fidzu : Drupal

25 Sep 2026 12:28pm GMT

What changes when Drupal becomes something an enterprise AI agent can act on, rather than the place where every user must work? Pantheon plans to show that model running end to end in Rotterdam.

25 Sep 2026 12:04pm GMT

Digital sovereignty does not begin with replacing software. It begins with knowing which services an organisation depends on, who controls them, and what it would cost to leave.

25 Sep 2026 10:33am GMT

25 Sep 2026 10:12am GMT

For several DrupalCon Rotterdam sessions, the useful question is not simply whether Drupal teams can automate more. It is where automation should stop, where review should begin, and what people still have to judge for themselves.

25 Sep 2026 6:14am GMT

DDEV v1.25.4 Is Out

DDEV v1.25.4 landed on September 2 with 142 PRs from the community. The theme is doing less by hand:

• Database seeding - a new project can start from a seed snapshot instead of an import step.
• ddev start --reset-database - throw away a project's database and start clean without ddev delete -O.
• Global Dockerfiles and env files - image and environment customizations applied to every project at once, instead of per-project.
• MySQL 9.7 LTS, plus MODX Revolution and Maho project types.
• Linux packages moved to Cloudsmith at packages.ddev.com (Gemfury keeps working).

Read the full release post for details.

Snapshots, Explained (with Screencast)

The snapshot work in v1.25.4 got its own post: DDEV Snapshots: Checkpoints, Restores, and Seeded Databases. It covers basic snapshot use, checkpointing during a migration, uncompressed snapshots, snapshots embedded in the project, and seeding a new project from a snapshot - with a screencast↗ walking through old and new behavior.

The older DDEV Database Management post has been updated to match.

Hobobiker Rides Again: A Three-Part Live Series on Drupal 6 → Drupal 11 with Claude

The Drupal AI Learners Club↗ - the initiative led by Amber Matz and Angie Byron that meets regularly for show-and-tell on AI tools and workflows - has scheduled a three-part live series with Randy Fay joining Amber and Angie as host, migrating hobobiker.com - a Drupal 6 site with years of content - two different ways.

After Jamie Abrahams migrated a site live and checked the result with evals in One Command, One Migration: AI Best Practices in Action↗, Randy tried the approach on his own very old site. The results made one thing clear: Claude does its best work with a guided plan, a clear view of the source and destination, and success criteria it has to prove it has met. So the series takes hobobiker.com on two journeys - one ending in static HTML, the other in Drupal 11 - and checks both against the same test suite.

These are working sessions, not polished demos. Bring your questions, suggestions, and opinions; the peanut gallery is part of the show.

All three are on the club's Luma calendar↗, and recaps of past sessions are collected in the session list on drupal.org↗.

• October 16, 2026 at 9:30 AM US Pacific / 12:30 PM US Eastern / 18:30 CEST - Part 1: Road Test: Having Claude Write the Tests Before the Trip
  Before any migration starts, we need a way to know whether it worked. Randy works with Claude to explore the Drupal 6 site and design automated tests covering content and design: pages, paths, images, menus, and how things look. The goal is a test suite that doesn't depend on any particular destination, so the same tests can run against a static archive and a Drupal 11 rebuild. Along the way: how to push Claude past "looks good to me" toward a complete verification plan, and how a sandboxed environment like coder.ddev.com smooths out the process.
  RSVP↗

• October 23, 2026 at 9:30 AM US Pacific / 12:30 PM US Eastern / 18:30 CEST - Part 2: The Last Ride: Sending a Drupal Site into Retirement
  Not every old Drupal site needs an upgrade; some just need a dignified retirement. Randy has archived plenty of legacy sites as static HTML, and this time Claude does the work - given a proven strategy (Lullabot's "Sending a Drupal Site into Retirement"), clear success criteria, and the tests from Part 1. Can it turn hobobiker.com into a static site that holds up, in an hour, in a way everyone watching can follow? A practical use case for anyone with an aging site that still has content worth keeping.
  RSVP↗

