02 Oct 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Drupal AI Initiative: Speed, Safety, and Smarter Journeys: What Drupal AI 1.5 Means for Digital Marketing Leaders

Author: Will Huggins

In enterprise digital experience, the conversation around generative AI has shifted dramatically. Digital leaders are no longer asking whether AI can write a paragraph or spin up a page. They are asking:

  • Can our AI deliver seamless customer journeys?
  • Can it scale without diluting our brand voice?
  • Will our IT and compliance teams actually approve it?

The release of Drupal AI 1.5 directly answers those questions.

Driven by 63 active contributors across 31 global organisations, Drupal AI 1.5 shifts the platform from one-shot text generation into an interactive, governed, and brand-safe digital experience engine.

For CMOs, Heads of Digital, and website owners, this release is not about backend developer plumbing - it is about practical marketing velocity, measurable ROI, and total brand sovereignty.

Here is a breakdown of what Drupal AI 1.5 unlocks for your digital roadmap.

1. Digital Assistants That Actually Remember the Customer Journey

Early AI chatbots suffered from digital amnesia: the second a visitor navigated to a new page or refreshed their session, their context vanished. For high-consideration purchases or complex self-service portals, this creates friction and frustrates users.

Drupal AI 1.5 introduces persistent, stateful conversation memory:

  • Seamless Multi Page Engagement: Conversational assistants now securely remember previous interactions across a user's entire browsing session. If a prospect asks about product specifications on a solutions page and later opens the chat on your pricing calculator, the assistant retains the context.
  • Enterprise Privacy by Default: Conversation threads are sandboxed per user session. Visitors enjoy a personalised journey, while your data protection officers can rest easy knowing customer history is never exposed across sessions or leaked externally.
  • Grounded in Your Content: Rather than relying on generic model knowledge, chatbots can now be plugged directly into your site's verified content repository (Retrieval-Augmented Generation / RAG), ensuring every answer is accurate, factual, and backed by your brand's single source of truth.

The Strategic Win: You transform your website from a static brochure into an intelligent, conversational destination that guides prospects smoothly through the conversion funnel.

2. Real-Time Streaming Guardrails: Zero-Risk Brand Safety

For any marketing leader, the greatest fear with public-facing AI is reputational damage: a model hallucinating incorrect pricing, generating off-brand language, or leaking sensitive corporate information.

While traditional safety filters only check text after the entire response is completed-slowing down user experiences-Drupal AI 1.5 introduces active streaming guardrails:

  • Live Stream Filtering: Guardrails now monitor the AI's output token-by-token in real time. If an external model attempts to output confidential identifiers, internal instructions, or unvetted claims, the filter suppresses and replaces the content before a single character renders in the visitor's browser.
  • Semantic Topic Guardrails: Restricting an AI to approved topics used to be brittle. If a model said "coastal vacation" instead of "beach holiday," strict keyword filters would break. Version 1.5 uses intelligent semantic matching: the assistant understands intent, synonyms, and localised phrasing while remaining firmly inside your brand boundaries.
  • Cost-Effective Compliance: User prompts can now be routed through dedicated, cost-free moderation channels instead of burning expensive generation tokens, protecting both your brand standards and your marketing budget

The Strategic Win: Complete brand safety. Your legal, compliance, and IT teams get auditable, proactive safeguards built into the core publishing architecture.

3. From "One-Click Prompts" to Interactive Editorial Copilots

Early CMS AI automations were rigid: an editor clicked an AI button, waited, and was forced to accept or discard whatever came back.

Drupal AI 1.5 turns AI Automators into an interactive creative partner inside the editing workspace:

  • Interactive Refinement in the Edit Form: When generating campaign copy, headlines, or summaries, editors can now open an interactive refinement window. With plain-language prompts like "make this more urgent," "tighten to 30 words," or "adapt for our enterprise persona," the copy updates dynamically-while automatically preserving your overarching brand voice rules.
  • Multi-Step Content Pipelines in One Click: Marketing teams can trigger automated workflows directly from a field. A single click can research a topic, draft copy, pull relevant taxonomies, and format the output-without leaving the edit screen or waiting on developer intervention.
  • Vision-Aware Content Intelligence: The CMS can now "see" the imagery embedded in your articles. Multimodal vision models analyse uploaded graphics to automatically draft descriptive alt-text, optimise summaries, and ensure full accessibility compliance without manual overhead.

