From Athens to Rotterdam: Why Drupal AI Needs an "Athena" Release

The Enterprise Drupal Summit Europe 2026 will take place on 28 September 2026 in the SS Rotterdam.

We are now accepting session proposals.

Focus of the summit

The program focuses on Drupal in enterprise contexts, with emphasis on:

• Large-scale Drupal architectures
• Digital experience platforms built on Drupal
• AI use in enterprise content and delivery workflows
• Composable and API-driven architectures
• Governance, security, and compliance in regulated environments
• Operating Drupal at scale in complex organizations

The event is aimed at practitioners and decision-makers working on enterprise digital platforms.

What we are looking for

We are prioritizing submissions that are based on real implementations.

Relevant topics include:

• Case studies from enterprise or public sector deployments
• Architecture decisions in complex Drupal systems
• AI integration in content management or delivery
• Multi-site and multi-brand Drupal setups
• Sessions should be grounded in practical experience rather than product positioning.

Format

Accepted formats include:

• 20 minute talks (MAX)
• Case study presentations (focus on the business side)
• Architecture or strategy sessions

Selection criteria

Proposals will be evaluated on:

• Relevance to enterprise Drupal use cases
• Clarity of problem and solution
• Evidence of real-world implementation
• Transferable lessons for other enterprise organizations
• Technical or organizational depth

Submit a proposal

Submissions are open via Pretalx.

Looking forward to seeing you there!
 

The Enterprise Drupal Summit Europe 2026 will take place on 28 September 2026 in the SS Rotterdam.

We are now accepting session proposals.

Focus of the summit

The program focuses on Drupal in enterprise contexts, with emphasis on:

• Large-scale Drupal architectures
• Digital experience platforms built on Drupal
• AI use in enterprise content and delivery workflows
• Composable and API-driven architectures
• Governance, security, and compliance in regulated environments
• Operating Drupal at scale in complex organizations

The event is aimed at practitioners and decision-makers working on enterprise digital platforms.

What we are looking for

We are prioritizing submissions that are based on real implementations.

Relevant topics include:

• Case studies from enterprise or public sector deployments
• Architecture decisions in complex Drupal systems
• AI integration in content management or delivery
• Multi-site and multi-brand Drupal setups
• Sessions should be grounded in practical experience rather than product positioning.

Format

Accepted formats include:

• 20 minute talks (MAX)
• Case study presentations (focus on the business side)
• Architecture or strategy sessions

Selection criteria

Proposals will be evaluated on:

• Relevance to enterprise Drupal use cases
• Clarity of problem and solution
• Evidence of real-world implementation
• Transferable lessons for other enterprise organizations
• Technical or organizational depth

Submit a proposal

Submissions are open via Pretalx.

Looking forward to seeing you there!
 

Article by: Aidan Foster, Foster Interactive

The three human skills that turn AI into a multiplier.

Creativity, strategic thinking, and articulation are the three skills that decide whether AI makes you better or just faster. - Aidan Foster

• Strategic thinking comes from experience. There's no shortcut.
• Creativity can be learned, but it's more like going to the gym than reading a book. You build it through reps.
• Articulation lets you craft quality prompts and specs for AI, and it's the most trainable of the three. But it only matters when there's something worth articulating. The value lives in the other two.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

The AI discourse has one dominant message: automate faster, cut the grunt work, reduce headcount, ship more.

Most leaders are responding by getting better at execution. Better prompts. Faster workflows. More output per person.

Execution still matters. It's just not where the constraint is anymore. The leaders who pull ahead in the next three years won't be the ones who automated the most; they'll be the ones who understood where the real constraint moved.

The Bottleneck Moved

Think back to five years ago. A new landing page meant a brief, a copywriter, a designer, a developer, a round of revisions, and three weeks of calendar time. A campaign asset required coordinating four people across two time zones for something that might run for six days before you killed it.

That friction was real. Teams were sized around it. Agencies were built on it. Budgets accounted for it. That friction is gone.

A capable team can now produce a landing page in hours. Drafts, variants, and structured content at a pace that would have required six people two years ago. The execution ceiling collapsed.

The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved upstream, to the quality of thinking that goes in before AI touches anything.

Strategic clarity. Creative direction. Precise articulation of what you actually want.

That's where the value lives now. That's where most teams are dangerously underprepared.

Strategic Thinking

A CMO walks into a strategy review and knows something is wrong. They've seen this pattern fail before, in a different market with a different product. They remember exactly how it ended.

That's not intuition in the mystical sense. It's pattern recognition built through immersion. You watch your confident calls go wrong, you figure out why, you adjust.

Strategic thinking requires experiencing consequences. You have to have been wrong, and had something depend on you being right.

Researchers studying scientists at the frontier of human knowledge found the same principle. The best of them use cultivated judgment to ask better questions, to know where to go next. AI needs to be pointed. It executes brilliantly within a defined frame. The frame has to come from somewhere.

Our sense for aesthetics, meaning and embodiment give us a vital advantage over our technological creations.

Why Human Intuition Is Still Science's Greatest Tool In The Age Of AI - Noema Magazine, 2026

Creativity

Most people believe creativity is an innate trait. Either you have it or you don't. That's wrong.

86% more ideas after 3 months of training. The untrained control group barely changed.

Creativity is a muscle. It responds to reps, to practice, to deliberate exposure to new inputs. A controlled study at Radboud University found that students who went through structured creativity training nearly doubled their ideation output in under a year. The untrained group stayed completely flat. (PLOS ONE, 2020)

You cannot read your way to it. You have to do the reps.

Research across Nobel laureates and major creative contributors identified two distinct types of creativity with two distinct peak ages. Conceptual innovators - the ones who execute one brilliant overarching idea - tend to peak young. Experimental innovators - the ones who synthesize across years of accumulated experience and observation - peak in their 50s. (Galenson and Weinberg, via Big Think)

The kind of creativity that matters most in marketing is the experimental kind. The kind that gets better the more you've seen.

