own.

Credibility takes time to establish. PhotoCraft's documentation describes an early alpha that is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. Its future usefulness will depend on continuing improvements, compatibility and support, alongside the freedom its licence provides.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert explains that distinction in his essay on licence-only and stewarded open source. Both are open source, but stewardship adds an ongoing commitment to the software and the people who depend on it. Maintainers fix failures, coordinate releases and respond to security issues, while organisations help fund the infrastructure and continuity that adoption requires.

Drupal illustrates why that continuing care matters. Its community and supporting organisations sustain a shared platform that users can retain while choosing different providers to host, extend or support it. The opportunity for new AI-built alternatives is to develop comparable continuity around their code. Established projects, including Drupal, must keep demonstrating that their stewardship delivers dependable software and meaningful choice.

A plausible outcome is more freely available alternatives, with lasting adoption concentrated around projects that sustain that care. Proprietary vendors may respond through better services or greater dependence on hosted features, while open projects can offer independence backed by accountable maintenance. Funding security, compatibility, documentation and long-term support would help make those alternatives viable. The strongest challenge to proprietary control could come from communities that give people both the freedom to leave and confidence in what comes next.

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

Allen Jason wrote and curated this issue of Editor's Pick.

19 Oct 2026 2:35pm GMT

Website teams can generate new pages faster than they can govern them. Pantheon's P1 beta tests a different approach to sharing that responsibility.

19 Oct 2026 1:54pm GMT

The image above shows me holding a plant that represents a small piece of code or an idea I want to share with someone else. To me, sharing code feels like planting something in someone else's garden. The analogy of open-source code and projects as plants and gardens appeals to me because plants are organic and essential to sustaining life, and the gardens we plant require significant planning and care. Open-source contributions come in all shapes and sizes, like gardens and the plants they hold, and both need maintenance. Some gardens require more maintenance than others.

My past two posts/tales focused on building and maintaining a Drupal module using AI, and now I want to discuss contributing to a module using AI. To continue my garden analogy, the projects I maintain are like my personal gardens.

Personal garden

By building and maintaining a Drupal module, I have control over my personal garden, but it exists within a community of gardens. I can decide which code/plants stay or go. Ultimately, I am responsible for the health of the project/garden. My project/garden is part of the Drupal gardens community (pun/irony intended). I am hyper-aware of the Drupal community where my Drupal garden lives.

Early on, when I took over building and maintaining the Webform module, I realized I was responsible for more than code; I was responsible for the entire experience of building Webforms for site builders and for supporting the module's extensibility for developers. To assist site builders and developers, I continually created videos and code examples as I built out the module. My blog explored and shared all aspects of the Webform module, including Read More

19 Oct 2026 12:26pm GMT

An AI-generated video that looks real has to be declared to the people watching it, and on a site the declaration has to be both on the page and inside the file. Here I follow how AI Disclosure, the module I created on drupal.org within the Drupal AI Initiative, does it. Images have an article of their own, and so does audio. A video needs a label when it is a deep fake: when it credibly shows a person, a place, an object or an event that exists or could exist, and whoever watches it would take it as real. A synthetic avatar presenting a company's results falls within it, if the viewer mistakes it for a real person. A cartoon or a clearly fictional video keeps the label in a lighter form, next to the video rather than on it. The obligation falls on the publisher, under Article 50(4) of the AI Act, and it applies from 2 August 2026.

19 Oct 2026 12:00pm GMT

As we work with our consulting clients on site-builds, we are often asked to include modules related to newsletters and analytics. Sometimes, our clients don't fully understand the ramifications of adding external scripts to their sites, so we end up having a larger data privacy discussion. In most cases, we recommend to our clients that they limit external embeds and scripts on their site mainly in the interest of user privacy. We figured it was about time that we took a closer look at our own site. With that in mind, we recently made the decision to remove most 3rd-party embeds and tracking scripts from this site with a few exceptions: Our Mautic marketing automation system (which we self-host and completely control.) Termageddon (affiliate link) content for our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages. Embedded YouTube videos. We have removed: All embedded EventBrite forms (which we haven't used in a very long time!) All references to Mailchimp (again, we haven't used it in a long

18 Oct 2026 1:24pm GMT

Six hats off to DrupalCon Rotterdam

Gábor Hojtsy Sat, 10/17/2026 - 18:02

17 Oct 2026 3:02pm GMT

16 Oct 2026 8:27am GMT

Get to know Drupal CMS, Canvas and Mercury for rapid prototyping

admin Fri, 16 Oct 2026 - 17:43

16 Oct 2026 4:30am GMT

At my day job, we recently had a client who wanted to bring us a project but had to persuade a large group of stakeholders. I was able to create a functioning version of the site they described in less than 2 hours.

16 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

BigCommerce is a SaaS platform that has earned its reputation with B2B sellers. Its B2B Edition handles selling with quotes, its catalog supports far more product options than most SaaS platforms, and its open APIs make it friendlier to integrations than many of its competitors. If your business fits neatly inside its walls, it's a legitimate choice. Many distributors and manufacturers have found success on the platform.

The trouble starts when your requirements don't match the platform's assumptions. Its best B2B features sit behind the top-tier plan. Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) caps force automatic upgrades as you grow. A new fee introduced in June 2026 charges a percentage on orders processed through non-embedded gateways, including offline payments like purchase orders. And when your order workflows, product types, or integrations go beyond what the platform anticipated, you're forced to work around BigCommerce rather than with it.

Drupal Commerce is an open-source alternative built on Drupal. You own the code and the data, there are no license or transaction fees, and every part of the platform, from checkout to order workflows to the product data model, can be shaped to fit how your company already works.

Read more

15 Oct 2026 6:49pm GMT

Today we are talking about the UN, Open Source, and Drupal with guests Tim Lehnen & Henry Poole. We'll also cover Live Update as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/574

Topics

• What Is UN Open Source Week
• Why Open Source Fits UN Goals
• Who Attends and What Tech Is There
• Conference Audience and DPI DPG
• Drupal as a Digital Public Good
• UN Uses Drupal at Scale
• Why Attend and What to Gain
• Upstream First Contracting
• Open Procurement Curriculum
• Reaching Procurement Conferences
• Steering Spend Upstream
• Funding Open Source Legally
• Talking Louder Beyond Drupal
• Digital Sovereignty Explained
• Governance Values Matter
• Fixing Funding Perception
• Community Next Steps Closing

Resources

• Appalachia
• Omar Mohsine
• Digital public infrastructure - DPI
• Digital public good - DPG
• ShareIT act
  • Agencies need to use open source
  • PDF: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-17951/pdf/COMPS-17951.pdf
• Ditap
• NCMA
• Sovereign tech agency
• Palantir blog
• Eva black - Four opens
• FSF - Four freedoms
• Drupal's open web manifesto
  • https://www.drupal.org/association/open-web-manifesto
  • https://openwebsitealliance.org/charter.html#open-web-manifesto

Guests

Henry Poole - civicactions.com henry-poole Tim Lehnen - drupal.org hestenet

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Tim Sharp - tea-sharp

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted parts of your Drupal pages, like blocks, views, or notifications, to update in real time without a page refresh, and without having to stand up extra infrastructure to do it? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Live Update
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2026 by Alessandro Feijó (afeijo) of Mindcore
  • Versions available: 1.0.0-alpha6, which works with Drupal 11 and 12
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release just a week ago
  • No security coverage yet, since it was just created and only has alpha releases
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation: a detailed README, plus a roadmap doc and a built-in demo page
  • Number of open issues: none
• Usage stats:
  • 14 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Live Update positions itself as a generic real-time event layer for Drupal: modules publish events to named channels, and browsers subscribed to those channels update just the affected part of the page
  • Out of the box it uses plain HTTP polling back to Drupal, every 5 seconds by default, so it works on pretty much any host with no extra services
  • The transport is pluggable, though. Set it to automatic and it'll try WebSockets first, then an experimental Server-Sent Events submodule, then fall back to polling
  • For site builders, the base module adds an "Update this block live" checkbox to any block in the block layout, no code needed
  • There's also a whole suite of submodules: live-refreshing Views displays, single-entity updates, user presence blocks like "who's viewing this page", a notification bell with toasts, queue progress monitoring, remote JSON API tables, and an admin dashboard with an event monitor
  • One I think editorial teams will like: Live Update Form, which warns you when someone else is editing the same content you are
  • For developers, publishing is one line, a liveupdate_publish() helper or an injectable service, and on the front end you can either use data attributes in your markup or subscribe through a small JavaScript API
  • Every channel is access-controlled, and modules can weigh in on who's allowed to subscribe through by implementing hook_liveupdate_channel_access()
  • Under the hood, events are stored in their own database table with an optional time-to-live, and expired ones get cleaned up on cron. Polling clients just ask for anything newer than the last event ID they saw
  • There's a solid set of Drush commands too, including one to publish a test event straight from the command line, which is handy for debugging
  • Caveat: this is very new and still alpha, so I'd treat it as one to watch and experiment with rather than deploy into production today
  • And if polling isn't enough for you, there's a companion project, Live Update Go: https://www.drupal.org/project/liveupdate_go
  • It's the push transport Live Update is designed around. A small Drupal module, plus a standalone gateway written in Go that gives browsers a native WebSocket connection
  • Drupal stays in charge: it checks channel access, hands the browser a short-lived signed token, and sends signed events to the gateway, which fans them out to connected clients
  • You run the gateway as its own service, with systemd or Docker, behind a TLS reverse proxy. The README is very clear that you shouldn't try to launch it from PHP
  • It can scale horizontally using Redis or Valkey pub/sub, one gateway can serve multiple Drupal sites with isolated tenants, and if it ever goes down, Live Update falls back automatically and switches back once it recovers
  • Same maintainer, created at the start of October, and also alpha, with an alpha1 release and one reported site so far

15 Oct 2026 6:00pm GMT