09 Jul 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Drupal AI Initiative: Distributed Leadership: How the Drupal AI Initiative is Scaling for 2026

By the Drupal AI Initiative

Following our announcement last week introducing Inside AI and Outside AI, we are excited to share how we are scaling our leadership and organizational structure to support these two parallel workstreams.

What started as an ambitious vision originally founded by Jamie Abrahams from FreelyGive quickly gained community-wide momentum. In June 2025, our founding partners - 1xINTERNET, Acquia, Dropsolid, FreelyGive, and Salsa Digital - came together to establish the official Drupal AI Initiative, providing a cohesive strategy, baseline funding, and dedicated staff. Since then, the initiative has grown rapidly to encompass over 30 partner organizations, with many of their team members stepping directly into key leadership and execution roles.

To support our rapid growth and ensure effective daily coordination, we are evolving our structure into a more robust, three-tier governance model comprising a Drupal AI Board, a Drupal AI Leadership Team, and our existing community of AI Partners.

The Drupal AI Leadership Team

The purpose of the Drupal AI Leadership Team is to coordinate day-to-day project execution, align technical and cross-functional work streams, and ensure all initiative activities successfully deliver on our strategic goals.

At the center of this governance evolution, this team formalizes leadership roles that have organically emerged and evolved over the past year. Rather than introducing a brand-new operational layer, this structure officially empowers the individual contributors who have already been actively driving the initiative's day-to-day work.

By having dedicated, individual leads taking ownership of specific subject-matter areas, we ensure that every key aspect of the initiative has focused guidance. This structure also provides a natural avenue for our partner organizations to showcase their technical talent and gain visibility within the ecosystem, while placing experienced contributors in charge of critical technical and horizontal areas.

Leadership structure

The Leadership Team's execution is divided into two distinct, cooperative disciplines:

  • Functional Leads: Individuals who maintain direct ownership of specific functional modules or recipes (such as Agents, Search, or the Context Control Center) and align development roadmaps with the broader goals of the initiative.
  • Cross-Functional Leads: Leads who provide horizontal support across the entire initiative for critical non-feature disciplines like UX, QA, Marketing, Documentation, and Community coordination.

This division ensures that technical teams can focus on delivering robust functionality, while cross-functional leads act as an internal agency to validate, test, document, and promote those features before they reach users.

In an upcoming post, we will share more details about the leadership team structure, introduce our current domain leads, and outline vacant positions.

The Drupal AI Board

Our founding partners, who previously made up the initiative's core steering group, are transitioning to become the members of the Drupal AI Board.

The Board serves as the strategic and supporting foundation for the Leadership Team, establishing a strong, predictable operational environment. Rather than individual developers having to balance ecosystem coordination, funding allocations, and administrative hurdles alongside daily coding, the Board takes on these responsibilities.

Composed of our founding partner companies, the Board is responsible for setting the high-level strategy, defining the general initiative direction, and prioritizing our long-term roadmap. In addition to guiding this overarching strategy, the Board provides baseline initiative funding and staff, manages overall ecosystem alignment, and secures ongoing partner resource commitments. This structural backing ensures a stable operational runway, allowing the Board to focus on defining leadership functions, appointing execution leads, and securing the necessary resource allocations so developers can focus strictly on build and delivery.

What Changes? (And What Stays the Same)

For the developers, builders, and content creators actively contributing to the initiative, the day-to-day experience will feel familiar, but with clearer support structures.

Our established sprinting procedures remain completely unchanged. The community and partner teams will continue to collaborate on their scheduled sprints.

However, we are introducing two key improvements:

  1. Clear Authority and Direction: Our leads now have clear authority over their respective subject-matter areas. They will provide structured guidance and continuously groomed, public backlogs of issues for the contributors to Drupal AI.
  2. Improved Delivery and Speed: With structured coordination, individual contributions will integrate more seamlessly into the broader roadmap. Distributing this responsibility across more shoulders allows us to increase our overall delivery speed and execute on more complex strategic goals simultaneously.