The senior strategist who's been in the game 15 years isn't past their creative peak. The research says they may not have hit it yet.

Articulation

Articulation gets your thinking and creativity out of your head and into a form AI can use.

A VP with sharp strategic instincts and genuine creative range can still get generic output from AI if they can't extract what's in their head and structure it precisely.

Imprecise input produces generic output. Always.

The model doesn't know what your brand sounds like. It doesn't know who your buyers are, what language they use, or what keeps them up at night. It doesn't know what you've learned over three years about what actually converts.

All of that has to come from you, structured in a way AI can use. Articulation responds to deliberate practice faster than the other two. Most people never treat it as something worth developing. (Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook, 2025)

Experience Is the Advantage If You Use It Correctly

The skills AI cannot replicate are the ones that take years to build. But knowing that doesn't help unless you act on it. Three things worth doing now:

Audit your process assumptions, not your expertise. The judgment you've built is the asset. The habits formed around the old production bottleneck are what need to change.

Treat articulation as a skill to develop deliberately. Document what you know about your buyers, your brand, your market. Structure it. That structured knowledge is what separates useful AI output from generic noise.

Do the creative reps. Consistent exposure to new inputs and new problems. New disciplines.

Give yourself and your team time to be creative. Whiteboard ideas as a group. Collect interesting work and express what specifically about it grabbed your attention.

Skip the reps and your creative edge fades.

Leaders who invest in all three first will pull ahead. The advantage compounds.

Where does your team sit?

Most teams I talk to are strong on execution. The upstream work - the strategic clarity, the creative direction, the structured articulation of what makes them different - is where the gap is.

That gap is also where the opportunity is.

Drop a comment. I'd like to hear how others are thinking through this.

Sources: Noema Magazine (2026), Radboud University / PLOS ONE (2020), Galenson and Weinberg / De Economist (via Big Think), Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook (2025)
 

Article by: Aidan Foster, Foster Interactive

The three human skills that turn AI into a multiplier.

Creativity, strategic thinking, and articulation are the three skills that decide whether AI makes you better or just faster.

• Strategic thinking comes from experience. There's no shortcut.
• Creativity can be learned, but it's more like going to the gym than reading a book. You build it through reps.
• Articulation lets you craft quality prompts and specs for AI, and it's the most trainable of the three. But it only matters when there's something worth articulating. The value lives in the other two.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

The AI discourse has one dominant message: automate faster, cut the grunt work, reduce headcount, ship more.

Most leaders are responding by getting better at execution. Better prompts. Faster workflows. More output per person.

Execution still matters. It's just not where the constraint is anymore. The leaders who pull ahead in the next three years won't be the ones who automated the most; they'll be the ones who understood where the real constraint moved.

The Bottleneck Moved

Think back to five years ago. A new landing page meant a brief, a copywriter, a designer, a developer, a round of revisions, and three weeks of calendar time. A campaign asset required coordinating four people across two time zones for something that might run for six days before you killed it.

That friction was real. Teams were sized around it. Agencies were built on it. Budgets accounted for it. That friction is gone.

A capable team can now produce a landing page in hours. Drafts, variants, and structured content at a pace that would have required six people two years ago. The execution ceiling collapsed.

The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved upstream, to the quality of thinking that goes in before AI touches anything.

Strategic clarity. Creative direction. Precise articulation of what you actually want.

That's where the value lives now. That's where most teams are dangerously underprepared.

Strategic Thinking

A CMO walks into a strategy review and knows something is wrong. They've seen this pattern fail before, in a different market with a different product. They remember exactly how it ended.

That's not intuition in the mystical sense. It's pattern recognition built through immersion. You watch your confident calls go wrong, you figure out why, you adjust.

Strategic thinking requires experiencing consequences. You have to have been wrong, and had something depend on you being right.

Researchers studying scientists at the frontier of human knowledge found the same principle. The best of them use cultivated judgment to ask better questions, to know where to go next. AI needs to be pointed. It executes brilliantly within a defined frame. The frame has to come from somewhere.

Our sense for aesthetics, meaning and embodiment give us a vital advantage over our technological creations.

Why Human Intuition Is Still Science's Greatest Tool In The Age Of AI - Noema Magazine, 2026

Creativity

Most people believe creativity is an innate trait. Either you have it or you don't. That's wrong.

86% more ideas after 3 months of training. The untrained control group barely changed.

Creativity is a muscle. It responds to reps, to practice, to deliberate exposure to new inputs. A controlled study at Radboud University found that students who went through structured creativity training nearly doubled their ideation output in under a year. The untrained group stayed completely flat. (PLOS ONE, 2020)

You cannot read your way to it. You have to do the reps.

Research across Nobel laureates and major creative contributors identified two distinct types of creativity with two distinct peak ages. Conceptual innovators - the ones who execute one brilliant overarching idea - tend to peak young. Experimental innovators - the ones who synthesize across years of accumulated experience and observation - peak in their 50s. (Galenson and Weinberg, via Big Think)

The kind of creativity that matters most in marketing is the experimental kind. The kind that gets better the more you've seen.

The senior strategist who's been in the game 15 years isn't past their creative peak. The research says they may not have hit it yet.

Articulation

Articulation gets your thinking and creativity out of your head and into a form AI can use.

A VP with sharp strategic instincts and genuine creative range can still get generic output from AI if they can't extract what's in their head and structure it precisely.

Imprecise input produces generic output. Always.

The model doesn't know what your brand sounds like. It doesn't know who your buyers are, what language they use, or what keeps them up at night. It doesn't know what you've learned over three years about what actually converts.

All of that has to come from you, structured in a way AI can use. Articulation responds to deliberate practice faster than the other two. Most people never treat it as something worth developing. (Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook, 2025)

Experience Is the Advantage If You Use It Correctly

The skills AI cannot replicate are the ones that take years to build. But knowing that doesn't help unless you act on it. Three things worth doing now:

Audit your process assumptions, not your expertise. The judgment you've built is the asset. The habits formed around the old production bottleneck are what need to change.

