fidzu : cms

Keyword search struggles with natural language and exploratory questions. Daniel walked the DrupalSouth 2026 audience through how OpenSearch and Skpr enable semantic search that understands intent and meaning, and how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) transforms results into clear, human-friendly answers grounded in your actual content.

Last week, the PreviousNext team headed over to Wellington for DrupalSouth 2026, and what a week it was.

The highlight of the week was the Splash Awards - and this year, we are honoured to have won:

• Best in Government with Cancer Australia for the GovCMS PaaS project we did in collaboration with Paper Moose
• Best in Show with Cancer Australia
• Community People's Choice Award - Adam Bramley (jointly awarded to Nicole Ritchie)
• Hall of Fame - Lee Rowlands

Congratulations to Lee and Adam! Both deserved the recognition for their active work with the Drupal Community.

The Best in Show win for Cancer Australia makes this a remarkable run. PreviousNext has now won Best in Show three times back to back. Here's the full picture:

• 2024 - DrupalCon Singapore with the National Mental Health Commission for our work with the Mentally Healthy Workplaces platform
• 2025 - DrupalSouth Melbourne with a joint project with Folk, which transformed the Catholic Schools NSW website.
• 2026 - DrupalSouth Wellington with a joint project with PaperMoose, unifying Cancer Australia's 11 websites in a single GovCMS PaaS solution.

Wellington was also a milestone for Skpr's, which officially launched in the New Zealand market at DrupalSouth. If you haven't seen or heard about Skpr yet, now is a good time!

From there, it was all about the Drupal community. We spent the week reconnecting with familiar faces, meeting new ones, and having the kinds of conversations that don't happen over email.

We had six PreviousNext team members take the stage this year:

• Daniel Veza - Keywords to Context: Semantic Search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation with OpenSearch
• Adam Bramley - The Pinto Module - Efficient Theming for Front and Back End Developers
• Owen Lansbury - How Drupal is keeping pace with a changing digital market and how it can benefit your organisation
• Michael Strelan - Recipes, Site Templates and the future of Drupal distributions
• Nick Schuch - Practical Performance Testing
• Nathan Ter Bogt - Security on Autopilot: Low-Touch Automated Security for Drupal Projects

We were also thrilled to have Lara Saunders from Bond University join us at DrupalSouth this year. It's always great to see clients engage with the broader Drupal community.

We're incredibly proud of the team - and grateful to the clients and community who make this kind of recognition possible. See you all next year on the Gold Coast!