This structural evolution ensures that everything built by both Inside AI and Outside AI integrates seamlessly with the broader Drupal AI roadmap and aligns directly with our collective short term and long-term goals.

How to Get Involved

As we step into this new phase of growth, we are looking for dedicated partners and brilliant minds to help execute our goals.

  • Become a Lead: If you have proven leadership within the Drupal AI ecosystem and want to actively guide a subject area (committing 1-2 days per week), we want to hear from you. Board-appointed lead positions are open to active, dedicated contributors.
  • Contribute to the Initiative: You can get involved with the initiative's next phase by:

Our AI Partners

The Drupal AI Initiative is made possible by the generous funding, resources, and technical contributions of our partner network. We are incredibly grateful to these companies for driving the future of open-source AI:

Founding Partners

Gold Partners

Silver Partners

You can view the full list and status of our contributing sponsors on the official Drupal AI Partners directory.

09 Jul 2026 2:44pm GMT

Talking Drupal: TD Cafe #018 - Drupal Site Templates

Join Martin, Andy and Mike as they discuss what Drupal site templates are and how they differ from Drupal's traditionally bare-bones starting point, aiming to reduce setup effort and total cost of ownership while making Drupal competitive again for small nonprofits and smaller sites. They compare building templates versus client sites, covering the evolution from early Layout Builder/Recipes work to today's simpler packaging via a Drush site:export workflow, plus tooling like DripYard Recipe Builder for extracting reusable "recipe" parts.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe018

Topics Martin Anderson-Clutz

Based in London, Ontario, Martin transitioned from graphic design to web development, ultimately specializing in Drupal in 2005. Currently working as a Product Marketing Manager at Acquia, he is Triple Certified in Drupal and UX-certified by the world-renowned Nielsen Norman Group. His key contributions include: As a speaker & writer, presenting at Drupalcamps and Drupalcons, and a published blogger across multiple platforms, including the Acquia Dev Portal and opensource.com; as a podcast host, participating in the Talking Drupal podcast, including as the "Module of the Week" correspondent; and as an open source maintainer, developing and maintaining popular Drupal contrib modules and recipes, including Smart Date and Fullcalendar.

Andy Giles

Andy is a Drupal back-end developer. In 2012, he founded Blue Oak Interactive, a development and consulting agency focused on complex Drupal site builds, particularly in e-commerce. In 2025, he partnered with Mike Herchel to launch Dripyard, a premium Drupal theme designed to reduce the cost of ownership and enhance the developer experience for modern Drupal projects.

Mike Herchel

Mike is a founder & developer at Dripyard, and is a longtime contributor to Drupal. He has played a key role in modernizing Drupal's frontend architecture, performance, and accessibility, and is known for helping bring Drupal's component-driven development into mainstream use. Mike has delivered projects for organizations including IBM, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the U.S. court system. He is a frequent speaker on performance, accessibility, and modern frontend practices.

Guests

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Andy Giles - andyg5000 Dripyard

Mike Herchel - mherchel Dripyard

09 Jul 2026 4:01am GMT

08 Jul 2026

feedDrupal.org aggregator

Aten Design Group: Using AI to Moderate Content in an Existing Drupal Workflow

Using AI to Moderate Content in an Existing Drupal Workflow Joel Steidl Drupal

A New Solution to An Old Problem

Content moderation is a data processing problem. For large sites with many content contributors, moderators can get bogged down catching obvious content policy violations without having time to do real editorial work.

Meanwhile, AI is great at fast, consistent classification of text, which is exactly the kind of work that can clog an editorial queue. It's not a replacement for human judgment: it makes mistakes, it can be gamed, and it lacks context. But as a first-pass filter, AI can meaningfully shrink the noise that reaches a human reviewer.

This post walks through adding that type of AI content filter to an existing Drupal workflow using contrib modules and no custom code.