Treat articulation as a skill to develop deliberately. Document what you know about your buyers, your brand, your market. Structure it. That structured knowledge is what separates useful AI output from generic noise.

Do the creative reps. Consistent exposure to new inputs and new problems. New disciplines.

Give yourself and your team time to be creative. Whiteboard ideas as a group. Collect interesting work and express what specifically about it grabbed your attention.

Skip the reps and your creative edge fades.

Leaders who invest in all three first will pull ahead. The advantage compounds.

Where does your team sit?

Most teams I talk to are strong on execution. The upstream work - the strategic clarity, the creative direction, the structured articulation of what makes them different - is where the gap is.

That gap is also where the opportunity is.

Drop a comment. I'd like to hear how others are thinking through this.

Sources: Noema Magazine (2026), Radboud University / PLOS ONE (2020), Galenson and Weinberg / De Economist (via Big Think), Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook (2025)
 

At DrupalCon Chicago, the Driesnote included a visualization with “community” as one of the three pillars of Drupal, along with “platform” and “agencies.” That framing felt memorable, and worth exploring further.

If you attended DrupalCon Chicago, you might have experienced a slightly differently shaped triangle. I don’t know the attendance numbers, but I saw technical sessions with packed rooms, while community-focused sessions had plenty of empty seats. That’s not new. It’s been true for years. People care about community, but when the schedule forces a choice between a session on AI integration and one on community health, most folks choose the technical session. I understand why. Technical work feels concrete. Community work is generally not why employers send folks to a DrupalCon.

This raises a question: how can all of us work together to close that gap without having to attend community sessions at DrupalCon?

Consulting our Code of Conduct

I serve on the Community Working Group (CWG), specifically on the Community Health Team. A lot of people don’t know there are two teams inside the CWG, so here’s the short version:

• The Conflict Resolution Team handles incidents after they happen. If you file an incident report, they’re the ones who review it.
• The Community Health Team works on everything that happens before an incident report, such as workshops, resources, and other preventive work. Our goal is to help the community build the kind of culture where fewer situations reach the reporting stage in the first place.

Both teams matter. And beyond the CWG, the DrupalCon Code of Conduct offers advice for all of us. It includes a section titled “We are collaborative,” which says:

If and when misunderstandings occur, we encourage people to work things out between themselves where this is practical. Where support is beneficial to achieve this, participants agree to ask for help. People are encouraged to take responsibility for their words and actions and listen to constructively-presented criticism with an open mind, courtesy, and respect.

I suspect that many people read the harassment list and the reporting email and stop there. That’s understandable. Those parts exist for a reason. But the passage above describes the wide middle ground where most friction in our community occurs.

The middle ground of community health

If the only two options we envision are “this is fine” and “file a report,” we end up with a lot of buried resentment, a few dramatic blowups, and not much in between. Most day-to-day friction doesn’t rise to the level of a Code of Conduct violation. It’s tone. Assumption. Misread intent. A comment in an issue queue from someone who didn’t scroll up to read what had already been said. A joke that came off differently than it was intended.

The Community Health Team’s work is to strengthen the middle. That means helping people develop the habits and skills to address friction directly, kindly, and early, so it doesn’t compound into something that needs the Conflict Resolution Team. The Code of Conduct invites everyone to do this work. Not just CWG members. Everyone.

Some ways we work things out

Here are four situations I’ve seen in the community, and in some cases been part of. None of these are scripts. They’re illustrations. The point is that the Code of Conduct invites you to try, and that you’re allowed to. You don’t need permission.

• Late at night at a DrupalCon, after hours of sprinting and drinks in the hotel lobby, someone says something about another contributor that turns a few heads. That person might realize it the next day. The generous move, the one the Code asks for, is to find that person and say “I said something last night I want to walk back.” Not a grand apology. Just a small, honest correction. Most of the time, that’s the whole fix.
• Someone drops a comment in an issue queue without reading the full thread above. Their comment reads as dismissive of work that’s already been done, or repeats a point that was already addressed, and it comes off as rude. They might not know that’s how it came across. A direct message from someone in the thread (“hey, I think you may have missed a few comments, here’s where we landed”) can turn that into nothing. A pile-on in the issue turns it into something else.
• You witness an exchange between two people at DrupalCon that makes you wince. Maybe it’s cultural. The Drupal community spans continents, and directness that comes across as rude in one country seems normal in another. Maybe it’s a power dynamic, or a bad day, or both. Checking in with the person on the receiving end, just between the two of you (“I could not help but notice your conversation and I wanted to ask, are you doing okay?”), doesn’t escalate anything. It lets them know they weren’t invisible.
• Someone keeps doing something that just doesn’t feel right. Not harmful, but grating. You can do your best to describe how it made you feel before it becomes a grudge you carry into every future interaction. “Hey, can I mention something? The way we’re doing X did not sit well with me, and I want to figure out how to talk about it.”

If you need help figuring out the best way to handle a situation like this, the Community Health Team is available. We can help you talk through a situation, decide whether a direct conversation is possible, or offer a second perspective. You can reach out at any time. We don’t investigate, and we don’t take sides. We think with you.

When it isn’t practical

The Code says “where this is practical.” Sometimes it isn’t.

We live in a world with power differences. If the person on the other side holds significant authority over your ability to contribute, a direct conversation may not be safe for you. Ongoing patterns of behavior are different from single incidents. Safety concerns are different from style concerns. And if the other person has shown they aren’t willing to engage in good faith, you are not obligated to keep trying.

Those are incidents for the Conflict Resolution Team. Those are the situations the people on that team signed up for, and you can reach them through the incident report form. Filing a report is not escalation for its own sake. It’s using the right tool for the situation.

The three-pillar framing

Returning to the Driesnote, if community is one of three pillars holding up Drupal, then the pillar can’t only be carried by the folks who show up to CWG sessions. The math doesn’t work. Community health has to happen in the rooms with the technical sessions, on the Slack channels where the code review happens, or at the dinner table where someone just got interrupted for the third time.

Most of the work the Community Health Team cares about isn’t work you need a whole session to learn. It’s work you’re already in a position to do. The next time something said in an issue queue doesn’t feel right, you catch yourself venting about someone, or you see a newcomer get talked over, you have a chance to support Drupal’s community.

Community is a pillar, which means it doesn't get held up by a small group of people with CWG in their session title. It gets held up, or it doesn't, by how we talk to each other on a Tuesday afternoon when no one's watching.

Drupal’s Code of Conduct doesn’t just give you a way to report harm. It also asks you to do the smaller, harder thing first. That’s where most community health happens.

Article by: María Fernanda Silva

If you’ve spent any time around Drupal lately, you’ve probably noticed that AI is everywhere — in the keynotes, in the hallway conversations, in the issue queues. You may also have noticed that everyone else seems to know what they're doing, while you're still trying to figure out where to start.

You are not. Not even close.

Those questions — what is actually going on, and where do I even start? — are exactly what the Drupal AI Learners Club was built for.

Where it started

Angie Byron (webchick) has been part of the Drupal community since 2005: core committer, one of the driving forces behind Drupal 8, and one of those people everyone seems to know. She did not come to DrupalCon Chicago 2026 planning to start anything. She came to celebrate Drupal's 25th anniversary and catch up with old friends.

But somewhere between the hallway conversations and the late-night tables, she started picking up on something: a lot of people were anxious about AI, unsure what it meant for their work, their identity as Drupal developers, their community — and quietly terrified to admit they did not have it figured out.

"I don't know what is going on, and neither do you," she would later describe as the feeling she wanted to create space for. "It's fine. Nobody knows. It's changing too fast." 

That feeling stuck with her. And the Drupal AI Learners Club was born. Not as a space to hype AI, and not as a space to condemn it, but as a place to cut through the noise and talk honestly about what these tools actually do, how people are using them, and where they fall short.

Just show up

The club runs on a simple premise: come as you are. Sessions are low-pressure, informal, and require no prepared presentation. Participants share their setups, their workflows, what is working, and what is not.

The first session launched on April 8, 2026, with the topic "Share Your Setup!" and brought together community members to walk through the models, modules, agents, IDEs, and tools they were actually using day-to-day.

Sessions happen whenever someone steps up to talk about something (currently, ~weekly) and are recorded, so anyone who cannot attend live can catch up afterward. And as Angie puts it, there are no stupid questions. Everyone is here to learn, including the people who have been doing this the longest.

Join the conversation

The Drupal AI Learners Club is not here to tell you AI is the future. It’s here to make sure that wherever this is going, the Drupal community goes together — developers, site builders, contributors, and everyone in between.

There are many ways to join the club: attend a session, suggest a topic, volunteer to present, or join the organizing team. Sessions are published to a playlist on the Drupal Association YouTube channel so you can catch up anytime, and the conversation keeps going in the #ai-learners channel on Drupal Slack.

And remember, as the Spanish proverb says: there is no silly question — only silly people who do not ask.
 

As we migrate more projects to GitLab on git.drupalcode.org, we have discovered improvements to make in the mapping of Drupal.org project maintainers to GitLab’s project members, ensuring that it is a 2-way synchronization.

The next time you update maintainers for your project on Drupal.org, this will update all maintainers’ access in GitLab. Please review project members in GitLab, and under Activity, the Team events. Syncing is now more thorough, so there might be more maintainership and member changes than you expect.

In the next few days we plan to bulk update GitLab project members for all projects that have maintainers with “Maintain issues” on Drupal.org, granting them the project planner role in GitLab. This will enable more access for them to manage issues and merge requests in GitLab.

We reviewed all the mappings and have settled on:

• “Write to VCS” on Drupal.org grants the GitLab project developer role.
• Having both “Administer maintainers” and “Write to VCS” grants the GitLab project maintainer role.
• “Maintain issues” grants the GitLab project planner role.
• Other Drupal project maintainership roles are not synced.

Syncing is two-way, so that saving maintainers in Drupal will keep choices made in GitLab.

• Maintainer in GitLab grants “Write to VCS” and “Administer maintainers,” matching GitLab’s “Administer maintainers” permission on Drupal.org.
• Developer grants “Write to VCS” and removes “Administer maintainers.”
• Planner grants “Maintain issues” and removes both “Write to VCS” and “Administer maintainers.”
• Reporter and Guest remove “Maintain issues,” “Write to VCS,” and “Administer maintainers.”

Reporter is very similar to planner, however it acts the same as guest for maintainership mapping. This preserves access when flipping between setting permissions in GitLab or Drupal. Access to “Maintain issues” in Drupal is mostly irrelevant with issues migrating.

Maintainer in GitLab previously did not grant “Administer maintainers.” It should because in GitLab, it allows the Manage project members permission, so it is a direct mapping.

Removing a maintainer in GitLab will

• If they were the project node author on Drupal.org, assign authorship to another person with “Administer maintainers,” or fall back to Unsupported projects.
• Remove “Maintain issues,” “Write to VCS,” and “Administer maintainers.”
• Not change access to “Edit project” or “Administer releases.”
• If they have no remaining Drupal.org project maintainership roles, completely remove them as a maintainer.

In addition to filling the gaps in the mappings, updates to maintainership in GitLab were missed, we hadn’t implemented a listener for the user_update_for_team webhook. So updating maintainers on Drupal.org will catch up all project member roles in GitLab.

Once all issues are migrated, “Maintain issues” will be removed from Drupal, and GitLab itself will be the only way to manage access below developer.

You can find the full details in the issue at #3586519: Migrate maintainers from Drupal.org projects as GitLab members

For any specific implementation questions, please comment on the issue. For general feedback, post to Drupal Slack's #gitlab-issue-feedback channel. 

Join us to hear directly from the team behind an award-winning AI solution built for local government. What does genuinely useful AI in public services look like? Not a concept, not a pilot, but a working solution that saves hours of manual work, improves accessibility, and puts better content in front of citizens faster.

Southwark Council's AI-powered PDF importer for Drupal is exactly that, and it won the prestigious Digital Leaders AI Impact Award 2026.

We are delighted to invite you to a webinar where you can hear the story first-hand.

About the webinar

Date: Tuesday 16th June | 16:00 BST
Guest: Angie Forson, Web and Digital Programme Lead, Southwark Council
Host: James Hall, Product Lead, Websites at Everyone TV

This is a rare opportunity to hear directly from a senior stakeholder about how Drupal and AI are delivering real, measurable value in an area that truly matters: public services for the citizens of Southwark.

Angie will walk through the journey, the challenges, the outcomes, and what it means for the wider local government sector.

Register for the webinar →

The problem it solves

Manual PDF conversion has long been one of the most time-consuming tasks facing council web teams. Converting a single document can take hours. Multiply that across thousands of PDFs and the burden becomes significant, both in staff time and in the delay it creates before citizens can access accurate, accessible information.

The Southwark team, working with their partners at Chicken, built an AI-powered importer for the LocalGov Drupal Publication Module that reduces that process to minutes, often under one minute.

How it works

Each PDF passes through a three-step pipeline:

1. Extract - a PDF parser pulls the raw content from the document
2. Transform - AI converts it to properly structured, accessible HTML with logical pagination
3. Save - clean HTML pages are ready to review and publish directly in Drupal

The result is an HTML representation of the PDF content, saved into a Drupal Publication and ready for review before going live. Every import is logged, so errors can be identified and resolved efficiently.

The module uses a plugin architecture, meaning each step in the pipeline can be swapped out. Councils can use different extractors, AI models, or output to different Drupal content types, making the solution adaptable to a wide range of content and operational requirements.

Built the right way

The team delivered this project with an agile, user-centred approach, continuously refining requirements to ensure the tool meets real user needs rather than simply ticking a technical specification.

"This project is a great example of AI working alongside and empowering content creators, and Drupal as a platform supports this really well." - Farez Rahman, Drupal Developer

"I'm excited about the impact this product will have, not just for our users, but also in transforming how we design, build, and create content internally. We're shaping a future where services start with HTML-first thinking." - Evelyn Francourt, User Experience Lead

Why this matters beyond Southwark

Local government teams across the country face the same challenge. This solution, built on open source Drupal and the LocalGov Drupal ecosystem, is designed to be shared, not kept in one place.

If your organisation publishes PDFs, manages large volumes of content, or is exploring where AI can deliver practical value without unnecessary complexity, this webinar is for you. Tuesday 16th June | 16:00 BST | Online.

Register for the webinar →
 

This is the fourth post in our GitLab issue migration series. The earlier posts focused on what is changing and how maintainers should set up their projects. This one is for the rest of us — the people who file bugs, review code, push fixes, and triage queues without wearing a maintainer hat. If your favorite contrib project has just moved its issues to git.drupalcode.org, here's what you need to know.

What's changed at a glance

When a project's issues are migrated, they move from www.drupal.org/project/{name}/issues to git.drupalcode.org/project/{name}/-/work_items. Old URLs redirect to the new ones, and issue numbers (NIDs) are preserved as GitLab IIDs — so an #3409678: Opt-in GitLab issues you find in a commit message will still resolve to the same issue.

In GitLab, "issues" are technically a subtype of "work items," but the term issue still applies, and you'll see it throughout the UI. If you've worked on any GitHub or GitLab project before, the experience will feel familiar.

What still works the way you're used to

A lot has not changed:

• You can still create issues without any special role.
• The contribution credit system is unchanged. Every comment you make on a GitLab issue still syncs to its contribution record automatically. The credit UI itself still lives on drupal.org.
• Shared issue forks are still the way to collaborate (on code). Drupal still doesn't use personal forks; collaboration on a single fork remains the model. The fork management UI also still lives on drupal.org.
• The familiar workflow conventions can still apply — Needs work, Needs review, RTBC, priority levels, and so on. They were migrated as scoped labels (more on this below).
• GitLab CI still runs your tests the same way it has for the past few years.
• Your Drupal.org login still works. Single sign-on means no extra account to manage.
• Cross-references and parent/child relationships still exist, just with slightly different syntax (more on that below).

Some things actually got better

It's worth naming a few real wins for contributors:

• A modern issue editor with proper markdown, real code blocks, syntax highlighting, image paste, and a mobile-friendly UI.
• Issues and merge requests now live alongside the code, pipelines, and CI logs on git.drupalcode.org — far less context-switching during code review.
• Much better filtering, search, and saved queries on issue lists.
• Issue boards (Kanban-style) are available for projects that want them.

Who can edit what

A few permission details are worth knowing up front, because they're tighter than what you may be used to on the old issue queue:

• Anyone can comment on an issue.
• Only the original author or project maintainers can edit the issue description. This is a real change — on drupal.org, any logged-in user could edit an issue summary. If you'd like a description updated and you're not the author, leave a comment with the suggested wording so the author or a maintainer can apply it.
• Labels and other metadata (priority, version, category, component, tags) can only be edited by users with a Planner role or higher on the GitLab project.

That last point is real friction for contributors who triage and label issues, and we're addressing it directly. #3559846: Allow changing GitLab issues labels for all contributors is building a label-management UI that will live on drupal.org, alongside the existing contribution credit and issue fork management screens. Once it ships, any contributor will be able to manage labels on any issue without needing a project role on GitLab. This is also an upstream issue, but it doesn't seem to be worked on.

Until then, if metadata needs updating, leave a comment noting what should change. Maintainers and other contributors with the role can apply it.

Old workflow conventions can still apply

Good news for anyone with muscle memory for Drupal's NW / NR / RTBC dance: the conventions weren't dropped in the migration. They were preserved as scoped labels on GitLab issues — state::rtbc, the equivalent state labels for needs-work and needs-review, priority labels, and so on. Each project's setup may vary, but the familiar conventions carried over, and contributors can keep using them.

Two notes:

• Applying these labels yourself currently requires the Planner+ role on the project, until #3559846 ships the contributor label UI. In the meantime, a comment indicating the status you'd assign is the right move.
• Merge request states are a useful parallel signal: an MR's Draft / Ready toggle and approval status reflect the actual code change being reviewed, which often communicates more clearly than a label on the parent issue. Some projects lean heavily on MR state, some on labels, some use both — there's no single right answer.

Day-to-day: how to do common things

Create an issue

Navigate to the project, click Work items in the left sidebar, then New item. The form is just a title and description; labels and metadata are added afterwards by users with the appropriate role. If a project has set up issue templates (markdown files in the repo), you'll see them in a dropdown.

The first auto-generated comment

The first comment on every new issue is posted by DrupalBot. It's the bridge to the things that still live on drupal.org:

• A link to the contribution record (where credit is tracked).
• A link to the fork management page, where you can create or request access to a shared fork, view existing MRs, and open a new one.
• Once #3559846 ships, a link to the contributor label management UI.

Forks and merge requests

The fork management screen on drupal.org works the same way for GitLab issues as it has for Drupal.org issues. From there, you can create a shared issue fork, request access if one already exists, push a branch, and open an MR. Branching and merging happen in GitLab's native UI, where they're already optimized.

Linking issues across systems

During the transition, contributors will be working with both Drupal.org issues and GitLab issues, sometimes in the same comment. The syntax differs by direction:

• Drupal.org → Drupal.org issue Brackets around the issue number (without spaces): [ #123456 ] (unchanged)
• GitLab → GitLab issue (same project): #123456 (no brackets)
• Cross-platform (either direction): paste the full URL

For "related issues" entries on Drupal.org, always use the full URL when pointing at a GitLab issue.

Things you might notice on migrated issues

A few oddities are worth flagging if you're working through historical issues:

• DrupalBot is listed as the author on every migrated issue. (Issues created after migration correctly show their actual creator.) The GitLab API forced a tradeoff between preserving the original author and preserving the issue ID. We chose to preserve the ID so that #123456 still maps to the same issue. The original author's name is preserved in the first line of the issue description.
• Old drupal.org issue URLs redirect to their GitLab equivalents, so existing links in commit messages, blog posts, and external references continue to work.

Reporting bugs and getting help

Found a bug in the migration itself or in the integration between Drupal.org and GitLab? Please file it in the Drupal.org customizations issue queue.

Have a question, or want to share feedback on the new workflow? Join the #gitlab-issues-feedback channel on the Drupal community Slack.

We're actively iterating on this transition based on what we hear from contributors and maintainers in opted-in projects. The more feedback we get now — while we're still in the opt-in phase — the better the experience will be when the rest of contrib gets batch-migrated.

Reference: GitLab documentation

For more detail on any of the GitLab features mentioned in this post, the official GitLab documentation is the canonical source.

Issues and work items

• Issues overview
• Create an issue
• Work items
• Description templates
• Crosslinking issues
• Issue boards

Labels and permissions

• Labels (including scoped labels)
• Roles and permissions

Merge requests

• Merge requests overview
• Draft merge requests
• Merge request reviews and approvals

Markdown

• GitLab Flavored Markdown

Related blog posts in this series:

• GitLab issue migration: immediate changes
• GitLab issue migration: the new workflow for migrated projects
• GitLab issue migration: how to use the new workflow
• GitLab issue migration: a contributor's perspective (this one)
   

Related issues

• Opt-in your project for migration to GitLab Issues. Eventually, all projects will be migrated.
• Provide feedback on the GitLab issue migration.
• General issue for the GitLab migration.

* We used Claude AI to refine our first draft and help link related materials like the GitLab documentation.

One year ago, at Drupal Developer Days in Leuven, something special happened.

The Drupal AI Initiative was not officially launched yet. That would happen later, in June. But Leuven was where the spark happened. It was where the first real momentum came together. Where conversations turned into commitment. Where a shared belief became a shared plan.

Five companies stepped up to kickstart the initiative: Dropsolid, Acquia, 1xINTERNET, FreelyGive, and Salsa Digital. Together, they helped turn an ambitious idea into the beginning of a movement.

Now, one year later, as we gather again at Drupal Developer Days in Athens, we celebrate one year since that moment of conception.

Leuven was where the initiative was kickstarted. June was when it officially went live. Athens is where we celebrate how far it has come.

A year of momentum, collaboration, and delivery

The Drupal AI Initiative was created with a bold ambition: to help Drupal become the leading open source CMS for AI-powered digital experiences.

But from the beginning, this was never just about adding AI features.

It was about building AI into Drupal in a way that reflects the values of the Drupal community: open, flexible, responsible, transparent, and collaborative. It was about giving organizations the tools to innovate with AI while keeping control over governance, content, security, editorial workflows, and long-term digital strategy.

Over the past year, the initiative has grown from a spark in Leuven into one of the most ambitious collaborative efforts in Drupal’s history.

What has been delivered?

Since the official launch of the Drupal AI Initiative, the team has made major progress. The amount of installs is growing significantly, 13980 at the time of writing. Adoption is accelerating. According to shared data we’re growing at about 260 sites per week and accelerating.

This is only the sites that share numbers, the real share is much higher. 

Growing numbers of Drupal AI Partners

Between Drupal Con Vienna and Chicago, the initiative added 12 new partners, a total of 34, representing a 50% increase in participation. We are on track to match this growth in support between now and DrupalCon Rotterdam, a key goal for this year.

Delivering capabilities at scale

The initiative also successfully established and executed the delivery management RFP process, putting important operational frameworks in place, including:

• Partner expectations documentation
• Onboarding processes
• Development sprint processes
• Contribution tracking
• Team planning sheets
• Weekly status reporting

These may sound like operational details, but they are what make collaboration at scale possible. They help turn enthusiasm into structure, and structure into delivery.

The Drupal AI Initiative has become the largest multi-company collaboration in Drupal community history.

- Dries Buytaert

The initiative is now actively funding critical roles across multiple organizations, including product management, innovation management, technical leadership, and program management. This marks a major milestone: the Drupal AI Initiative has become the largest multi-company collaboration in Drupal community history.

The 2026 roadmap was finalised earlier this year, informed by customer demand and industry insight. Delivery is actively underway.

At the same time, marketing efforts have been elevated to position Drupal as the leading AI-powered open source CMS globally, supported by ongoing storytelling and visibility through the Drupal AI Initiative blog.

Significant rise contribution

Focused effort on strategically important features, combined with a growing number of partners committing resources and strong community participation, has driven a significant increase in momentum and impact.

The tag clouds below visually represent the many Drupal community members who in the past 12 months have contributed to the AI Initiative (sized according to number of fixed issues worked on). Includes code and non code contributions. 

The following organizations have also contributed to the Drupal AI Initiative in the past year.

Marketing Drupal AI

From small beginnings with Paul Johnson and Frederik Wouters taking on marketing, we now have a cross disciplinary high performing team with 10 leads across areas of specialization.

Focussing on introducing Drupal to new audiences the emphasis has been on webinars, participating in external events and organising major new customer facing events of our own. These include Drupal AI Summit Paris and New York City (14th May 2026), The AI Summit London (10-11 June 2026) and the latest Enterprise AI Summit Rotterdam (28 September 2026).

Our work has included facilitating Southwark Council, London, winning Digital Leaders AI Impact Award 2026, producing video case studies and highlighting major new AI features announced during the DriesNote with social video content. All these activities have substantially raised Drupal’s profile to a wider audience.

Building toward Rotterdam

The next major milestone is already taking shape.

In Rotterdam, the initiative will launch an exclusive Drupal Enterprise AI event, available only to Drupal AI Initiative partners. The event will bring together European decision-makers aboard the SS Rotterdam for peer networking, customer case studies, and strategic conversations about building AI-powered content management solutions with Drupal.

Participation in this event is limited to partners who join the Drupal AI Initiative by June 30.

That creates a powerful moment for companies that want to be part of Drupal’s AI future. The initiative is scaling, the roadmap is active, the team is growing, and the opportunity to help shape what comes next is open now.

A strong foundation for what comes next

The Drupal AI Initiative is in a strong position.

With $380,000 in cash and $1.5 million in in-kind contributions, more than 50 contributors from partners, the initiative has the resources and commitment needed to continue scaling. The plan is to onboard an additional 12 partners by Rotterdam, further strengthening the team and accelerating delivery.

The message is clear: You counted on Drupal AI, and we delivered. Now we want to create more efficiency and scale.

That is what this next phase is about. More delivery. More visibility. More impact.

Thank you to the people who made this possible

This milestone belongs to many people.

It belongs to everyone who joined those early conversations in Leuven.

It belongs to Frederik Wouters, who brought the right people together at the right moment and helped create the spark that started it all.

It belongs to the five companies that kickstarted the initiative: Dropsolid, Acquia, 1xINTERNET, FreelyGive, and Salsa Digital.

It belongs to every partner, contributor, sponsor, strategist, developer, product thinker, marketer, and community member who has helped move this initiative forward.

And it belongs to the wider Drupal community, whose openness and willingness to collaborate make initiatives like this possible.

You can still join

The Drupal AI Initiative is growing, and companies can still become part of it.

If your organization believes in the future of Drupal, if you want to help shape responsible AI in open source, or if you want to be part of the group building the next generation of AI-powered content management, now is the time to join.

Become part of the 34 makers already helping to build Drupal’s AI future.

To join the Drupal AI Initiative as an organization and become a partner, contact Dominique at dominique@dropsolid.com.

From Leuven to Athens, this has been an incredible first year.

And the best part? We are only just getting started!
 

Original article posted by Christoph Breidert on 1xINTERNET website

Over a decade ago, I co-founded 1xINTERNET on the conviction that Drupal was the best platform for ambitious web applications. That bet paid off. But recently, as AI began disrupting our industry, I found myself facing an unfamiliar feeling: uncertainty. For the first time in my career, the path forward wasn't entirely clear.

If you are a decision-maker navigating this shift, you likely feel the same way. We are all trying to figure out how to leverage AI's huge potential without compromising enterprise security, compliance, or content quality.

The good news is that while the broader AI landscape remains turbulent, the direction for content management systems is becoming clear.

- Christoph Breidert

Christoph Breidert facilitating a Drupal AI workshop at DrupalCon Chicago 2026.

When the Drupal AI Initiative was founded in June 2025 by 1xINTERNET, Acquia, DropSolid, FreelyGive, and Salsa Digital, our mission was to chart that exact path. Today, alongside Niels Aers, my role is to manage the AI product direction so that organizations can confidently bring AI into production.

Since the founding, over 30 leading companies have joined the initiative. But a defining moment happened recently at DrupalCon Chicago 2026. During his keynote - the "Driesnote" - Drupal founder Dries Buytaert bluntly asked the community regarding the AI shift: Are you in or are you out?

The undeniable energy from the community and the rapidly intensifying momentum proved one thing: Drupal is all in on AI.

But what does "all in" actually mean? We aren't just talking about adding superficial features like chatbots or simple text generators. We have built a powerful agentic infrastructure natively into Drupal. This provides us with a robust foundation, allowing organizations to build complex AI applications and deploy autonomous agents capable of executing multi-step workflows on their behalf.

What an Agentic CMS actually requires

Let’s be clear: Agentic AI delivers incredible velocity, and every organization from SMEs to global enterprises needs that speed. But deploying autonomous agents without control is a liability. You need AI infrastructure that accelerates your workflows while ensuring that this speed doesn't destroy your content quality or violate your compliance rules.

This requires a robust governance foundation to run the infrastructure safely. The Drupal AI Initiative has spent the past months building exactly that. These are the final pieces we have built to complete the production-ready foundation:

• AI Guardrails: Configurable rules that intercept both outgoing requests and incoming AI responses. Whether it's preventing the exposure of personal data (PII), ensuring prompt safety, or mitigating legal liability, guardrails keep the AI agents within defined boundaries.
• AI Observability: Complete transparency into what your AI agents are doing. Every prompt, token usage metric, and model response is logged, providing a clear audit trail for compliance and cost optimization.
• Context Control Center: AI models are useless without context. This system acts as a router, intelligently feeding the right organizational data (and only the right data) to the LLM based on the user's specific task.

Introducing AI Content Reviews

Let’s separate the hype from reality: The core foundation of Drupal AI is production-ready today. With a secure governance infrastructure now in place, we are shifting from building the engine to delivering the applications. We are shipping out-of-the-box features so organizations can immediately benefit without building complex workflows from scratch.

The first major capability rolling out is AI Content Reviews. This is not a future roadmap concept, it is a real, tangible feature designed to close the quality gap for large websites by acting as a continuous, background quality assurance partner.

It provides scalable, AI-assisted content governance that integrates naturally into how editors already work. The system evaluates content against your organization's specific rules, such as brand voice, legal compliance, SEO, and accessibility. It flags issues, explains them in plain language, and proposes concrete fixes. Crucially, human oversight remains the starting point: an editor simply reviews the flagged issues and can apply the suggested fixes with a single click.

AI Review Management Overview

Upcoming features

AI Content Reviews is just the first application of our agentic infrastructure. Following close behind is AI-powered semantic search with synthesized summaries. This allows visitors to find what they need through meaning rather than keywords, enabling the site to surface direct answers instead of just a list of results. 

We are also actively packaging AI assistants embedded natively across editorial workflows, site-building, and end-user interfaces. These capabilities have been thoroughly explored and validated in our innovation workstream and are now being readied for production use.

Want to see the full picture of what we are building? You can explore the complete Drupal AI Roadmap to see exactly where the initiative is heading next.

Overview Drupal AI Roadmap 2026.

Drupal’s architectural advantage

Why build this directly into Drupal instead of relying on external AI services or other CMS platforms? It comes down to a fundamental technological advantage. Many modern CMS platforms, especially closed SaaS products and pure headless systems, force you to rely on disconnected external API wrappers to communicate with AI. This architectural limitation means your developers have to manually rebuild your existing user permissions, workflows, and access rules in a separate middleware layer just to keep the AI secure.

Drupal AI has a distinct head start because of its deep internal architecture:

• Co-location with the Content Graph: AI models are only as good as the context they can access. By embedding AI orchestration directly within Drupal, the AI has native, zero-latency access to your entire structured content graph. There is no integration friction.
• Native Permissions & Access Control: Because Drupal's entity system and field-level access controls are so deeply integrated, the AI operates entirely within your existing permissions. It cannot expose, analyze, or modify content the user shouldn't see.
• Provider-Agnostic Abstraction: Similar to what makes frameworks like LangChain powerful, Drupal AI abstracts the LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, local models, etc.). But unlike external middle-tiers, Drupal enforces strict schema typing before data ever hits your database, ensuring structural integrity.
• An Unmatched Ecosystem for AI Agents: Autonomous agents need tools to interact with the outside world. Because Drupal already possesses a massive, deeply established ecosystem of enterprise integrations, your AI agents can directly interact with your CRMs, ERPs, and marketing platforms. You don’t have to build custom API connectors for your AI to take action across your broader tech stack.

Moving forward

The uncertainty of the AI era remains, no one knows exactly what the landscape will look like in three years. I'm being honest about that. But what I do know is that the architecture we are building is solid, the foundation is ready, the community driving it is fully committed and has the resources.

If you are evaluating whether Drupal is the right foundation for AI-powered content management, you don't have to figure that out alone. The Drupal AI Partners network brings together specialized agencies with deep experience deploying exactly these capabilities. If you are ready to move from evaluation to implementation, that is the right place to start.

We are all building in conditions none of us have navigated before.
The difference is what we are building on.

Site templates are available through two distinct pathways, each serving different needs within the community.

The official Drupal.org Marketplace provides a curated collection of site templates that meet certain quality standards, and are built on top of Drupal CMS as a foundation.

Community templates offer an alternative pathway for innovation and experimentation without the constraints of the curation process, by publishing the template as a general project on Drupal.org.

Official Marketplace Site Templates

The Drupal.org Marketplace are built on top of Drupal CMS, and curated to provide new users with confidence that they're starting with a consistent, solid and professionally built foundation that follows established best practices.

Key characteristics

• Templates undergo a review processes

• Must follow Drupal CMS best practices for security, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA), performance, and code quality

• In the beginning, focus is solely on growing Drupal CMS adoption; site templates accelerate adoption of Drupal CMS by providing context relevant demo content and Drupal Canvas-compatible theme

• Clear documentation, maintenance commitments, and user support expectations

• Currently open to Drupal Certified Partners (for organizations) and Ripplemakers (for individuals or very small companies). Apply to become a creator here.

Benefits

• Consistency for users who need reliable, production-ready starting points

• Quality assurance through professional review processes

• Support and maintenance commitments for long-term sustainability

• Revenue opportunities for professional template creators

• Sustainability for the Drupal Association through revenue sharing

Community Site Templates

Anyone interested in contributing a template can do so now, by publishing it as a general project on Drupal.org. All free site templates, including marketplace templates, are general projects for packaging and distribution purposes. Community site templates will be considered for inclusion in the Drupal.org Marketplace based on their compatibility with the outlined criteria.

Key characteristics

• Can be published without formal review or approval

• Not bound by the same standards as Marketplace templates

• Can be built using Drupal CMS or Drupal Core

• Available to all community members

• Can take risks and explore directions that might not fit Marketplace criteria

Benefits:

• Innovation by removing barriers to experimentation

• Diversity of approaches and implementations

• Learning opportunities for the community to explore what's possible

• Stepping stones that might eventually evolve into Marketplace templates

• Lower barriers to entry for community contribution