fidzu : cms

This morning, Salesforce announced its plan to acquire Contentful.

Congratulations to Sascha Konietzke, Paolo Negri, and the whole Contentful team. They spent 13 years building Contentful into one of Europe's most visible enterprise software companies. Salesforce buying Contentful is real validation of the product, customers, and team they built.

The deal makes sense for both Salesforce and Contentful. Salesforce has long had a CMS-shaped hole in its product offering, and Contentful fills it with a mature, enterprise-ready SaaS product.

To me, the more important question isn't whether the acquisition makes strategic sense, but what it means for digital sovereignty. It's a textbook example of why "Buy European" isn't enough.

Before I go further, let me be clear about where I'm coming from. I founded Drupal and still lead the project, and I co-founded Acquia, the company built around Drupal, where I'm Executive Chair. So when I argue that this deal exposes a problem, you should factor in that Open Source is both my life's work and my livelihood.

Contentful is a German company, Contentful GmbH, registered in Berlin. For over a decade it has been a flagship European software company.

If the acquisition closes, it becomes part of Salesforce, a US corporation, and falls under US law.

For many of Contentful's customers, this acquisition will be a non-event. For governments, public institutions, and regulated industries, it exposes a harder truth: a vendor being European today is no guarantee it stays European tomorrow.

A practical example is the US CLOUD Act. Many people may not know about it, but it becomes relevant anytime a non-US vendor is acquired by a US company.

In plain English, the CLOUD Act means that US authorities can require any US company to disclose data it controls. That can apply even if its data is stored in Europe, managed by a European team, or running on European infrastructure.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The law came out of a dispute between Microsoft and the US government over emails stored in Ireland. US Congress changed the law while the case was pending, making clear that US providers can be required to produce data stored abroad.

That does not make Contentful a bad company. It does not make Salesforce a bad owner. And it does not take anything away from what the Contentful team built.

But it shows the limit of "Buy European". Contentful spent 13 years as a trusted European vendor, and one board meeting is enough to put it under US law.

An Open Source license changes that. Drupal customers running on Acquia, my own US-based company, are also exposed to US law. But because Drupal is Open Source, they can move to a European hosting partner, self-host, or fork the code. A Contentful customer cannot.

The Contentful team deserves credit for what they built. Few European software companies have reached its scale and size. But this is also a reminder for Europe. For software that governments, public institutions, and critical industries depend on, sovereignty must survive any acquisition.

That is the point of The Software Sovereignty Scale and The Sovereignty Prerequisite that I submitted to the European Commission as feedback on their Cloud Sovereignty Framework.

Open Source is the only way to guarantee long-term choice, control, and governance over your code, data, and infrastructure.

Special thanks to Tiffany Farriss for her review of this blog post.

01 Jun 2026 6:30pm GMT

Today we are talking about AI, How to stay up to date with it, and if it will really take our jobs with guests Angie Byron & Amber Matz. We'll also cover AI Best Practices for Drupal as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/555

Topics

• What Is AI Learners Club
• Amber Defines the Club
• Origin Story and DrupalCon
• AI Debate and Community Tensions
• Issue Queue Conduct and Moderation
• Thread Tone vs Substance
• AI Adoption Outside Drupal
• Conflict Mediation Playbook
• Maintainer Burnout and Flood
• Safe Space Learners Club
• How the Club Started
• Picking Topics and Demos
• AI Taking Our Jobs
• Future of Learners Club

Resources

• Context Control Center
• AI Learners Club
  • Initiative page
  • Event calendar
  • YouTube Playlist
  • Session Recaps
  • Next session (Claude Design)
  • Slack: #ai-learners
  • Most wanted topics
• What Angie's working on these days

Guests

Amber Matz - tugboatqa.com amber-himes-matz Angie Byron - ai_best_practices webchick

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Scott Falconer - managing-ai.com scott-falconer

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Do you want to start using AI tools for Drupal development, in the most efficient way possible? There's a composer plugin for that!
• Module name/project name:
  • AI Best Practices for Drupal
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Mar 2026 by Angie Byron (webchick), one, of today's guests, a long-time Drupalist, one-time Acquian, and a fellow Canadian
  • Versions available: dev version only, which doesn't seem directly opinionated about what version of Drupal you're using, though it does have minimum versions of PHP and Symfony libraries that suggest Drupal 10 is functionally your minimum
• Maintainership
  • It is officially seeking co-maintainers
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - an in-depth README, or you can ask an AI model! (like I did for this segment)
  • 54 open "Work Items" on Gitlab, so lots of active discussion already
• Module features and usage
  • AI Best Practices for Drupal aims to be the opinionated starter experience for AI-assisted Drupal development
  • You can think of it as a single Composer install that makes any AI coding agent "speak Drupal": following community standards, preferring contrib over custom code, and avoiding framework-naive mistakes. It replaces scattered, tool-specific CLAUDE.md files and Cursor rules that some Drupal developers currently maintain individually, with one canonical, community-governed package that works across Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and more. With contributions by a variety of Drupal luminaries including Marcus Johansson, Christoph Briedert, and Scott Falconer, it's the Drupal equivalent of Laravel Boost: stop explaining Drupal to your AI every session and just get writing code.
  • After install or update, it will create an AGENTS.md file from a provided template if there isn't one already, or it will update a specifically marked "ai-best-practices" section of an existing file
  • You will also have a directory of provided skills, and guidance for creating new Drupal agent skills
  • Also included is a set of evals, meant to automatically identify when AI models go off course and provide feedback
  • AI Best Practices for Drupal is meant to provide guidance that will be particularly useful for AI agents, so it's ideal for Drupal developers getting started with AI tools, or for AI developers who want to get started with Drupal

01 Jun 2026 6:00pm GMT

Drupal 12 is still months away, but readiness work is already becoming visible in contributed projects. One recent example comes from Scheduled Transitions 2.9.0-beta4, which declares compatibility with Drupal ^11.3 || ^12. The release itself is modest, but it serves as an early reminder for teams beginning to review upgrade paths and dependency inventories ahead of the next major Drupal release.

Scheduled Transitions is an editorial workflow module that allows content revisions to move automatically between moderation states at scheduled times. While the module itself may not be widely discussed, it represents the kind of workflow dependency that organisations often rely on for day-to-day publishing operations.

That makes its Drupal 12 compatibility declaration noteworthy. Upgrade planning should not stop at Drupal core. Teams also need visibility into the contributed modules that support moderation, scheduling, revisions, translations, layout management, search, and editorial access. Early compatibility signals help identify which parts of a publishing stack are already preparing for the next release cycle.

According to the Drupal core release schedule, Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 is planned for the week of 14 September 2026, with Drupal 12.0.0 scheduled for the week of 7 December 2026. Drupal 10 is also expected to reach end of life on 9 December 2026, giving site owners a practical reason to begin evaluating dependencies before the final quarter of the year.

The takeaway is straightforward: start small, but start now. Check which contributed modules already declare Drupal 12 support, note any changes in PHP requirements, and identify workflow dependencies that have yet to publish a compatibility path. Scheduled Transitions is only one example, but it highlights the quiet preparatory work that often determines how smoothly a major upgrade goes.

With that context in mind, the major developments covered in last week's edition of Editor's Pick newsletter are presented in the teaser blocks below.

Readers can follow The Drop Times on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for ongoing updates. The publication is also active on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.

Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The Drop Times

01 Jun 2026 6:23am GMT