Implementing the Solution

Modules

The full solution uses zero custom code. Here are the key contrib modules:

The Basic Setup

The assumption is that a site already has a working Content Moderation workflow. The AI gate slots in between author submission and the editor queue:

[Before]
Draft → Needs Review → Published
 
[After]
Draft → Needs Review → [AI gate] → AI Review Passed → Published
                               ↘ Rejected

To support this, the workflow needs two new states (AI Review Passed, Rejected) and two new transitions (AI Approve, AI Reject). Those transitions should not be granted to any UI role as they're triggered only by ECA.

The five modules listed above need to be installed, an AI provider configured with a securely stored API key, and the updated workflow applied to the relevant content type.

Screenshot of the workflow states UI in Drupal
Workflow state diagram

The ECA Model

This is the core of the implementation.

Create a new ECA model at Admin → Configuration → ECA. The model has five nodes:

1. Event - Workflow: state transition Fires when an article transitions to needs_review.

2. Action - Token: set value Stores [entity:body:value] into a token named moderation_input. This uses ECA's token replacement, which resolves field values correctly at runtime. (A note on this: the more obvious Get field value action returns null for body fields in practice - token replacement is the right approach here.)

3. Action - Moderation (from AI Integration for ECA) Calls the AI provider's moderation operation. Set model to openai / omni-moderation-latest, token input to moderation_input, and token result to ai_result. The result token exposes [ai_result:flagged] (1 or 0) and [ai_result:information] (per-category scores).

4. Action - Workflow: transition (condition: [ai_result:flagged] = 1) Transitions to rejected. Revision log: AI moderation: content flagged.

5. Action - Workflow: transition (condition: [ai_result:flagged] = 1, negated) Transitions to ai_review_passed. Revision log: AI moderation: content passed initial screening.

The conditions use ECA's built-in Compare two scalar values plugin. Steps 4 and 5 share the same condition - one negated, one not.

Screenshot of the ECA Model
ECA model visual
Moderation action configuration panel
Moderation action configuration panel

Testing

Submitting a benign article routes it to ai_review_passed with the pass log entry. Submitting content that violates the violence policy routes it to rejected with the flagged log entry. Both transitions appear in the node's revision history with the AI-stamped message.

Node revision history on a rejected article
Node revision history on a rejected article

Going Further

Custom Moderation Prompts

The OpenAI Moderation API uses fixed categories. If your policy doesn't map to them cleanly - community guidelines, brand safety rules, domain-specific restrictions - you can replace the Moderation action with a Chat action and a configurable system prompt. The rest of the ECA model stays the same.

With a Chat action returning structured JSON (response_format: json_object), you define exactly what the AI evaluates and how it reports back. The downstream ECA conditions check the response token the same way. This makes the screening logic editable in the UI without a code change or redeploy.

Giving Authors a Path Forward

A bare rejection with no context isn't great author experience. ECA can handle the follow-on steps too. On the rejection branch, you can chain additional actions before or after the transition: send the author an email using [ai_result:information] to surface which categories were flagged, set a message on the form, or move the node to a Needs Revision state rather than a hard Rejected - giving authors the ability to edit and resubmit rather than starting over.

You could also model a full revision loop: Rejected → Needs Revision → Needs Review (with the AI check firing again on resubmit). Whether that's appropriate depends on your content volume and how much trust you extend to repeat offenders, but the workflow and ECA config support it without any custom code.

Closing Notes

The drupal/ai_integration_eca module is what makes this approach work cleanly. Without it, inserting AI into an ECA model would require a custom action plugin. With it, the entire integration is UI-configurable and exportable as config.

A few things worth knowing before you build on this:

  • The ai_eca submodule inside drupal/ai is deprecated as of 1.x. Use drupal/ai_integration_eca (a separate package) instead.
  • drupal/ai_integration_eca is still at RC as of this writing - worth checking for a stable release before going to production.

Nathaniel Woodland

08 Jul 2026 10:16pm GMT