The Strategic Win: High-velocity content operations. AI handles the first 80% of drafting and repetitive formatting, leaving your team with complete creative control over the final 20%.

4. On-Site Search That Understands Customer Intent

If visitors cannot find the right product, resource, or service within seconds, they bounce. Traditional on-site search engines rely on exact keyword matches, frequently failing when visitors search using colloquial questions or conversational language.

Drupal AI 1.5 upgrades search into a semantic relevance engine:

  • Intelligent Result Re-Ranking: Integrated directly with your site's search architecture, the AI analyzes user queries semantically and re-orders results based on actual intent, not just raw word frequency.
  • Instant Answers: New question-answering capabilities can pinpoint the exact passage answering a user's question, displaying direct snippets alongside high-confidence relevance scores.
  • The Strategic Win: Higher digital engagement and increased conversion rates by eliminating the "dead-end" search experience across your digital properties.

5. Total Financial & Operational Governance

One of the fastest ways to lose executive support for AI initiatives is unpredictability-unexpected API bills or black-box operations that IT cannot audit.

Drupal AI 1.5 builds transparency directly into the dashboard:

  • Real-Time Token & Cost Tracking: Product owners can monitor exact token consumption (input, output, and cached reasoning) alongside live provider rate limits. You know precisely what each campaign or automated workflow costs.
  • Enterprise Observability: All AI actions emit standardized monitoring metrics compatible with leading enterprise platforms (such as OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or New Relic), ensuring full auditability for platform architects.

Move Fast, Stay in Control, Own Your Destination

Proprietary digital experience platforms lock your organization into their single, closed-ecosystem AI model-charging heavy licensing premiums while limiting your flexibility. Lightweight headless tools offer AI writing widgets, but leave you without enterprise governance, multilingual depth, or data sovereignty.

Drupal AI 1.5 delivers the best of both worlds: model-agnostic freedom to choose the best AI for the job, visual campaign acceleration for marketing teams, and bulletproof architectural security.

Experience Drupal AI Today

Reading about capabilities is one thing; seeing them transform your digital operations is another.

Explore our live interactive environments to test chatbots with memory, stream-level guardrails, and interactive content workflows:

👉 Explore the Drupal AI Interactive Demos

02 Oct 2026 1:49pm GMT

Drupal AI Initiative: Drupal AI after the DriesNote Rotterdam: what you can use today and what comes next

Dries Buytaert

Image: DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 by Paul Johnson

Author: Jeremy Chinquist

At DrupalCon Rotterdam on September 29, 2026, Dries Buytaert used his keynote to show how far Drupal has come and who it can reach next. Dries framed the keynote around three pillars that bring Drupal's strengths to more people: multilingual (reach people in more languages), JavaScript and headless (bring more developers and applications to Drupal), and AI (give people new ways to work with Drupal).

This post zooms in on the AI pillar. For the full keynote, including digital sovereignty, multilingual, headless and the new Drupal Advocacy Program, read the official recap: DriesNote Rotterdam: Drupal is Light-Years Ahead of Its Reputation. To watch the six demos from the keynote, see Proof, not promises. Watch the six demos from the DriesNote Rotterdam.

Watch the full keynote on YouTube


Exclusive interview: James Hall sat down with Dries Buytaert for the Drupal AI Initiative. Watch it on LinkedIn

Image: James Hall, Everyone TV interviews Dries Buytaert following the DriesNote


A strong start for the Drupal AI Initiative

Dominique De Cooman, Head of Partnerships for the Drupal AI Initiative, opened the conference with a short welcome and a clear message: the Drupal AI Initiative is strong and active. Dries later mentioned that over 100 people have contributed to the Drupal AI Initiative so far.

Try it now: "Drupal AI Demo: Northmoor University"

On stage, Dries showed off the demo that the Inside AI team, led by Christoph Breidert, had been developing over the past few months. "Drupal AI Demo: Northmoor University" is a complete university website that shows Drupal AI at work on realistic content. Anyone can try it today at drupal.org/ai/demo. To learn how the demo was built and what it can do, read Christoph's announcement: Introducing the Drupal AI Demo.

Demo

Five parts of the demo were highlighted during the talk:

  • Find weak content and fix it. Drupal AI scans the site's programs, courses, people, news, events and policies, checks them for accuracy, tone and inclusive language, and flags weak items.
  • Fix it without the expert. Editors fix the flagged content themselves instead of waiting for a specialist.
  • Grounded answers, every source cited. Visitors can ask the site questions. Drupal AI answers from the site's own content and cites its sources. If the answer isn't there, it marks the question as outside the site's scope and uses the content to point to the right person to contact. It is not allowed to invent an answer.
  • Drafts, not surprises. Editors can connect their own AI assistant. Asked to update every page that mentions a newly promoted professor, the assistant finds 10 pages and drafts the changes, but publishes nothing. Every draft waits for a human to review and publish.
  • Stay accountable. AI guardrails, one source of truth and every interaction logged.

Did you know?

Aidan Foster also used the demo site in the presentation "Encoding Expertise: How UX Research Powers Human-First AI" to show how AI guidelines can help review a site's content.


Stay accountable

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

What this means for you: for agencies and site owners, this is the quickest way to see Drupal AI on a real site before planning a project. The guardrails matter as much as the features: the AI flags, drafts and cites, and people decide what gets published.

Building Drupal Canvas components with AI

Dries showed AI-assisted development for Drupal Canvas. Given a prompt such as "Build a content template for my articles," the AI assistant checks its work against Canvas Workbench, ESLint and the Canvas CLI. The result is a set of simple template files, pushed to the site with the Canvas CLI.

What this means for you: front-end developers can let an AI assistant write the first draft while Canvas' own tooling validates the result.

the Drupal Canvas CLI at work, from the "Coding with AI" demo

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

Connecting Drupal to AI assistants

Today, exposing a Drupal module's features to AI assistants via MCP takes around 1,000 lines of code. Dries showed a prototype that brings this down to around 20 PHP attributes, using a recipe that combines the Simple OAuth, MCP Server and Tool API modules. The principle is "describe once, use in multiple places": one description of a capability serves AI assistants, workflow tools and JavaScript components alike.

In the demo, a FindImages tool lets an AI assistant look up images on the site, with FlowDrop connecting the pieces.

What this means for you: this is a prototype, not a release. For module maintainers, it points to a future where one description makes a module usable by AI assistants.

Describe once, use in multiple places

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

On the roadmap: the Rosetta Sprint

The next step is the Rosetta Sprint: a four-day sprint with key maintainers to describe Drupal's capabilities once, in a form that AI agents, other systems and humans can all read. The goal is to make Drupal's data and capabilities easier to expose to AI agents, orchestration tools, frontends and more. The date and location are still to be announced.


Did you know?

Kristen Pol used the Drupal AI Demo to record the demo clips for her session "Context Control Center: Bringing AI Context to Drupal CMS." Curious how Drupal gives AI the right context? Take a look.


Talk louder about Drupal

Dries closed with a clear request: "Here is my ask: Talk louder about Drupal." Try the demo, share what you build with Drupal AI and join the Drupal Advocacy Program.

Image: Karl Hepworth (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

Thank you, Drupal AI Partners

During the keynote, Dries thanked the Drupal AI Partners, the organizations that back the Drupal AI Initiative. Want your organization to join them? Become a partner.

AI Partners

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

02 Oct 2026 9:57am GMT

01 Oct 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #572 - The PHP Foundation

Today we are talking about PHP, Open Source, and Sustainability with guest Elizabeth Barron. We'll also cover AI Image Classification as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/572

Topics

Resources

Guests

Elizabeth Barron - thephp.foundation elizabethbarron

Hosts

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

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

01 Oct 2026 6:00pm GMT

The Drop Times: Bento Showcase Brings Visual Hierarchy to Drupal Views

A Drupal View does not have to end as a row of equal cards. Bento Showcase tests how far sorting, promotion, and image treatment can carry a structured content collection toward a composed page.

01 Oct 2026 11:01am GMT

Nuvole: Cutting Drupal's site:install time from 20 minutes to 90 seconds with an AI coding agent

A large multilingual Drupal site took almost 20 minutes to self-install, which made every CI run painfully slow. Here's how a PHP profiler and an AI coding agent got it down to 90 seconds.

"We'll add the tests later" only works if the tests are fast enough that nobody is tempted to skip them. On one of our large multilingual Drupal projects, they weren't.