• October 30, 2026 at 9:30 AM US Pacific / 12:30 PM US Eastern / 17:30 CET - Part 3: The Long Haul: Planning and Running a Drupal 6 to Drupal 11 Migration
  This is the hard one. Drupal 6 to Drupal 11 skips many major versions and hits most of the snags that come with them. Instead of turning Claude loose, we prepare it the way you'd onboard a new team member: first it explores the D6 source database and files, then it learns what the D11 destination offers, then it writes a migration plan before touching any code. Randy follows that plan live, with plenty of input from the peanut gallery, stopping at sensible checkpoints and picking up in later sessions if needed. The finish line is the same test suite from Road Test, now running against a working Drupal 11 site.
  RSVP↗

Pressable Ships an Official DDEV Add-On

Pressable↗ released an official, open-source DDEV add-on for syncing WordPress sites between their hosting and a local DDEV environment.

• What it does - ddev pull pressable and ddev push pressable sync the database and uploads over SSH and WP-CLI, with no API tokens or plugins required. --skip-db and --skip-files let you move one or the other, and Pressable limits pushes to non-production staging sites, with confirmation prompts, as a safeguard.
• Install - ddev add-on get pressable/ddev-pressable
• Links: changelog entry↗ • source on GitHub↗

There's also a French write-up from KingLand looking at how Pressable combines the DDEV add-on with MCP-driven AI for agency WordPress maintenance, including the case for keeping humans on the sensitive operations: Pressable : l'hébergement WordPress dopé par DDEV et l'IA↗ (French).

Community Projects

ddev-branchery: a URL, PHP version, and database per branch - Benjamin Kott's add-on gives each Git branch its own worktree beside the main checkout, with its own web address, PHP runtime, and isolated database, while the main project keeps running. Documentation↗

ddev-tailnet-proxy: DDEV projects on your tailnet - Titouan Mathis built a proxy that discovers running DDEV projects on a remote development server, assigns them stable ports, and serves them under the server's Tailscale hostname - no per-project configuration. Read the note↗

TYPO3 Quickstarter 0.7.0 - The CLI that scaffolds local TYPO3 environments on DDEV added support for legacy TYPO3 9 and 10 on PHP 7.4, so older extensions can be worked on before modernizing, plus a built-in phpMyAdmin that auto-logs in. Release notes↗

Knecht Cloud, hands-on - Matthias Andrasch walks through installing Knecht Cloud on a Hetzner VPS: project setup, AI-driven workflows, a browser terminal, and online previews, in a tool built for DDEV projects on TYPO3, Drupal, and Craft CMS. Read part 1↗

Talks and Tutorials from Around the Web

• DDEV & shopware-cli for Shopware 6 → Benny Poensgen's slides from Shopware Open-Stage on September 17, 2026, on pairing DDEV with shopware-cli. View the deck↗ - see also his Shopware on DDEV post, and his October 21 training session below.
• Mailpit with DDEV for Drupal 11 email testing (Spanish) → Jesús Daza covers DDEV's built-in Mailpit integration and an SMTP-based setup, how to reach the UI, and how to confirm mail is being delivered during development. Read on solucionex.com↗
• A DDEV-based local development workflow → Michael K. Laweh on what DDEV gives a consultant working across Laravel, Yii, and WordPress projects: consistency across projects and teams, fast project setup, and framework-agnostic tooling. Read on klytron.com↗

DDEV Live Training

Sessions are open to everybody.

• October 21, 2026 at 8:00 AM US Mountain / 10:00 AM US Eastern / 16:00 CEST - Shopware with DDEV, with Benny Poensgen
  A look at running Shopware on DDEV, from Benny's earlier post on the blog.
  Add to Google Calendar • Download .ics

• November 11, 2026 at 8:00 AM US Mountain / 10:00 AM US Eastern / 16:00 CET - Advanced Coder.ddev.com Techniques
  Using the coder CLI, local and web-based VS Code, and remote-controlling Claude, including the freeform template.
  Add to Google Calendar • Download .ics

Zoom Join Info:
Link: Join Zoom Meeting
Passcode: 12345

Governance

• The next DDEV advisory group meeting, open to everybody, is November 4, 2026 at 8:00 AM US Mountain / 10:00 AM US Eastern / 16:00 CET. Add to Google Calendar • See the agenda. We love to hear from our community!

Sponsorship Update

We so appreciate all of you supporting the project!

August 2026: ~$10,038/month (83.7% of goal)

September 2026: ~$10,099/month (84.2% of goal)

If DDEV has helped your team, consider sponsoring. → Become a sponsor↗

Contact us to discuss sponsorship options that work for your organization.

Stay in the Loop-Follow Us and Join the Conversation

• Blog↗
• LinkedIn↗
• Mastodon↗
• Bluesky↗
• Discord↗

Compiled and edited with assistance from Claude Code.

25 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Today we are talking about GovHub, Drupal in Government, and Why Governments Love Drupal with guest Jasmyne Epps. We'll also cover Convivial Gov Site Template as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/571

Topics

• GovHub Origins and Goals
• Feature Requests and Governance
• Why Government Chooses Drupal
• Team Structure and Release Cadence
• Accessibility and Compliance Strategy
• Hosting Model and Multisite
• Structured Content and Microcontent
• Syndication and Emergency Alerts
• Orchard Design System Explained
• Training and Onboarding Editors
• Gov Talks Conference
• Logo Specs and Releases
• Ticket Prioritization PRICE
• QA Workflow with Tugboat
• Handling Traffic Spikes
• Drupal 11 Performance Talk
• Drupal 11 Upgrade Gotchas
• Getting Users Excited
• Translation Strategy Limits
• Why Government Loves Drupal

Resources

• GovHub
• The Bug Stops Here - The State of Georgia Shifts Left (GovCon 2025 presentation with Jasmyne Epps and James Sansbury)
• Accelerating an ambitious migration and development project (GovHub + Tugboat migration story)
• Logo page
• Public facing knowledge base
• Orchard design system
• (P)Rice
  • (P)olitics - (R)each - (I)mpact - (C)onfidence - (E)ffort
• Luma

Guests

Jasmyne Epps - jasmyneepps.com jasmyneepps

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Amber Matz - tugboatqa.com [amber himes matz](https://www.drupal.org/u/amber himes matz)

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to stand up a polished, accessible government website in Drupal (with components, content types, SEO, and cookie consent all wired up) without writing any code? There's a site template for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Convivial Gov
• Brief history
  • Created in March 2026 by Morpht, the shop behind the Convivial family - with Ivan Zugec leading the maintainer team.
  • Versions available: 1.3.3, which works with Drupal 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained: release just last week, on September 16th
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage: functional tests for install and validation, plus a kernel requirements test.
  • Documentation there's a full handbook over at docs.morpht.com, and a live demo at gov.convivial.io
  • Open issues: none?
• Site template features and usage
  • Like the Haven site template we talked about a couple of weeks ago, Convivial Gov gives you a curated stack plus demo content, and in this case hands you a robust, ready-to-customize government site.
  • Because it's built on Drupal CMS, you get all the latest Drupal tooling: Canvas for visual page building, Single Directory Components, and Recipes.
  • The front end is Morpht's Morphos theme, built on Tailwind and DaisyUI, so you get dark mode, multiple colour palettes, and a big library of editor-friendly components out of the box. It's worth mentioning that using the Morphos theme on a production site requires a paid license
  • The provided components are sorted into six buckets: container, content, child, element, background, and behavior. They include fun ones like scroll reveal and a colour palette switching behavior
  • The content model is broad. You get seven content types: Page, Section, Article, Publication, Resource, Topic, and Audience. And, they come with a stack of teaser and card view modes to display them.
  • The whole point is no-code: a site builder can compose sophisticated pages in Canvas without ever touching a template.
  • One thing to watch: the default timezone is Australia/Sydney out of the box
  • It's also worth comparing Convivial Gov to another site template called Local. Both dropped in March 2026, both are Canvas-based Drupal CMS site templates for the public sector, and both lean on ECA for automation - so there's real common ground. The difference is scope and mechanism. Local, from Annertech, is narrowly purpose-built for local councils and community-service directories: it ships a specific service information architecture - Service and Service Landing content types - with ECA wired so section pages stay in sync when service pages get published or updated, taking its cues from the gov.uk design system. Convivial Gov goes the other way - it's design-system-led and general-purpose, a broad component library and content model meant for any government, agency, or marketing site rather than one particular workflow.