The site has content in 100 languages, around 200 modules, 400+ configured fields, and up to 5,000 config files once translations are counted in. Running drush site:install against that configuration took close to 20 minutes. Add Docker startup and the actual end-to-end test run on top, and a single CI pipeline run could easily take an hour. Copying the production database into CI wasn't an option, so a full config-driven install was the only realistic way to get a clean site to test against for every change.

An install that slow doesn't just cost CI minutes, it costs feedback loops. So we set out to find out exactly where the 20 minutes were going, fix what we could, and see how AI could shorten the loop of measuring, fixing and re-measuring.

Setting up a profiler

The first step was getting visibility into what Drupal was actually doing during install. We used SPX, a lightweight PHP profiler that's easy to drop into a Docker-based PHP image alongside xdebug or blackfire alternatives, without much of the performance overhead those carry.

Once enabled, SPX gives you a web UI to browse individual profiles and see wall time, memory and call counts per function:

Screenshot of the PHP-SPX web configuration panel

And for any profiled request, a flame-graph-style view of the whole call stack, with a sortable table of the most expensive functions underneath:

Typical SPX profile report, showing a flame graph and a sortable table of function call times

That's already useful for a single page load. The interesting part is what happens when you point the same tooling at an AI coding agent.

Giving the coding agent access to the profiler

SPX ships an MCP server extension, SPX-MCP, which exposes recorded profiles through a query-like interface instead of a browser UI. Wiring it into an agent's MCP configuration means the agent can list profiles, drill into a specific request, and pull out the functions responsible for the most time, without a human first opening a flame graph and squinting at it.

In practice, that turns "let me go look at a profile and tell you what's slow" into a two-line prompt:

Screenshot of an AI agent drilling into the costliest functions of a homepage request

The agent found the three most recent profiles, correctly noticed they were regular page requests rather than the site:install run we actually cared about, and then, once pointed at the right report, broke a 1.44s homepage request down into HTML rendering, Twig compilation, class loading, cache reads and database time, each with concrete function names attached. That's the same triage a developer would do manually, just a lot faster to get to.

The problem with profiling a 20-minute install

Profiling a single page request is straightforward. Profiling a 20-minute drush site:install is a different story: turning SPX on for the whole run produced one profile with almost 590 million calls, weighing about 8GB on disk. That's too large to open in the web UI, and too large for an agent to reason about as a single blob.

The fix was to split it into one profile per install stage instead of one profile for the whole run. Drupal's installer runs through a fixed sequence of tasks (install_select_language, install_config_import_batch, install_import_translations, and so on), and there's a single place in core, install_run_tasks(), where each task starts and finishes. A small patch there starts and stops an SPX profile around each task and tags it with the task name as metadata:

--- a/core/includes/install.core.inc
+++ b/core/includes/install.core.inc
@@ function install_run_tasks(&$install_state, ?callable $callback = NULL) {
     $task = array_shift($tasks_to_perform);
     $install_state['active_task'] = $task_name;
     $original_parameters = $install_state['parameters'];
+    if (function_exists('spx_profiler_start')) {
+      spx_profiler_start();
+      spx_profiler_full_report_set_custom_metadata_str(json_encode(['task' => $task_name]));
+    }
     $output = install_run_task($task, $install_state);
     ...
+    if (function_exists('spx_profiler_stop')) {
+      spx_profiler_stop();
+    }
   } while (!$finished);

That turned one unmanageable profile into a dozen small ones, each scoped to a single install task, each cheap enough for the agent (or a human) to load and query directly. For the rare case of a profile that's still too big, there's also SPXQ, a small command-line viewer for browsing multi-gigabyte SPX reports without loading the whole thing into memory or a browser tab.

Finding the bottlenecks

With per-task profiles available, the workflow became a loop: profile a task, find the most expensive function, patch it, install again, and check the diff in timing. Doing that by hand, task by task, function by function, is tedious, exactly the kind of repetitive, well-defined work an AI coding agent is good at once it has direct access to the profiling data instead of having to be told what's in it.

One of the clearest examples was the install_config_import_batch task, which turned out to spend the majority of its time in EntityStorageBase::doPostSave():

SPXQ terminal view of install_config_import_batch, showing doPostSave at 52.57% of wall time

Digging into that call chain showed that saving a single field config was re-triggering hooks and cache invalidation for every entity type's base field definitions, even when only one bundle had actually changed, and it was doing that for every field, of which there were hundreds. After each fix, the agent could re-run the install, pull the new profile, and confirm the improvement against the previous run.

What actually moved the needle

After several rounds of this profile-fix-reprofile loop, here's what made the biggest difference:

  1. Cache collection names. StorageComparer::getAllCollectionNames() was rescanning the sync directory to find language collections on every one of ~2,800 config items during import, even though the answer never changes. Computing it once per import and reusing it cut that step by 27.6%.

  2. Cache translatable default config. LocaleConfigManager::getTranslatableDefaultConfig() rebuilt a typed-config wrapper once per language, even though the shipped default config is identical across languages. Caching it by config name cut this by 53.5%.

  3. Cache isSupported(). The sibling of the fix above, doing two redundant config reads per language for an answer that doesn't depend on the language. Caching it removed another 5.4%.

  4. Scan the translation directory once. The same, usually-empty translation folder was being scanned for every project/language pair, up to 1,580 times. Listing it once and matching filenames against that list brought the whole step down to about 6ms.

  5. Skip no-op config saves. LocaleConfigManager::updateConfigTranslations() was saving configuration even when nothing had actually been translated, reloading language override objects for all languages on every save. A simple !empty($processed) guard removed 237 unnecessary saves.

  6. Stop force-rebuilding a cold field map. After every container rebuild, FieldDefinitionListener::onFieldDefinitionCreate() was forcing a full field map rebuild for every single field created during install. Skipping that while the map is still cold cut getBaseFieldDefinitions() calls by 76%, with no change to the resulting field map.

  7. Narrow the cache clear on field save. This was the single biggest win. Saving one field config was wiping every entity type's base field definitions and triggering a full plugin rediscovery. Clearing only the affected bundle's field definitions during install cut this step by 18%, verified as producing byte-identical definitions across 37 entity/bundle combinations.

  8. No-op the translation status key/value store during install. A small wrapper turns locale.translation_status lookups into an in-memory no-op during install (and passes through normally afterwards), avoiding repeated database hits for a value that's meaningless mid-install.

  9. Disable remote translation lookups for CI installs. During an automated test install there's no reason to reach out to the localization server, so translation.import_enabled and related settings are simply turned off for that environment. This one is a CI-only optimization, not something you'd want in production.

  10. Skip irrelevant entity hooks during install. Some entity_update/entity_insert hooks have no meaning during install or fixture loading. Guarding them behind $entity->isSyncing() avoided pointless work; for example, the Search API module's _search_api_view_crud_event() handler.

None of these are exotic. Individually, most are the kind of "don't redo work you already did" fix any Drupal developer would recognize once pointed at it. What changed was how quickly they could be found and verified: instead of manually reading flame graphs and re-running a 20-minute install to check each guess, the agent could query a profile, propose a targeted fix, and confirm the improvement against the previous measurement, over and over.

The result

After all of it: 1 minute 30 seconds, down from roughly 19 minutes 30 seconds. A 13x improvement on the number that mattered most for us, the total install time inside the CI pipeline.

Not every fix here is something we'd apply blindly to every project. Some, like skipping remote translation downloads, only make sense for a throwaway test install. Others touch Drupal core behaviour around cache invalidation and are being submitted as proper core patches with issues on drupal.org, since they need review and testing well beyond "it worked for us".

Bonus

Both the SPXQ profile viewer and a reusable "profile, analyze, fix, validate" skill for coding agents are public:

Tags: Drupal Planet, Drush, Performance, AI, Drupal, DrupalCon

01 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Jacob Rockowitz: Vibing Drupal: What’s your take on the /grill-me skill?

After watching the Driesnote (aka the keynote) from DrupalCon Rotterdam, I was inspired and overwhelmed by everything happening in Drupal that I need to catch up on.

Immediately, I should help get the new Tool API working with the Webform module, but first I need to work through the Webform module issue backlog. Second, I need to learn more about Drupal Canvas and start defining a roadmap for my organization to move to Drupal Canvas. Lastly, I have no experience with ECA, and now there's FlowDrop to look at too.

My new AI reality is that I'm generally no longer overwhelmed by new technical challenges because I leverage AI to help me learn and plan how to evolve my knowledge base and the applications I support. I've used AI enough, building and maintaining a Drupal site and its modules, to know just how capable today's frontier models are. At the same time, I struggle to communicate with AI and get it to understand my requirements to achieve my goals. During these struggles, I get slapped in the face with AI slop.

After deleting most of my agent skills and starting over, I began experimenting with one of the most popular agent skills, /grill-me, which proved to be a game changer.

The /grill-me skill was created by Matt Pocock and is mentioned in many Reddit threads. I was not sold on even trying it until I listened to Read More

01 Oct 2026 8:52am GMT

Stuart Clark (Deciphered): File (Field) Paths 8.x-1.0; stable and back under maintenance

File (Field) Paths is stable. 8.x-1.0 is the first stable release since the Drupal 7 one (long may it live), and it does what it has always done: sorts and renames your uploads with token patterns, so you get a filesystem you can read.

If you've been holding off while it sat in RC, you don't need to. It has 215 automated tests and 1287 assertions where beta8 had 21 tests, a safer default for where uploads wait, and a plan for what comes next. It's under active maintenance again.

Core file fields let you choose a directory, and that setting takes tokens. Drupal ships [date:custom:Y]-[date:custom:m] as the default. What it can't take is a token about the entity you're attaching the file to, because at the moment the file is saved those values don't exist yet. The file name isn't touched at all.

Continue reading →

01 Oct 2026 6:00am GMT

30 Sep 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Omega8.cc: Self-Driving Sea Monster

In December 2017, on Ægir's tenth birthday, Steven Jones of ComputerMinds joked that within ten years Ægir would be an AI, setting up cat gif websites for its own purposes. With fourteen months left on the clock we checked how the prophecy is doing. In BOA, our Ægir hosting stack, the agent which keeps a server current is called Skynet since a 2012 commit meant to replace boring welcome messages, the installer still pretends to charge your credit card as it did in 2010, and the family named after a Norse sea giant and his doorman, Ægir and Eldir, grew a Barracuda, an Octopus and this summer a Kraken. Since 2025 the Ægir 3 projects on drupal.org are maintained by us, after the prophet himself asked, fairly enough, whether they should be marked obsolete, and in 2026 the stack is built with AI tools: eleven stable releases against three last year, for Drupal, Drupal CMS and Backdrop sites. The AI stays on our desks and nothing on your server guesses, so only the cat gifs are late.

30 Sep 2026 5:34pm GMT

The Drop Times: Drupal AI Release Digest: Gemini Embeddings, Mautic Tools and Views Agent Fixes

Not every Drupal AI update calls for the same response. Recent releases may require teams to rebuild search indexes, update agent configuration or keep experimental Views changes under close human review.

30 Sep 2026 4:37pm GMT

Drupal AI Initiative: Introducing the Drupal AI Demo

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.


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.

30 Sep 2026 12:01pm GMT

1xINTERNET blog: The Official Drupal AI Demo Is Live, and What It Means for Your Website

The official Drupal AI Demo is live. Explore how Drupal AI features work together in one real-world demo!

30 Sep 2026 12:00pm GMT

Drupal blog: Proof, not promises. Watch the six demos from the DriesNote Rotterdam

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.

30 Sep 2026 10:55am GMT

Drupal Association blog: The Drupal Advocacy Program: Helping the world catch up to what Drupal can do.

Graphic that says 'help the world cup up to what drupal can do'

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.

Quote graphic that says 'Drupal 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.

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30 Sep 2026 9:21am GMT

The Drop Times: Splash Awards 2026 Name Winning Drupal Projects in Rotterdam

The winning projects span AI, public services, publishing, education, healthcare, commerce and other areas of Drupal implementation.

30 Sep 2026 8:49am GMT

The Drop Times: The Public Record Drupal Deserves

Watching the DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam, one part of Dries Buytaert's argument felt immediately familiar.

30 Sep 2026 8:44am GMT

Acquia.com - Drupal Blog: Drupal Is Light Years Ahead of Its Reputation. Here Is How We Close the Gap.

Key takeaways from the DrupalCon Rotterdam Driesnote: MCP support through PHP attributes, Canvas updates, and a new Drupal advocacy program.

30 Sep 2026 7:29am GMT