24 Sep 2026 6:00pm GMT

Shopify is the fastest way to launch a simple online store. It handles hosting, security, and checkout beautifully. For straightforward DTC brands, it's hard to beat. But the more your business strays from a simple product catalog (B2B workflows, multi-brand storefronts, complex product configurations, deep ERP integration, content-driven commerce, full SEO control) the more you end up fighting the platform, stacking paid apps, and working around limitations that shouldn't exist.

And there's a deeper issue. Shopify is a merchant services company first and an ecommerce platform second. When 68% of GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) flows through Shopify Payments and the Shop app mediates your post-purchase relationship, you have to ask yourself: do you really own your customer relationship at all?

Drupal Commerce is an open source ecommerce framework that gives you complete ownership of your code, data model, customer relationships, and roadmap. No per-transaction platform fees. No forced migrations. No artificial product limits. No locked-down URLs. No platform inserting itself between you and your buyers. It's built for businesses that need the platform to adapt to them-not the other way around.

Read more

24 Sep 2026 5:53pm GMT

Putting AI into production raises harder questions than connecting a model to Drupal. Rotterdam speakers focus on context, evidence, controls and human review.

24 Sep 2026 4:23pm GMT

Structured control flow and managed memory each took away a freedom and handed
back a guarantee. Concurrency in PHP has not made that trade.

24 Sep 2026 3:00pm GMT

A statewide publishing platform can reduce repeated technical work across public websites, but it also establishes an operating model that can outlast the migration that created it.

24 Sep 2026 1:21pm GMT

Release state changes the response: some Drupal changes are ready to use, some warrant a targeted update, and others belong in testing rather than production.

24 Sep 2026 11:55am GMT

I came up with the title for this blog post while working on 20+ Webform security issues, because there were moments when I used Codex to hammer out a particularly complex issue. I couldn't help but find it ironic to use something as advanced as AI to hammer at a problem or challenge.

Some security issues were so complex to reproduce that I had to push Codex to replicate the problem, and it occasionally generated sloppy code. Still, even with Codex generating AI-slop, it helped me understand the root causes and solutions for security issues that had lingered for years.

Before I go any further, let's step back and talk about the challenge of maintaining the Webform module and addressing security issues.

Maintaining the Webform module

The bulk of the Webform module was created a decade ago, when I had more time and motivation to make a sizable contribution to Drupal. Drupal contributors and their contributions come in all shapes and sizes. The current codebase is stable and extendable, with "extendable" as the keyword, because people and AIs can alter and create Webform features and behaviors as needed using contributed modules or custom code. It is ironic that all the example webforms included in the Webform module, intended to help humans, have proven incredibly useful for AIs in understanding and extending webforms.

Though I am willing to say the code is stable, the fact that a webform is generally public and accepts input leaves the Webform module open to security issues. In other words, malicious actors, including AI, will target webforms to exploit XSS vulnerabilities or expose data.

Securing the Webform module

It is worth recognizing and praising Drupal's security team for...Read More

24 Sep 2026 8:32am GMT

Core contributors and continuous integration maintainers need to account for the new JavaScript development baseline without treating it as a Drupal 11 or production hosting requirement.

24 Sep 2026 6:44am GMT

The more consequential part of Dropsolid's Rotterdam presence is not the sponsorship tier. It is the argument that Drupal's content, permissions and workflows can form part of the control layer around AI systems using organisational knowledge.

24 Sep 2026 6:00am GMT

The DrupalCon program is always more than any one person can take in, so ahead of Rotterdam I want to lay out where Tag1 will be and how to connect with us. We have seven talks across Tuesday the 29th and Wednesday the 30th.

If you are coming, treat this as a map to where we will be and what we will be talking about. If you are not, the lineup is a fair read on where our heads are this year. A good deal of it is AI a team can put to work in a Drupal project today. More of it is the unglamorous work inside Drupal core, the parts nobody demos but everything else leans on. And one talk is the client story that keeps the rest honest. The full DrupalCon schedule covers everything beyond our own sessions; the times below are all local CEST.

First Stop, Afloat: The Enterprise Drupal AI Summit

The week opens on Monday the 28th, before any of the DrupalCon sessions, with a full day at the Enterprise Drupal AI Summit aboard the SS Rotterdam, the former ocean liner. It's a strategy day rather than a code day, built for senior decision-makers in government, higher education, and large enterprises, with a program on data sovereignty and running AI on enterprise platforms. Tag1 is there as both a summit sponsor and a Certified Gold Partner and Maker in the Drupal AI Initiative. The certification marks demonstrated Drupal AI expertise and a commitment to the Drupal code and community, and it fits a longer pattern. Data sovereignty is also where my own session picks up the next day, so if that is the thread you care about, the summit is the place to start.

Next Stop, Ashore: The DrupalCon Sessions

Tuesday, September 29

From Shadow AI to Sovereign AI Infrastructure

• Location: Open Stage
• When: 14:25 CEST
• Speakers: Thomas Schröpfer, amazee.ai and Hank VanZile, Tag1

Often, AI use inside a company was never approved by IT. It arrives through a browser extension, a personal account, a tool someone tried because it saved them an afternoon, and it stays out of the security review until something goes wrong. That is shadow AI. Thomas and I walk through an alternative: a private AI gateway that gives an organization visibility into how AI is being used without pushing teams off the tools they like or slowing them down. My part is how Scolta uses amazee.ai's private AI infrastructure to add secure AI capabilities across Drupal, Laravel, and WordPress, so the AI a site needs does not come with the governance gaps shadow AI opens. If this is a challenge your organization is facing, come find me after and we can compare notes.

Wednesday, September 30

Rebuilding the LMS Mid-Flight: A Drupal Success Story with AFT and AFL-CIO

• Location: Mees Room I
• When: 10:45-11:30 CEST
• Speaker: Marcin Grabias

Rebuilding a live LMS is risky. Rebuilding it while it powers mission-critical training for organizations like the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO is even harder. This session takes you through that journey-from growing pains and technical debt to a fully reimagined Drupal-native solution-sharing the lessons learned along the way.

Inside the Pyramid - A path to faster, clearer Drupal testing

• Location: Penn Room I&II
• When: 11:40-12:25 CEST
• Speaker: Francesco Placella

The test pyramid has been a cornerstone of software quality for decades, yet Drupal core has no formal guidelines instructing contributors how to write automated tests. This session will cover both the current state - discussing techniques to write faster tests - and how to change Drupal to make these improvements structural.

A joyful tour through the CLI now in Drupal Core

• Location: Penn Room I&II
• When: 13:40-14:00 CEST
• Speaker: Moshe Weitzman

It finally happened! A CLI in Drupal core. With the help and blessing of the Drush maintainers, Drupal core has gained its own extensible CLI. Learn how to use it, and develop and test commands for it.

Client Spotlight

Scolta: Drop-in AI Search Without a Search Server

• Location: Mees Room II
• When: 14:45-15:30 CEST
• Speakers: Kelly Booz, AFT Share My Lesson and Jeremy Andrews, Tag1

What if you could replace Solr with something that runs in the browser, costs almost nothing, and delivers better results out of the box? Scolta is an open source search toolkit that does exactly that: client-side search powered by Pagefind, with an AI layer for query expansion and summaries.

How we made the biggest performance gains in a decade in Drupal core

• Location: Van Oldenbarnevelt Room
• When: 14:45-15:30 CEST
• Speaker: Nathaniel Catchpole

Drupal 11.4 reduced database queries and cache I/O by around 50% compared to Drupal 11.0, as well as various front end performance improvements. This session will explain how we got there and give you tips for applying these techniques to your own site.

AI-Powered Site Building in Drupal: From Blank Site to Styled Pages in a Conversation

• Location: Leeuwen Room I&II
• When: 16:00-16:45 CEST
• Speakers: Francesco Pesenti, Francesco Quagliati

Building a complete Drupal site demands expertise across content types, taxonomy, menus, block configuration, and styling. What if a non-technical user could describe what they need in plain language and get back fully structured, styled pages, then refine everything through conversation?

Come Find Us

A lot of the work in these talks usually sits out of sight, in performance, testing, and the plumbing of AI workflows, so a week like this is one of the few times it surfaces all at once. If any of it is close to what you're working on, catch me or any of the team between sessions and let's talk. We would love to hear about the hard problems you're working to solve.

24 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT