The International Splash Awards 2026 have reached a new milestone, with 40% more submissions compared to last year.

A huge thank you to everyone who submitted a project and helped make this year’s edition even bigger.

The jury is now reviewing the submissions, with nominations set to be announced in early September.

We look forward to celebrating the projects and teams behind them during DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.

Stay tuned. The nominations are coming soon.

Thank you to everyone who submitted a design and shared their creativity with the community, and to everyone who took part in the voting. The five finalist designs showed the imagination and community spirit that make DrupalCon so special.

Meet the winning design

The Drupal community has spoken! 

After an open public vote, Juliane Vöske’s design has been selected as the official DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 T-shirt.

Her winning design will be worn by attendees from across the global Drupal community. This is the T-shirt that will bring us together in Rotterdam. 

See you there!

Technical Blog Series 

Introduction

The conversation at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 won't just be about what Drupal CMS 2.x can do — it will be about how teams are actually getting there. Migration is the real-world bridge between the platform you have today and the Recipe-driven, Canvas-powered experience covered in Post #1 of this series.

This post is a hands-on guide covering the three migration paths developers are navigating in 2026, the tools that power each one, and the common pitfalls that derail projects weeks or months into execution. We'll go deep on the Migrate API, look at real YAML definitions, and document the failure modes you're most likely to hit — along with their fixes.

Understanding What You're Actually Migrating

"Migrating to Drupal CMS" covers three structurally different problems. The tools, timeline, and risk profile are different for each:

This is cross-posted from Mike Herchel's blog

A few weeks ago, I met up with some of the DrupalCon Orlando local planning committee at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort to check out the venue and finalize a bunch of plans.

We toured the resort, planned events, sampled food and drinks (strictly for quality assurance, of course), floated around the pools, and spent way too much time talking about all the fun stuff we're putting together.

After seeing everything in person, I'm convinced this is going to be the best DrupalCon ever!

This DrupalCon is going to feel different (and I think that's a good thing)

If you've been to previous DrupalCons, one thing you'll notice right away is that this one is going to have a different vibe. Normally we're in a downtown convention center where you can walk to bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and whatever else you stumble across.

This isn't that. The Grand Cypress sits in the middle of Orlando's resort area near Disney. If you want to leave the property, you'll probably grab an Uber or Lyft. Disney Springs is only about 10 minutes away, and the parks are just beyond that.

But honestly... I don't think most people are going to want to leave. This resort is awesome.

Instead of everyone scattering around downtown after the sessions end, I think we're going to end up hanging out together around the resort having poolside cocktails, or smores by the fire pits. And after spending the weekend there, I think that's going to make for an even better conference.

The pools are ridiculous

Seriously. The pool area is unlike anything we've ever had at a DrupalCon.

The pools wind around faux limestone cliffs with waterfalls pouring down into them. There's a cave that connects two sections of the pool, a grotto, a waterslide, two hot tubs, and tons of places to spread out.

Then you've got a poolside bar serving frozen drinks, beer, and food just a few steps away. I can already picture dozens of Drupal people hanging out there after sessions.

Florida in March is basically cheating

If you're coming from somewhere that's still cold in late March... congratulations. This is probably the nicest time of year to be in Florida.

Expect highs around 80°F (27°C), cool evenings, blue skies, and weather that's pretty much perfect for sitting outside all day. It's warm enough to swim without feeling like you're melting.

One of the nicest surprises is the hotel rate that we have. The Drupal Association was able to lock in an incredible rate of just $259/night, and that includes no resort fee. Considering this is one of the best times of year to visit Florida (and a resort like this!) it's an amazing deal. If you're planning to attend, book sooner rather than later:https://www.hyatt.com/events/en-US/group-booking/VISTA/G-DC27.

Everything is actually close together

This might sound boring compared to waterfalls and waterslides, but trust me, it matters. One thing I loved about the venue is how compact the conference space is. No hiking across giant hotel lobbies or speed-walking half a mile to your next session. No wondering which section your talk is actually in.

Everything is clustered together, which means less walking and more time talking to people in the hallways, which is the best part of every DrupalCon anyway.

Drupal's Got Talent is finally happening!

I've been trying to make this happen for years. Every DrupalCon I’d pitch the idea of a talent show, and every year something got in the way. Well... this is the year! It’s happening!

We'll be looking for pretty much anything entertaining:

• Musicians
• Bands
• Stand-up comedy
• Magic
• Singing
• Dancing
• Juggling
• Puppet shows
• Weird talents you didn't think anyone wanted to see (we do)

We’re not taking sign-ups just yet, but keep an eye out!

What should you pack?

Besides your laptop?

• 👙 A swimsuit (trust me)
• 🩴 Flip-flops or sandals
• 😎 Sunglasses
• 🧴 Sunscreen
• 👕 Clothes for warm afternoons and cooler evenings
• 🎤 Your hidden talent

This venue is a little different than what we're used to, but after spending the weekend there, I know it's going to create a totally different kind, and super memorable, DrupalCon.

Instead of everyone disappearing into the city after the sessions end, I think people are going to stick around. Hanging out by the pool. Sitting around the fire pits. Grabbing a drink. Talking Drupal late into the night.

And honestly? I can't wait!

This is cross-posted from Mike Herchel's blog

A few weeks ago, I met up with some of the DrupalCon Orlando local planning committee at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort to check out the venue and finalize a bunch of plans.

We toured the resort, planned events, sampled food and drinks (strictly for quality assurance, of course), floated around the pools, and spent way too much time talking about all the fun stuff we're putting together.

After seeing everything in person, I'm convinced this is going to be the best DrupalCon ever!

This DrupalCon is going to feel different (and I think that's a good thing)

If you've been to previous DrupalCons, one thing you'll notice right away is that this one is going to have a different vibe. Normally we're in a downtown convention center where you can walk to bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and whatever else you stumble across.

This isn't that. The Grand Cypress sits in the middle of Orlando's resort area near Disney. If you want to leave the property, you'll probably grab an Uber or Lyft. Disney Springs is only about 10 minutes away, and the parks are just beyond that.

But honestly... I don't think most people are going to want to leave. This resort is awesome.

Instead of everyone scattering around downtown after the sessions end, I think we're going to end up hanging out together around the resort having poolside cocktails, or smores by the fire pits. And after spending the weekend there, I think that's going to make for an even better conference.

The pools are ridiculous

Seriously. The pool area is unlike anything we've ever had at a DrupalCon.

The pools wind around faux limestone cliffs with waterfalls pouring down into them. There's a cave that connects two sections of the pool, a grotto, a waterslide, two hot tubs, and tons of places to spread out.

Then you've got a poolside bar serving frozen drinks, beer, and food just a few steps away. I can already picture dozens of Drupal people hanging out there after sessions.

Florida in March is basically cheating

If you're coming from somewhere that's still cold in late March... congratulations. This is probably the nicest time of year to be in Florida.

Expect highs around 80°F (27°C), cool evenings, blue skies, and weather that's pretty much perfect for sitting outside all day. It's warm enough to swim without feeling like you're melting.

One of the nicest surprises is the hotel rate that we have. The Drupal Association was able to lock in an incredible rate of just $259/night, and that includes no resort fee. Considering this is one of the best times of year to visit Florida (and a resort like this!) it's an amazing deal. If you're planning to attend, book sooner rather than later:https://www.hyatt.com/events/en-US/group-booking/VISTA/G-DC27.

Everything is actually close together

This might sound boring compared to waterfalls and waterslides, but trust me, it matters. One thing I loved about the venue is how compact the conference space is. No hiking across giant hotel lobbies or speed-walking half a mile to your next session. No wondering which section your talk is actually in.

Everything is clustered together, which means less walking and more time talking to people in the hallways, which is the best part of every DrupalCon anyway.

Drupal's Got Talent is finally happening!

I've been trying to make this happen for years. Every DrupalCon I’d pitch the idea of a talent show, and every year something got in the way. Well... this is the year! It’s happening!

We'll be looking for pretty much anything entertaining:

• Musicians
• Bands
• Stand-up comedy
• Magic
• Singing
• Dancing
• Juggling
• Puppet shows
• Weird talents you didn't think anyone wanted to see (we do)

We’re not taking sign-ups just yet, but keep an eye out!

What should you pack?

Besides your laptop?

• 👙 A swimsuit (trust me)
• 🩴 Flip-flops or sandals
• 😎 Sunglasses
• 🧴 Sunscreen
• 👕 Clothes for warm afternoons and cooler evenings
• 🎤 Your hidden talent

This venue is a little different than what we're used to, but after spending the weekend there, I know it's going to create a totally different kind, and super memorable, DrupalCon.

Instead of everyone disappearing into the city after the sessions end, I think people are going to stick around. Hanging out by the pool. Sitting around the fire pits. Grabbing a drink. Talking Drupal late into the night.

And honestly? I can't wait!

As Drupal agencies, we're fortunate to benefit from a vibrant ecosystem that generates awareness, interest, and opportunities for all of us. At Zoocha we receive inbound enquiries from a variety of sources. Whether they arrive via Drupal AI, Drupal CMS, a community recommendation, a Drupal event, or direct through our site, every enquiry often represents something important: a person taking their first step towards our community.

Not every lead is a project. 
Not every lead has a budget. 
Not every lead is ready to buy. 

But they always deserve a meaningful response. 

The First Impression of Drupal 

When someone reaches out to a Drupal agency, they're rarely just evaluating that agency, they’re more often than not seeking to engage with Drupal itself. For many prospective clients, they may not know the difference between Drupal, the Drupal Association, Drupal CMS, an implementation partner, a hosting provider, or the wider open source community. They simply know they've heard about Drupal and are looking for guidance. 

The response they receive helps shape their perception of the entire ecosystem. If their first interaction feels dismissive, transactional, or overly focused on qualification, they may walk away believing that's what the Drupal community is like. If their first interaction is friendly and genuine, they leave with a very different impression. 

Resist the Urge to Qualify Too Early 

Most agencies have some form of qualification process. It's sensible, and so do we. Time is valuable, and we know not every conversation will become a project.

However, there is a difference between understanding someone's needs and interrogating them. We've all seen responses that immediately ask:

• What's your budget?
• What's your timeline?
• Have you secured funding?
• How many pages does the site need?
• Can you complete this requirements questionnaire?

While those questions have their place, they are rarely the most important thing during an initial conversation. Many prospects simply don't know the answers yet.

Some are conducting research. Some are exploring options. Some are trying to understand whether Drupal is even the right fit. At this stage, what they often need most is guidance.

Be Helpful Without Expectation 

One of the most effective approaches we've found at Zoocha is to assume that the first conversation may never lead to a sale. That does sound counterintuitive for a commercial organisation, but it changes the nature of the interaction. Instead of trying to move the conversation towards a proposal as quickly as possible, we focus on being useful. That might mean:

• Answering questions about Drupal CMS
• Explaining how Drupal compares to other platforms
• Pointing someone towards community resources
• Offering advice on procurement approaches
• Helping clarify requirements
• Suggesting next steps, even if they don't directly involve us

Sometimes that conversation ends there, and that's ok. The contact doesn't leave empty handed. They leave with a positive impression of who we are in the Drupal community.

The Long-Term Value of Community-First Thinking 

Interestingly, some of our most successful client relationships started with conversations that had no immediate commercial outcome. We've had early exchanges that were little more than an idea, with individuals facing a specific challenge and just looking to find out if they're even in the right place with Drupal. After a person-first conversation, they disappeared. But a few months, or even a year, later, they came back, and what began as a casual enquiry became a long-term client partnership.

This didn't happen because we had the best sales team or process. It happened because we prioritised human connection over a fast sale.

Open Source Values Apply to Business Development Too 

Drupal has always been built around principles of collaboration, openness, and knowledge sharing, these values really shouldn't stop at code contributions. They can also shape how we engage with prospective users of the platform. When we answer questions generously, share expertise freely, and help organisations make informed decisions, we're strengthening confidence in Drupal itself. 

Even if a particular opportunity never becomes a client engagement, the person on the other end of that conversation is left with a positive impression of the community. That's good for all of us! 

Conclusion 

The next time a speculative Drupal enquiry lands in your inbox, try viewing it differently. Consider simply asking, "How can we actually help this person?" The answer might only require a short email, a useful link, or a brief conversation, and yes, the immediate commercial return is likely to be zero. But the long-term return, for your agency and for the Drupal ecosystem, can be significant.

Every first interaction is an opportunity to demonstrate what makes the Drupal community different. Let's make sure it's a positive one.

This post is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox each month.

A note from our interim CEO

Dear Drupal community,

Open source hums along on the work that just gets done. As I step into the interim CEO seat, I'm making a point to notice the sheer volume of work powering this ecosystem, from the DA and beyond. Here's some of what has come together in the past month:

• Our engineering team migrated hundreds of projects to GitLab, security issues included, and kicked off an RFP to make launching a Drupal site dead simple.
• DrupalCon Rotterdam is ready and in the homestretch.
• The DrupalCon Orlando call for speakers opened August 4. If the event converts even half the enthusiasm of the local team (or the cuteness of Bytes the Gator), it's going to be one to remember.
• We're building a new front door to introduce Drupal to new audiences and evaluators, and we're looking for help.
• The community has 14 global events dropping this August and partnership groundwork under way in Burkina Faso.
• Nominations are open for the Women in Drupal Award, an honor I was humbled to receive back in 2023.

My goal as interim CEO is straightforward: make sure the Association's foundation is resilient enough to support all this energy. The first step is helping all of us notice and appreciate the work that already "just happens."

I hope you enjoy this month's newsletter and everything everyone's been building. And one final note: board elections are open. Please vote.

Tiffany Farriss Interim CEO

Vote in the 2026 At-Large Board Election — closes 14 August

If you're a Ripple Maker, your ballot arrived by email from Helios Voting on 22 July. Voting closes 14 August 2026 at 23:59 UTC, so there's still time to get to know the candidates: read their profiles and leave questions on the election details page, catch the Open Community Forum recording on our YouTube channel, or revisit the async conversation in #drupal-association on Drupal Slack. Every vote counts — make yours matter.

DrupalCon Rotterdam is in the homestretch

DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 is ready. Join the global Drupal community for four days of learning, collaboration, and connection — explore the program, meet the speakers, and start planning your experience. Secure your ticket now.

DrupalCon Orlando 2027: Call for Speakers is open

The DrupalCon Orlando 2027 Call for Speakers opened 4 August and closes 20 October 2026, with some notable changes this year:

A more focused program with fewer concurrent sessions and an emphasis on high-quality, impactful content. Updated session tracks reflecting the evolving Drupal ecosystem. And a new pathway for first-time speakers: if you've never spoken at a DrupalCon, DrupalCamp, or other Drupal event, you can submit to the new Poster Session — selected presenters showcase their work at the Monday Welcome Reception and present a 10-minute session on the Lightning Stage.

And keep an eye out for Bytes the Gator, the DrupalCon Orlando mascot, who'll be visiting Drupal events around the world between now and March 2027 — with a chance to win a free registration to DrupalCon Orlando 2027 along the way.

Celebrate the women shaping Drupal's future

Nominations are open for the Women in Drupal Award, sponsored by Jakala, recognising women whose work strengthens the Drupal community — in the projects they build, the teams they support, the ideas they bring forward, and the space they create for others to grow. Know someone whose contribution deserves recognition? Submit a nomination.

Drupal Steward: extra time when it matters most

When highly critical vulnerabilities emerge — like SA-CORE-2026-004, a SQL injection in Drupal core that anonymous users can trigger — every minute matters. Drupal Steward is a security service from the Drupal Association that gives you extra time to respond before vulnerabilities can be widely exploited: early notification of highly critical issues, recommended WAF mitigation rules, and access to security expertise, in coordinated collaboration with the Drupal Security Team. It's available in a Community Tier for smaller site portfolios, plus Small, Mid-Size & Enterprise tiers for organisations that want full control. Referral incentives are available for Drupal Certified Partners.

Behind the scenes with the engineering team

The migration of projects to GitLab issues continues — including security issues and hundreds of Ripple Maker projects — with GitLab soon to be enabled by default for all new projects, alongside updated contribution docs and a new custom commands reference. The team has also kicked off a collaboration with Alpha-Omega through their Security Engineer in Residence program to triage and respond to the growing wave of AI-generated security reports. And an RFP is under way for the Drupal Site Template Marketplace, focused on closing the last mile from template selection to live hosted site.

Help build Drupal's new front door

We're building a dedicated product marketing site for Drupal — a purpose-built, marketing-led site designed to reach the people who haven't heard of Drupal yet: marketers, IT directors, and enterprise decision-makers evaluating CMS platforms.

High-priority tasks are being added to the promote_drupal project on GitLab — real, scoped pieces of design, content, video, and strategy work with significant contribution credits attached, with more added on a rolling basis. If something catches your eye, reach out to Ryan Witcombe at ryan.witcombe@association.drupal.org or @RyanWitcombe on Drupal Slack.

A milestone for open source in West Africa

On 15 July, the Drupal Burkina Faso Association, led by its president Seferiba Salif Soulama, met with Burkina Faso's Minister of Digital Transition, Dr. Aminata Zerbo/Sabane, to explore how Drupal can support the country's digital future. The meeting marks a significant step toward a formal partnership between the Ministry and the Drupal Burkina Faso Association, with Drupal at the heart of Burkina Faso's digital modernisation agenda.

This is what open source looks like in action: communities, governments, and technology coming together to build something that belongs to everyone. Read the full story.

One more thing: The AI Byte

The Drupal AI Initiative team has launched The AI Byte, a monthly LinkedIn newsletter curating the best content across the web about Drupal AI — new capabilities, case studies, events, and webinars. Subscribe on LinkedIn.

This roundup is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Want it in your inbox? Subscribe to email communications and browse previous editions.

AI was used to help adapt this newsletter into a blog post. It was reviewed and edited by Drupal Association staff before publishing.

When I took on the role of Interim CEO, I committed to being direct about our finances and noted that our earlier audits already told much of the story. The board has now released our 2025 audit report, which was provided to the Board of Directors of the Drupal Association on 8 July 2026 and approved on 25 July 2026. It provides additional context and detail, but does not change the overall picture or our path forward. 

To be clear, nothing in this audit means any of the services the project depends on are at risk. What this audit does is help us to understand the status quo so that we can take appropriate action moving forward.

The DA Has Been Operating With a Structural Deficit 

The DA spent about $451,000 more on operations than we brought in last year (2025), and that followed a larger shortfall the year before ($923,000). 

Those two years are not cleanly comparable, because the 2025 audit also restates our previously audited 2024 results. Our auditors determined that about $353,000 of membership revenue had been recognized in 2024 that should instead have been allocated to 2025, when it was actually earned. This was a non-cash correction to our books: no money changed hands, and nothing was lost or misspent.

Together, 2024 and 2025 produced a combined shortfall of about $1.15M, which averages roughly $573,000 a year. Our current forecast puts 2026 on the same path.

Our cash reserves (the unrestricted funds we can actually spend on operations) have decreased by about 60% since the end of 2022, to roughly $960,000, which represents 2.3 months of operating expenses. Board policy sets a six-month target and a three-month reserve minimum. 2025 is the first year since 2019 that the DA has failed to meet the minimum. The DA remains a going concern and is not in danger of becoming insolvent, but it is time for action.

Revenue Growth Has Not Covered the Costs of our  Strategic Investments

Coming out of 2022 with strong reserves, the board approved a three-year strategic plan on 6 June 2023 and chose to put some of its surplus toward ambitious, community-requested investments in marketing and project support. Funding strategic growth is how excess reserves are best leveraged.

These investments have had a measurable impact:

• Contributions to Drupal strategic product innovation tripled, reaching 211,037 organizational credits in 2025, a 54% increase over 2024.

• We reached 106 Drupal Certified Partners under enhanced "maker" requirements, roughly double the 2022 figure.

• 43 people were brought  into Drupal leadership roles for the first time, against a goal of 38.

• We adopted and executed a go-to-market plan for the launch of Drupal CMS, and built marketing capacity inside the DA for the first time. 

However, the sustainability of these efforts long-term was tied to a goal which we did not meet: 

• Increase Drupal Association total revenues by 3X, from $3.49M in  2022 to $10.5M in 2026 to better support mission-driven activities. 

Our reported revenue did grow about 25% between 2022 and 2025. While 2025 is one of our largest revenue years on record, this figure is misleading, because most of the growth is in non-monetary services provided in trade (described in more detail below). Putting that aside, the Association’s cash revenue grew 5% over three years while out-of-pocket costs grew 27%. 

The gap is paid for out of our reserves. Reserves are the right instrument for starting something and the wrong instrument for running it. Funding our strategic initiatives from reserves was the right decision for the duration of the strategic plan, but while that plan ended last year, the work has continued without a viable funding plan. 

Marketing and project support are precisely the kind of mission-aligned work the DA should be doing. So the task in front of us is to fund it properly: each program examined discretely, with its own revenue plan, and held to revenue neutrality now that it has moved out of pilot and into operations.

Infrastructure Costs are Rising (and Invisible)

In 2022 we spent $1.3M running Drupal.org (the Web site, composer endpoints, GitLab, CI, authentication, and the global CDN), and in 2025 we spent $2.1M. That is up 61% in three years. It is the Drupal Association's single largest cost, and it has no direct funding mechanism. Every organization that uses Drupal relies on this infrastructure, but none of them are asked to pay for it, because we have never built a way for them to.

For most of Drupal's history that did not matter, because the surplus revenue from DrupalCon covered the costs of Drupal.org.  However, since 2022 the DrupalCon surplus has fallen from about $994,000 to about $227,000. While event costs have continued to increase since we resumed in-person events, event revenue has gone down.

This means that we are increasingly relying on the generosity of a handful of vendors and partners who provide services for free or in trade for sponsorship placements. That generosity has grown from $249,249 in 2022 to $1,011,995 in 2025 and now covers nearly half of what we spend on Drupal.org. These services in trade and donated services have not reported in our monthly reports because they were “non-cash”; they appeared only at audit.

The remainder of the infrastructure spending gap must be paid for out of general operating revenue, and failing that, out of reserves. These costs increased from $56,825 in 2022 to $859,384 in 2025. 

It is also important to note that these numbers do not account for work that is deferred because the funding is not there to pay for it. This technical debt does not appear on any of our financial statements, but is a growing liability that will need to be paid for at some point. 

The bottom line is that while our cash spending on infrastructure has remained steady, we have a rising essential cost that currently has no funding model attached to it yet. 

Unpacking the Timeline

The fiscal year 2024 closed 31 December 2024. The initial audit for 2024 was released in July 2025 showing $570,000 of deficit. Then in July 2026, it was restated downward to a $923,000 deficit as part of the 2025 audit.

While the Drupal Association CEO is accountable for the organization’s day-to-day operations, the board provides oversight over the organization’s budget and finances. This oversight requires timely, accurate, and consistent financial reporting.  

The monthly reports that the board’s Finance Committee reviewed and the audited statements published 6 months after the year close were prepared on different bases, with nothing reconciling the two. The Finance Committee struggled to get consistent answers or clarity about what individual figures included. In April 2026, Finance Committee asked our auditors to examine the reporting revenue recognition practices directly. That request is what produced the restatement of 2024 as part of the 2025 audit. This also explains how long it took to know where we stood in 2024. 

The Path Forward

The responsible approach is to act now, while we can still make changes on our own terms rather than in a crisis. Some of this is already underway and the rest has dates attached to it.

As Interim CEO, I am operationally accountable to make sure that the board has access to an annual budget that is actively managed with variances mitigated; receives consistent, contextualized and timely financial reports; and that robust internal controls and workflows are in place. This clarity will give the Finance Committee and the board what they need to exercise proper oversight within the policy guardrails they have set.

Our internal reporting will be reconciled to audit-basis accounting, so that the figures the board governs against during the year are as close as possible to the ones we publish after it; non-cash arrangements will be recorded as they occur rather than at year end; and our reserve position will be reported on a single defined basis, against both policy thresholds, every period. 

Drupal.org will be presented as a program with a cost that the Drupal Association is accountable for funding. The Association needs a durable way to fund Drupal.org rather than the patchwork indirect one we have now. These issues are not unique to Drupal, and I am looking forward to hearing others' thoughts, but be assured that I do not intend to solve a funding problem by reducing the services the community relies on.

Within the coming months, I will publish:

• What each part of our work actually costs and how it is funded

• The full costs of Drupal.org as a measurable figure, which will be the first time anyone, including the board, will have seen that number 

• An updated 2026 forecast and preliminary mitigation plan 

This fall, I will prepare a two-year 2027-2028 Operating Budget with the Finance Committee that the board will be able to review and approve before the end of the year. 

Nothing about the 2025 audit changes our commitment, our mission or the direction we need to go. It just adds a little urgency. I am focused on co-creating a financial model where the work sustaining Drupal rests on a foundation that is resilient and sustainable for the next long-term CEO.

Author: Will Huggins

In our previous blog posts, we’ve talked about how our growing ecosystem — now backed by 32 global partner organisations and a dedicated delivery team — is structured to build a secure, stable, and highly integrable AI-native digital experience platform.

So what does this mean for your day-to-day digital communications and marketing operations? How do you translate this into improved experiences for your audience, higher conversion rates, and reduced cost?

To win in the age of AI, digital leaders don’t just need faster ways to generate content or build great digital experiences. They need a platform that helps them move at maximum speed, while still maintaining the highest quality and content standards.

Here is an inside look at the key features on the Drupal AI 2026 roadmap, focused on the outcomes that matter most to digital communications and marketing teams: speed, brand safety, and measurable ROI.

"Prompt-to-Published" Page Building (Using Your Real Design System)

Many AI-powered page builders on the market suffer from what digital leaders call "AI Slop": random, messy, raw HTML blocks based on generic AI models. These pages can break your site's layout, look wildly off-brand, fail accessibility standards, and create the dreaded ‘technical debt’ for your developers to clean up.

Drupal AI’s upcoming Canvas AI Page Builder operates under a completely different paradigm. It is natively component-aware.

• You can feed Canvas AI a marketing brief, a PDF, or even a screenshot. Instead of writing custom code, the AI inspects your design system, selects the most relevant, pre-approved, accessible brand components, places them in a logical conversion layout, and drafts campaign-specific copy directly within them. Your marketing team can go from a brief to a beautifully structured, accessible landing page in minutes. You get complete visual design freedom without ever breaking brand guidelines or waiting in a developer’s queue.

The Brand Guardrail: Localised Nuance & Centralised Brand Voice

A major anxiety for marketing teams is brand dilution. If your team is using disconnected AI tools, your brand voice can quickly fragment, sounding professional on one page and generic on another.

Drupal AI solves this by embedding a centralised Context Control Centre directly into the CMS. This serves as the single source of truth for your brand's identity and governance rules.

• Authored Context: You define your style guides, brand vocabulary, audience personas, and strict regulatory boundaries (such as HIPAA, GDPR, or accessibility standards) once. Every AI-assisted content generation task automatically adheres to these guardrails.
• Hyper-Local Translation: For global marketing departments, translation is rarely word-for-word. Under the 2026 roadmap, Drupal AI's translation workflows don't just translate text; they analyse local nuance and adapt your localised content to fit regional cultural contexts while strictly preserving your core brand voice.

You can scale your global content footprint across multiple regions and channels, confident that every single piece of copy, everywhere, sounds exactly like you.

Closed-Loop Performance: Self-Optimizing Digital Experiences

Today, your content lives in the CMS, but your performance data is trapped inside a web analytics dashboard (like Google Analytics or Matomo), and the two systems rarely talk to each other. As a result, marketing teams often miss trends, fail to optimise low-performing pages, and struggle to scale what actually works.

Drupal AI is built to close this loop by bringing performance intelligence directly into the content creation interface.

• Intelligent Website Improvements: Drupal AI integrates directly with your analytics platform. Instead of merely showing you a static traffic report, background AI agents analyse user journeys and conversion drops.
• Actionable Optimisations: If a high-value landing page is underperforming, the AI agent automatically flags it and proposes concrete layout or copy optimisations — such as a more compelling call-to-action or a tighter, clearer headline — based on what is historically proven to convert.

No more digging through dashboards to find what's not working. Your website becomes a living, self-optimising engine, learning what works best for your audience and handing ready-to-publish optimisations directly to your content editors, bridging the gap between data and action.

Built-In Governance: Keeping Humans (and IT) Firmly in the Loop

Speed is meaningless if your IT department or compliance team vetoes your tools due to security risks. To build an AI platform organisations can trust, Drupal AI treats security and governance as structural priorities, not afterthought add-ons.

Unlike lightweight SaaS tools that operate outside of your corporate governance, Drupal AI operates entirely within your existing approval workflows and editorial permissions.

• Human-in-the-Loop Safeguards: AI agents can propose layouts, drafts, and SEO metadata, but they cannot publish them autonomously. Every change is staged in a revision branch, allowing your marketing managers to review, edit, or reject changes before they ever go live.
• Data Sovereignty and Security: Advanced security filters automatically sanitise and strip sensitive customer or corporate data before it is ever sent to an external Large Language Model (LLM). This shields your organisation from data leaks and compliance breaches.

This means you get the agility of generative AI backed by enterprise-grade, auditable, secure workflows: the kind of governance IT teams look for.

Own Your Digital Destination

The future of digital experience is being built on open-source, model-agnostic foundations. By giving your marketing team visual page building, centralised brand context, and performance-driven optimisation within an enterprise-grade secure environment, Drupal AI is paving the way for digital teams to operate at maximum velocity with zero brand risk.

The future of open-source digital experience is being built right now. If your digital product or content marketing teams are ready to experience what is possible today, explore our progress and try the live demo.
 

Author: Will Huggins

In 2025, the Drupal AI Initiative launched with a clear vision: to establish Drupal as the premier open-source AI platform for digital experiences.

One year later, the market momentum is clear. What began as a highly focused working group has grown into a powerful ecosystem supported by 32 global partner organisations, over 50 active contributors, and over $2.3 million in committed funding. Most importantly, with the core AI technology now clocking up over 18,000 installs, organisations are actively building their next-generation marketing engines on Drupal.

For digital teams, AI presents a host of opportunities. The power to increase speed of production on one hand, while maintaining quality, consistency and governance on the other. Drupal is addressing this head-on by creating two dedicated product workstreams: Inside AI and Outside AI.

This blog post outlines what this means for your digital roadmap and how Drupal can help your digital marketing operations win in the age of AI.

"Inside AI" vs. "Outside AI"

As AI has evolved from chat boxes into autonomous, multi-step agents, digital leaders need a platform that does two things simultaneously: empowers human creators inside the browser and securely integrates with external marketing systems.

To accelerate our product roadmap, we have divided our day-to-day development into two specialised, business-focused tracks:

1. Inside AI

• The Core Value: Empowering your marketing and content teams.
• The Focus: This stream focuses on the tools built directly into the editorial interface to supercharge you digital experiences and campaign execution. It drives our visual page-building tools, in-product copy editors, translation modules, and the Context Control Center (CCC).
• The Goal: To eliminate the repetitive tasks and developer bottlenecks that slow down your marketing queue. Your team can take a campaign brief, generate a brand-consistent landing page, optimise it for SEO, and localise it for global audiences in seconds, all while keeping humans firmly in the loop to make the final publishing decisions.

2. Outside AI

• The Core Value: Make it easy for site builders and developers to use coding agents to build, interact with and migrate to Drupal.
• The Focus: This stream ensures that Drupal serves as a highly governed, secure production platform for websites, marketing systems, automation platforms (such as n8n or Activepieces), and external AI agents.
• The Goal: To position Drupal as the most reliable, secure, and structured backend for your wider digital stack. We are making it incredibly easy for external systems and autonomous agents to build and deploy using Drupal without introducing security, compliance, or governance risks.

Through this dual focus, we aim to make Drupal the most advanced, intuitive workspace for your marketing teams and content creators, as well as the most secure and connectable platform to build on.

What is Ready Now?

As you plan your digital product roadmaps and marketing strategies, here is a summary of exactly what is production-ready, what is ready for pilot testing, and what is on the horizon:

Live and Ready

These capabilities are fully stable, secure, and ready to drive immediate ROI in your production environments:

• Freedom of AI Choice: Drupal connects seamlessly with over 87 AI providers (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure and Amazee.ai). You can swap models behind the scenes to optimise for cost, performance, or geographic data residency rules without rewriting any code.
• Creative & Editorial Assistants: Bounded, human-in-the-loop features like automated image alt-text generation, metadata auto-tagging, and initial copy drafting are ready to go. They act as immediate, built-in time savers for your editorial teams.
• AI Automators: Automate time consuming content management tasks like re-tagging all your content or turning PDF or word documents into accessible HTML pages - AI Automators are your CMS superpower!
• Brand & Data Guardrails: Advanced security filters that automatically sanitise sensitive customer data before it ever leaves for an external LLM, while validating incoming AI responses to ensure compliance and prevent "hallucinations" on your live site.

Ready for Beta Testing

These features are highly advanced and close to general availability. They are perfect for controlled pilot programs to gain a competitive edge:

• The Context Control Center (CCC): The brain of your brand. The CCC is a centralised space where you can define your brand voice, editorial style guides, target audience personas, and domain knowledge. This ensures that any AI-generated layout or copy sounds like your brand, rather than generic web text.
• Automated Translation & Multi-Step Campaigns: Workflows that automatically translate entire content libraries or combine multiple AI steps to generate structured assets while capturing local nuances and brand tone.
• Conversational Site Building: Tools that allow digital product owners and site builders to configure and lay out basic Drupal structures using natural language, drastically reducing initial setup times.
• Cost & Performance Tracking: Fully integrated with standard enterprise monitoring tools. You can track exact token usage, model costs, and AI activity in real time, protecting your marketing budget from unexpected bills.

Coming Soon 

One of the cutting-edge, experimental capabilities currently being refined in sandbox environments is Fully Autonomous Agents. These background agents are designed to analyse website performance, automatically propose layout optimisations to boost conversions, or build complex database queries entirely on their own.

Control and Governance

As a mature open-source platform, Drupal AI is structurally sovereign, model-agnostic, and transparently governed.
Whether you need to host open-source models locally to comply with strict regional privacy regulations or plug into the latest commercial LLMs for maximum speed, Drupal AI ensures you always own your data, your models, and your digital roadmap. We build trust directly into the architecture through branch-based content versioning, strict governance workflows, and deep audit trails.

Accelerate Your Roadmap

The Drupal AI Initiative is driving the future of open-source digital experience. If your marketing or digital product teams are ready to leverage the power of collaborative AI, try Drupal today.

When the Drupal Association announced that 1xINTERNET had become one of the world's Top-Tier Drupal Contributors, it was a proud moment for the company. Reaching the highest level of contribution recognition places 1xINTERNET among a select group of organisations helping shape the future of one of the world's leading open-source content management systems.

Yet, ask anyone inside the company about the achievement, and you'll hear the same response: becoming a Top-Tier Contributor was never the ultimate goal. Instead, it is the natural outcome of more than a decade of believing that if you build your business on open source, you should help build open source itself.

For over thirteen years, 1xINTERNET has invested in the Drupal ecosystem, not only by delivering digital platforms for clients, but by contributing code, maintaining projects, sponsoring community events, supporting governance, leading strategic initiatives and encouraging employees to actively participate in the community.

Today, the company sponsors more than 500 hours of Drupal contribution every month, actively supports more than 85 Drupal projects, has sponsored over 50 Drupal events, and has contributed to hundreds of issues across the Drupal ecosystem. Those numbers tell one story. The people behind them tell another.

Contribution isn't only about strengthening Drupal, it creates real value for the organisations that choose Drupal as the foundation for their digital platforms. We spoke with Baddý Breidert, Christoph Breidert and James Tillotson about why contributing matters, how it benefits clients, and why they believe giving back is essential to building better digital experiences.

James Tillotson, Christoph Breidert, and Baddý Breidert (Composite visual created with generative AI tools)

Building the future instead of following it

For 1xINTERNET CEO Baddý Breidert, contributing to Drupal has always been part of the company's identity.

"It represents over a decade of dedication to the Drupal project," she says. "I've worked with Drupal since 2006 and been actively involved in the community since 2013. Being recognised as one of the top three Drupal companies globally validates the expertise and sustained effort our team has invested over the years."

But the motivation goes much deeper than recognition. Instead of simply following the direction of Drupal, 1xINTERNET believes in helping shape it. Since Drupal is the technological foundation behind many of the company's digital platforms, contributing to its future isn't viewed as optional, it's viewed as a responsibility.

That philosophy influences almost every decision the company makes. Rather than waiting for new features, improvements or innovations to arrive, the team actively participates in creating them.

Managing Director Christoph Breidert describes it simply.

"We don't just build with Drupal; we help influence where the platform is going next."

It's an approach that benefits not only the Drupal community, but every organisation that chooses Drupal as the foundation for its digital future.

Open source is built on collaboration

Although contribution often means writing code, the three leaders agree that it's ultimately about something much bigger.

Open source succeeds because thousands of people collaborate, share knowledge and solve problems together. Every contribution, whether it's code, documentation, testing, mentoring, event organisation or strategic leadership, helps strengthen the ecosystem for everyone.

For Christoph, this spirit of reciprocity sits at the heart of open source.

"If you build digital solutions using an open-source project but choose to remain on the sidelines, you miss the opportunity to influence the tools you rely on," he explains. "Open source is built on shared knowledge, and contributing back is simply part of how we work."

That collaborative mindset is equally visible throughout 1xINTERNET's culture. 1xINTERNET’s UK Growth Manager James Tillotson sees open source as an extension of how the company works internally.

"We don't hoard knowledge," he says. "We share it to raise the baseline for everyone, which in turn allows us to keep innovating."

Rather than viewing contribution as something separate from day-to-day work, it's embedded in the way teams learn, collaborate and continuously improve.

Contribution isn't separate from client work

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding open source is that contribution somehow competes with client work. The reality, according to the team, is exactly the opposite.

James puts it bluntly: ""Contribution is client work."

When developers fix a bug in Drupal core or improve functionality that thousands of websites rely on, every client benefits, not just today, but for years to come.

Christoph agrees: "If you're not involved in building the technology, you're always reacting instead of leading."

Technology evolves quickly. Artificial intelligence, digital experience platforms, accessibility, security and content management continue to change at an unprecedented pace. Agencies that simply consume technology are forced to wait for innovation. Agencies that contribute help create it.

Baddý believes that's one of the company's greatest strengths.

"Contribution allows us to lead initiatives like Drupal AI, ensuring we aren't just consumers of the technology but creators of it."

Instead of adapting after the market changes, 1xINTERNET helps shape those changes from within.

Driving innovation through Drupal AI

Perhaps nowhere is that philosophy more visible than in Drupal AI. As Product Lead for Drupal AI, Christoph has been deeply involved in defining its roadmap, working alongside developers from around the world to build practical AI capabilities directly into Drupal.

For him, watching Drupal AI evolve from an ambitious idea into one of the platform's most exciting capabilities has been one of the defining milestones of the company's contribution journey.

"It's been incredible to collaborate with a global community to build something that will help shape the future of the web."

The significance goes beyond technical innovation. Because 1xINTERNET helps build Drupal AI, its teams understand the technology long before it becomes mainstream. They know what's coming, how it works and how organisations can use it responsibly.

James, who contributes to the Drupal AI Marketing Initiative, believes this creates a significant advantage for clients.

"Our clients have access to the latest innovations because we're involved in creating them."

Innovation isn't something clients wait for. It's something they experience alongside the people helping build it.

Better contributions create better client solutions

Although many clients may never see the code being contributed to Drupal, they experience its impact every day. Active contributors develop a much deeper understanding of the platform than those who simply implement it. Because the team understands Drupal's architecture, roadmap and future direction, they can make better long-term decisions for every project.

"Our clients receive stable and modern solutions without having to manage the underlying complexity," Christoph explains. "By maintaining our contribution status, we act as a direct pathway to web innovation."

That means fewer surprises, more sustainable architectures and platforms designed to evolve instead of becoming outdated. James believes clients increasingly recognise that value.

"They know we're not simply using Drupal, we're helping steer where it's going."

Trust has become a competitive advantage

Contribution also creates something that's difficult to measure but incredibly valuable: trust.

When organisations invest in large scale digital platforms, they aren't simply buying technology. They're choosing partners who will help them navigate years of future development.

Being recognised as one of the world's leading Drupal contributors provides confidence that 1xINTERNET isn't standing on the outside of the ecosystem, it's helping lead it. Baddý has seen this become increasingly important during procurement processes.

More organisations now actively look for suppliers who contribute back to the technologies they depend on. Public sector organisations and enterprise businesses increasingly view contribution as evidence of technical excellence, long-term commitment and sustainability.

James has experienced this while expanding 1xINTERNET's presence in the United Kingdom. "When entering a new market where people don't yet know your brand, your contribution footprint becomes a global passport. The Drupal community already knows who you are."

That credibility opens doors long before a first meeting takes place.

Supporting digital sovereignty

For Christoph, contribution is also connected to a much broader movement taking place across Europe and beyond. As organisations become increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, proprietary platforms and ownership of their data, open-source software is becoming strategically more important than ever. By contributing to Drupal, companies don't simply improve software, they strengthen an independent digital ecosystem that organisations can trust.

"Businesses increasingly want digital sovereignty," Christoph says. "By actively contributing to Drupal, we're helping build a secure and independent IT landscape that organisations can rely on."

It's a perspective that positions contribution not only as technical work, but as an investment in the future of open digital infrastructure.

A culture that attracts exceptional people

Contribution doesn't only benefit clients. It also shapes the people who choose to work at 1xINTERNET. The company actively encourages employees to contribute code, maintain projects, organise events, mentor others and share knowledge across the community. For many developers, that's exactly the environment they're looking for.

"Top developers want to work on things that matter," James says. "We offer them a stage, not just a desk."

Christoph agrees. Many developers are motivated by solving meaningful problems that have an impact far beyond a single client project.

For Baddý, contribution creates something equally valuable: a culture of continuous learning. By collaborating with some of the best Drupal developers in the world, the entire team continually raises its own standards, creating an environment where innovation and professional growth go hand in hand.

Looking ahead

Becoming a Top-Tier Drupal Contributor isn't viewed as a finish line. Instead, it's another milestone in a much longer journey. The company plans to continue investing heavily in Drupal AI, supporting the wider community, encouraging employees to contribute and helping organisations embrace open-source innovation with confidence.

Christoph hopes to make Drupal AI even more accessible through practical demonstration environments that allow organisations to experience its capabilities with a single click.

James wants to strengthen the connection between enterprise organisations and the open-source community, demonstrating that open source can successfully support even the most ambitious digital transformation projects.

Baddý remains focused on investing in people, community leadership and the long-term health of the Drupal ecosystem.

More than contribution

Ultimately, becoming a Top-Tier Drupal Contributor isn't really about rankings, badges or recognition. Those are simply the visible results of years of consistent investment.

The real achievement is building a company where contribution is part of everyday work, where sharing knowledge is expected, collaboration is celebrated, and innovation is something created together rather than consumed.

For 1xINTERNET, contributing to Drupal has never been about giving something away. It's about helping build a stronger platform, a stronger community and better digital experiences for everyone who depends on Drupal.

Because when the platform grows stronger, so do the organisations, developers and communities that build upon it.

Drupal's volunteer Security Team has protected millions of sites for more than 20 years and its process is world-class. Bandwidth among the security engineers has always been the limiting constraint. This spring that constraint met a new kind of pressure: AI-assisted analysis is finding latent vulnerabilities at an accelerating pace.

The Drupal AI Security Initiative adds funded security capacity in response. It is funded through Alpha-Omega's Security-Engineer-in-Residence (SEIR) program, coordinated by the Drupal Association, and works alongside the volunteer Security Team, which continues its normal process throughout.

This post introduces the initiative and reports on our first six weeks. The short version: the funded fractional team model is working and has already evolved our understanding of where we want to focus next.

What changed: the economics of discovery

Drupal's attack surface is what it has always been. What has changed is the cost of finding bugs. AI-assisted analysis makes discovery dramatically cheaper. AI can produce security issue reports at a volume and can discover exploit details at a speed that any volunteer effort struggles to absorb. Our advisory data shows the rate of discovery accelerating (our next post will work through what the data suggests in detail).

Meet the Drupal AI Security Initiative Team

The initiative builds on the lessons of the Drupal 8 Accelerate Initiative, which showed that throughput efficiency depends on funding the whole contribution workflow, not just one part of it.

The Drupal security team needs fixes, not just findings of potential issues. As fixes are developed, they are collaboratively reviewed. An engineer cannot mark their own fix complete. Funding one full-time engineer would likely produce findings faster than volunteers could review them, and they would queue. So we’re using the grant to fund a fractional team that covers the full path from discovery to merge on both the project and infrastructure side for Drupal: 

• Drew Webber (@mcdruid) is the Fixer. He applies AI-security expertise directly to Drupal's code: scanning, writing patches, building experimental tooling, and then submitting contribution-ready work across Drupal core and the contributed-project ecosystem.

• Greg Knaddison (@greggles) and Michael Hess (@mlhess) are Reviewers: They triage submissions, review patches, advance issues, and provide the RTBC status a fixer cannot grant themselves. Both come from the existing Security Team, and the grant helps subsidize the work they would otherwise do on volunteer time.

• Neil Drumm (@drumm) handles infrastructure, focusing on Drupal.org itself. The package distribution, build pipelines, and update mechanisms are a high-consequence, specialized surface on their own.

• Tiffany Farriss (@farriss) and Tim Lehnen (@hestenet) provide program support and coordination for the Drupal Association.

Our current grant has two three-month phases: Clarity (understand the problem) and Attention (fix issues and harden the process). 

Six weeks in: what we've done

We're using the funding and AI tooling to find, validate, triage, and resolve vulnerabilities faster than before, including proactively, across core, contrib, and our own infrastructure. In six weeks, the team has made contributions to more than 10 published advisories and CVEs and filed more than 30 issues. This work includes SA-CORE-2026-005, a critical PHP object-injection issue reachable via JSON:API that arrived as an external report and was coordinated to a fast release, alongside triage and remediation across dozens of findings and hundreds of inbound requests. The team also worked on rapid response/urgent issues off-hours; in one case, AI-assisted review helped find and fix a significant issue in Drupal.org code. 

We're also building reusable tooling and automation prototypes that increase throughput and make our security archive searchable and actionable. That includes five skills and a set of opengrep static-analysis rules, each targeting a vulnerability class, and local, open-weight tooling that processes about 40,000 historical security-mailbox emails to assign metadata like CWE mapping and flag duplicates (keeping sensitive data local). One key project outcome will be delivery of working tools the Security Team can continue to use after the initiative ends.

Drupal’s grant is one of several parallel Alpha-Omega grants across open source ecosystems. Being part of this cohort has allowed us to compare notes and share tooling, successes and failures with other open source projects.  So far we’ve collaborated most directly with Volker Dusch, who leads the equivalent effort at the PHP Foundation, and with colleagues at the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), who shared their report-validator protocol for separating real findings from noise. That protocol feeds straight into our intake, and into the report standard we want to co-create next.

The counts are perhaps not the most interesting part. We've resolved more security issues (10) than the minimum number (8) our proposal had committed to over the entire six-month project. We had assumed the meat of the task would be finding and fixing vulnerabilities. It turns out that the more interesting challenge will be adapting Drupal's security process to the volume and nature of higher-quality-than-expected AI-generated and AI-assisted reports.

So far that adaptation has happened downstream, after an issue has been reported. Shepherding issues to a fix, filing CVEs, automating that filing, and automating the analysis of published advisories are important and help scale the response process. But it is all at the bottom of the funnel. The opportunity we would like to explore is higher up, at intake, where issues arrive.

We've started exploring what that might look like. In discussions with core maintainers, some design principles emerged: AI stays limited to a single triage activity per issue and no bot noise on every commit and merge request. Ideally, early intake tooling would pre-filter inbound security issue reports and run a gated check that confirms whether they include enough context and reproduction detail before they reach a human.

What’s next

The next six weeks will build on what is working and push the intake question in two directions. The first is triage. The volume of incoming security issues is expected to keep growing and AI-assisted triage of that queue is an area to explore. We are interested in looking at how modern tooling can sort and deduplicate incoming issues so human attention can be focused where it's actually needed.

The second is the report itself. A clear issue report helps the Security Team and maintainer community move faster; a vague or bloated one slows everyone down. We want to explore and define what a useful AI-generated or AI-assisted security report should contain and draft a working standard, co-created with the Security Team and maintainers. If you are a maintainer or security reporter and have examples of good (or bad) AI-generated reports, please share them in Drupal Slack #security-discussion.

Six weeks of supplemental funding has already made a couple things clear. The roles the Drupal ecosystem depends on (security work as well as release management) need a durable, community-owned funding model, not one-time support. And we need to keep talking and collaborating across ecosystems like this.

Thanks

Huge thank you to Alpha-Omega for the support, funding and for access to AI tooling from Anthropic that enabled several of the findings above; to the Linux Foundation; and to the Drupal Association for coordination. And of course, none of this works without the two decades of effort from Drupal’s amazing Security Team.

DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 is going to be way more than just sessions and keynotes, it’s a chance to be part of what actually builds and improves Drupal. 

Contribution Day is a part of DrupalCon, and in Rotterdam it will be on Thursday, 01 Oct. This is the heart of the event, where the global community comes together to make a real and concrete impact to the project.

If you’re planning your trip, we highly encourage you to stay for Thursday. It’s the most rewarding day of the conference. Whether you write code, improve documentation, help with UX, fix bugs, or support translations, there’s a place for every skill level. 

And better still, you don’t need any prior contribution experience, just curiosity and willingness to get involved. You’ll be guided by experienced mentors, collaborate with many contributors from around the world, and leave with new connections, new skills and something meaningful you helped create. 

If you've never contributed before, this is the perfect moment to start!

So, what are you waiting for? 
Let’s do it!

Contribution Day in Rotterdam on 01 Oct.

By Scott Falconer, Product Lead, Outside AI

Where Drupal really stands with AI agents, where it has a right to win, and what we need to do next.

AI agents can build with almost anything. That is both great news and a problem for Drupal.

A person can ask an agent to recommend a platform, rebuild an existing site, create a content model, configure permissions, or change a running system. The agent then has to decide whether Drupal is a good path, reach it, understand it, act on it, and verify the result.

When that experience fails, we usually do not get a bug report. The agent works around Drupal, produces something that only looks finished, or quietly chooses another stack. 

That makes agent experience a growth problem for Drupal, not just a developer-experience problem.

Drupal does not need to be the fastest way to generate any page. Drupal should be the safest, clearest way to a governed, inspectable, long-lived site - and agents should be able to use it effectively.

By governed, we mean the controls that make a site safe to run and hand off - a real content model, scoped roles and permissions, review and audit, safe rollback - not just quick to generate.

This is the purpose of Outside AI, the workstream the Drupal AI Initiative launched: making Drupal legible, callable, safe, and verifiable for agents and builder tools operating from the outside.

The distinction from Inside AI, in shorthand:

• Inside AI: a person uses Drupal, and Drupal uses AI to help.
• Outside AI: a person uses an agent, and the agent uses Drupal.

These are different experiences, but they need substantially the same foundation: clear state, stable interfaces, scoped identity, governed actions, and reliable verification. Wherever possible, that foundation should be built once in Drupal and shared by both.

Our goal is not to make Drupal better for agents instead of people. It is to make Drupal's existing strengths explicit enough that both agents and people can safely use them. If we are successful we will make Drupal's strengths visible and attainable - improvements that hold no matter which agent, model, or tooling wins.

Where Drupal really is

Early measurements from the Drupal Agent Readiness Scorecard point to a tricky but useful conclusion: capability is becoming table stakes.

Our first-hour study drops a cold agent onto each platform with no prior setup and measures how fast and how reliably it can stand up a small but real structured, permissioned site. The bar: a content model, seeded content, a public page, a scoped editor role. Every milestone is confirmed by an independent HTTP probe, not the agent's own say-so. Agents cleared that bar on every platform we tested: Drupal CMS, bare Drupal core, WordPress, and a from-scratch Node app (each across multiple models and two agent families), plus single spot-check runs on Wagtail, Joomla, Strapi, and Payload.

The evidence is still early and deliberately narrow - and the scorecard is useful for direction, but "can an agent build with Drupal?" is no longer an open question.

The better questions: when should an agent choose Drupal, how far can it reliably get, and what is left after the agent is done?

Drupal has an advantage here. It was not designed for agents - but it was not luck, either.

For two decades, enterprise and community pressure forced Drupal to care about structured content, relationships, roles and permissions, editorial workflows, configuration management, APIs, and migration. Complex digital experiences demanded structure, governance, and safe ways to change things, so the community built them.

Those are exactly the things agents need: structured state they can inspect, explicit permissions they can reason about, actions with known boundaries, configuration they can hand off, and evidence that a change worked. The foundation was already here. AI is now revealing why it matters.

And agents do find it. In the study's Drupal runs, agents reached for native capabilities - content types, roles, permissions, Views, exported configuration - instead of bypassing Drupal with a static lookalike, and what they left behind was inspectable. That evidence is promising, but as Dries wrote about Drupal's role in agentic workflows, a head start is not a plan to win. What this post attempts to measure is where the head start is real, where it is not, and what we need to do to turn it into a win.

Drupal still makes agents work too hard to reach the advantage. Setup choices, authentication, module selection, stale assumptions, unclear action surfaces, and weak verification can consume the whole first session before Drupal's strengths become visible.

Agents do not reward us for architecture they never reach.

The advantage is made of decisions

Drupal core, contrib, and products like Drupal CMS are best understood not just as software, but as an accumulation of hard-fought decisions by many dedicated individuals: core is the architectural commitments (structured content, revisions, granular permissions), contrib the solved problems (search, forms, spam, SEO), and a product like Drupal CMS the curation - which of those a serious site actually needs, working together from day one. That accumulated judgment is the real inheritance, and the hard part to reproduce on any stack.

What makes those decisions unusually legible, inspectable, and reusable - without reading the code that enforces them - is that Drupal represents most of them as structured configuration: data with a schema, exportable to files, reviewable as a diff, and inspectable on a running site. Content types and fields, role grants, Views, editorial workflows - they all live there. That standard is the point: Drupal gives decisions a common, inspectable place to live. On a from-scratch build there is no such defined place - a decision may sit in code, a migration, an ad-hoc config file, or only in someone's head. On some headless CMSs, even the access rules are code. Drupal keeps an unusually large share of the decision surface legible as data.

That is what a human actually inherits from an agent-built Drupal site: decisions they did not know to ask for, in a form they can inspect and safely change. An agent building from scratch gives you exactly what it thought of. An agent building on Drupal CMS hands you the community's accumulated judgment - core's architecture, contrib's solved problems, the product's curation - as artifacts you can review, compare, export or change through the admin UI or by applying a recipe, without a developer touching code. When we verified agent builds, we did not take the agent's summary - we read the configuration. Decisions-as-data is what made that possible: legible, deployable between environments of the same site, composable across sites as recipes, and checkable by someone who was not in the room.

This is where Drupal's advantage can also become fragile - a decision can be structured and still be lost, bypassed, or stripped of its rationale:

• The config/code boundary can be a failure point. Configuration declares a desired state that one line of code can silently bypass. The access-coverage probe (which requests a restricted resource through every serving path an anonymous user could reach) found exactly this shape: custom code called ->accessCheck(FALSE) on an entity query and then exposed the returned entities without a later entity-access check, bypassing the access filtering the site otherwise expected. A site's true behavior is the intersection of config and code, and verification that reads only one layer misses the other.
• Configuration records what was decided, rarely why. It can carry labels, descriptions, and dependencies, but there is no first-class model for the rationale behind a decision or how future changes should treat it. The hard-fought decision arrives stripped of its reasoning.
• Configuration does not defend the intent behind a valid change. It can defend structural validity and dependencies, but not the human judgment a change quietly discards. In the recipe-composition tests - where we combined recipes that touch the same settings - two recipes applied conflicting config actions to the same property and the later action won mechanically. In the intent experiments - where we recorded the reason behind a design decision in the site itself, then asked a fresh agent to make a conflicting change - agents read the stored rationale and then removed the very affordances it was meant to protect.

So "those decisions aren't lost" turns out to be an assumption, not a guarantee - in these tests, it did not hold on its own… but the answer is not to freeze the decisions: the agent acts for the user, and sometimes changing one is exactly right. In the intent experiments the rationale was in the site, and the agents even read it - it still never entered the change. Our bet is timing: move the reason to the moment - keep it attached to the work, and put it in front of the agent exactly when it is about to change what that reason protects. The agent may still make the change; sometimes it should, but it is a tradeoff the agent had the opportunity to evaluate with the right context at the right moment.

And the stakes are rarely one big decision. A long-lived site is changed by many actors over many years - people and agents, each change small on its own. No single lost decision reads as damage; the damage is the trajectory. Small silent losses compound, change after change, until the governed site someone carefully built has drifted into something nobody chose. The advantage accumulated one hard-fought decision at a time, and it erodes the same way - which is why the lever has to sit at the moment of change, the same granularity where the drift happens. The advantage is made of decisions, for as long as you can remember them. 

Where Drupal has a right to win

The Playing to Win choice cascade rests on one premise: strategy is a choice.

A disposable landing page, a one-off prototype, or a deeply bespoke product where a CMS addresses only a small slice of the job may be better served by a different stack. Drupal does not need to win every prompt to win the work it is built for.

This is the practical consequence of the great CMS unbundling: AI commoditizes creation while raising the value of control - it lowers the cost of creation, not the cost of trust.

Drupal has a right to win when the result must remain understandable and operable after generation:

• Content-rich sites with a real editorial model.
• Sites with multiple roles, permissions, and approval boundaries.
• Sites that must ensure high quality and accurate content.
• Long-lived systems that teams of people and agents will change.
• Rebuilds and migrations where the source site's decisions cannot simply be discarded.
• Projects where configuration, deployment, auditability, and recovery matter.
• Sites where "it looks done" is not the same as "it is safe to operationalize."

This territory is defined by the work, not the organization's size. A small nonprofit can need strong editorial governance. A large enterprise will often find a disposable microsite sufficient for the right use cases.

In the language of the cascade:

• Winning aspiration: Drupal becomes the clearest, most trustworthy CMS choice for an external agent building a real, governed site.
• Where we play: work where structure, governance, handoff, and long-term operability matter.
• How we win: close enough of the first-session gap that Drupal gets considered, then prove the result is more inspectable, verifiable, and trustworthy.
• Capabilities we need: start and connect, understand the site, act through governed interfaces, verify and recover, and rebuild or launch through a repeatable path.
• How we measure it: fixed tasks, real running sites, retained failures and nulls, and independently checked outcomes.

How this gets more people to Drupal

Drupal's historical adoption barrier is not that it is powerful. It is that reaching the power has usually required someone who already knows Drupal.

A committed Drupal agency invests through that friction because it knows what is on the other side. A WordPress shop that occasionally considers Drupal, a system integrator with many platforms to choose from, or a lean in-house team may not.

AI can lower the expertise barrier - but only if the results can be trusted.

If an agent can absorb more of the repeatable setup and assembly, while experts review the consequential architecture, business, and governance decisions, then Drupal expertise moves up the value stack. Talented people spend their time on customer experience, editorial strategy, integrations, and the decisions that actually differentiate the site.

Prove that path and the agency pitch changes from:

We can build this after a substantial discovery and setup phase.

to:

We have already built a governed starting position. Here is the architecture, what we learned from the source site, which Drupal decisions we inherited, what we verified, and where expert judgment is still required.

That is a stronger way to enter a rebuild conversation - and it is how Drupal becomes a realistic choice for teams that do not already have deep Drupal expertise in-house.

It is still a strategic bet. We have not demonstrated that better agent experience produces Drupal adoption at scale, and we should not claim the market outcome before we have proven the mechanism. We would know the bet was wrong if agents kept bypassing Drupal's native capabilities even when they were easy to reach, if inspectable artifacts did not measurably cut a second team's time to change a site safely, or if entry friction never fell far enough for Drupal to enter consideration at all.

The first session should not require a laptop

Underneath the expertise barrier sits a second one: the environment. Local tooling for Drupal provides an excellent experience - DDEV can stand up a real site in minutes for someone who lives in a terminal. The same first-hour measurements ran on exactly that tooling, and even there, install weight - not capability - set the pace. And that is the expert path: it assumes a capable machine, a terminal, a container runtime, and the time to configure them. A growing share of first evaluations do not start there. They start on a phone, in a browser tab, or inside a chat window - often mediated by an agent that has no local machine at all.

No amount of polish can remove that local barrier. And to be clear, this is not a criticism of tools like DDEV - DDEV should remain the expert path. But if the only way to try Drupal is to install Drupal, we lose the people - and the agents - who were only willing to spend five curious minutes. We risk rejection before the first page is ever built.

That is why hosted try-and-build surfaces matter: places where someone who does not know or care about Drupal yet - or an agent acting on their behalf - can start a real site with nothing installed. Hosted trials, browser-based build environments, demo workflows, commercial platform starters, and one-click hosting paths each attack that floor from a different angle. And each has a natural graduation path: a trial becomes a real site, and a real site launches onto hosted platforms as it grows. The front door feeds the installed base.

This is also where the community structure of the Drupal AI initiative becomes its advantage. No single on-ramp will fit every user, and each provider brings its own vision, market, and opinions - a browser trial optimizes for the five-curious-minutes case, a demo workflow for build-something-real, a commercial platform for launch-and-scale. That plurality is a strength, on one condition: the Drupal underneath must be the same agent-ready Drupal everywhere - the same state introspection, the same governed actions, the same verification. Providers should compete on experience and opinion, not re-invent the substrate.

The standard: someone who has never heard of PHP or SQL - or an agent with no machine at all - can go from curiosity to a real, governed Drupal site in one session, and graduate that site to production hosting without starting over.

What we need to build

From here the essay turns into inside baseball: issue by issue, for the people working with Drupal every day. If that is not you, feel free to skim, or skip to the closing.

The Outside AI roadmap follows the journey an external agent has to complete - the same path Dries has sketched, from setup to connection, context, governed action, validation, recovery, and launch. These five stages assume Drupal is already in the running; getting there - an agent discovering Drupal, recognizing the task fits its territory, and reaching a starting surface before any Drupal site exists - is stage zero, and it is what the front door and self-description work above are for. In the below, we focus on what we should be able to say, with evidence, before calling it done. And wherever external tooling has to keep explaining the same Drupal quirk to an agent, that quirk is a roadmap item: the workaround is the requirements document.

1. Start and connect

An agent needs supported ways into Drupal and a scoped, auditable identity - and there is still a lot to decide in what that identity can be. An agent can act as a delegate, carrying a scoped slice of the authority of the person it works for. Or it can act as an independent, non-human account with grants of its own - a principal actor. These are two different models of what an agent is, with different strengths: delegation cannot exceed the person it acts for, which keeps the blast radius small and the audit trail human-shaped; an independent identity can carry work no single person's permissions cover, like scheduled maintenance or operations across many sites.

Drupal should not pick the winner. Products, hosts, and teams will choose differently - reasonably - and the same site may run both. From the substrate's side, the fork matters less than it looks: both models need the same structure - a grant that is scoped, an action that is attributed, a denial that is auditable. Build those once and either model, or both at once, can run on top. 

The mechanics are arriving. The core CLI entry point (vendor/bin/dr) landed in Drupal 11.4. Work on the execution principal, OAuth behavior, and MCP scope enforcement continues across the initiative: the execution-principal plan, OAuth identity work in Simple OAuth, and scope handling in the MCP Server module. No single entry point serves every environment: dr is a local and server transport, while a remote agent needs authenticated HTTP or MCP. What has to stay constant is the contract - the same action, authorization, and receipt model, reachable through the right transport for each.

The standard: given an agent operating under a scoped grant - delegated from a person or issued to a non-human identity - when it attempts an allowed action, the action succeeds and is recorded against an execution principal that names both the initiator and the executor. When it attempts an action beyond that grant, it fails clearly, safely, and with an auditable reason.

2. Understand the running site

The agent should not have to guess what Drupal or the running site can tell it. We need supported, machine-readable inventory, site structure, API and schema fidelity, path ownership, available actions, and current constraints.

The standard: given a running Drupal site, when an agent requests site context, it can discover content types, fields, roles, permissions, workflows, path ownership, enabled extensions, available actions, and relevant constraints - without scraping the UI or guessing from routes.

3. Act through governed interfaces

Agents need typed inputs, predictable errors, least-privilege execution, approval boundaries, and results another system can inspect.

This fundamental is one Drupal's entity layer already demonstrates: authorization attaches to the operation, not the entry point. An editor does not write to the database - they work through forms their permissions allow, and when a change goes through the Entity API, the same permission and entity-access checks fire whether it arrived from the admin UI or the API. For agents, that is the right foundation: no separate "agent mode" to secure - a new caller walks through a new door and hits the same wall. It is not yet universal: some checks still live at the door, and the command line has historically carried implicit authority - which is exactly why the execution-principal work in stage one matters. Part of the roadmap is making the fundamental universal, not inventing it.

What is missing is declaration, not governance. Entity CRUD is well covered - JSON:API exposes entities as resources under the same policies. But the operations beyond CRUD - clear a cache, apply a recipe, run a migration, reindex search - are scattered across admin forms, Drush commands, and one-off endpoints, each with its own shape. An agent cannot reliably discover what operations exist, what they require, or what they return; efforts like the Tool API and tool declaration introspection are working toward that declared catalog. The requirement is the fundamental, not any one module: one action model, many doors - typed inputs, the same authorization, and a structured receipt from every transport. A receipt, though, is still a claim - judging it is the next stage's job.

The standard: given one declared site action, when an agent calls it through any supported action adapter - CLI, MCP, ECA, or Drupal's AI systems - its typed inputs, authorization, errors, and result receipts behave consistently. Where an operation is entity CRUD through JSON:API, the same identity and authorization policies apply.

4. Verify and recover

The agent's own summary should not be held as proof - we would never expect a human to be the ideal judge of their own work. What matters is what the site actually shows. That is not a new problem: Drupal has always worked on it, because Drupal was never just for managing content - it manages how a team works together. Work does not count until someone else - or a system-enforced guardrail - says it does: drafts, moderation states, revision history with rollback, a permission model where the author does not have to be the approver. An agent is the newest actor in that system: it proposes within its permissions, the workflow gates what counts as done, a different actor approves, and revisions makes it reversible.

That machinery is fundamental to Drupal for content. For code and configuration, teams already have a mature review lane too - it just lives outside Drupal, in version control. And Drupal is unusually well placed to use it: because configuration exports to files, a config change can ride the same discipline as code - a diff, a pull request, a reviewer, CI, a revert. That is decisions-as-data paying off; most platforms cannot put their settings in a code review at all. An agent that works like a developer - building locally, exporting configuration, committing - inherits all of it.

The live site is the harder case, and not just for agents: a person doing site-building on production creates the same risk. Teams manage it by deciding where each kind of change is allowed to happen. Content is edited live, because live content has mechanisms for review. Structure is built in a development copy and flows to production through configuration import - so a config change made directly on production is temporary, and the next deployment erases it; some teams block live config edits outright. Giving an agent the same working agreement needs nothing new: a role that edits content on production, a freer hand in a development copy, the config path in between.

Two things are new though, and as a result they are the roadmap. First, the working agreement has to be explicit. Teams usually write it down for people - onboarding docs, locked-down production, review - but with agents, every session can be somebody's first day on the site, so anything left as "on the job" knowledge repeatedly fails fast. The boundary has to be stated by the site, and feedback given when it is enforced; the explicitness a cold agent needs is the same explicitness that protects a new hire.

Second, speed and scale. Where a team produced a handful of reviewable changes a day, agents can produce thousands. Human review alone does not survive that volume. Independent, automated verification has to absorb it - machine checks covering the routine, so human attention lands on the judgment calls. AI observability can trace requests through standard logging and telemetry, but tracing a request is not the same as independently verifying a change or rolling it back; the checking itself has to become machinery.

Our work is to extend the team discipline Drupal already applies to content - draft, review, approve, revert - to every surface an agent can change, at a speed and scale no site team has faced before.

The standard: given a change the agent claims is complete, when an independent process inspects the site, it can confirm what changed, show which content, configuration, code, or workflow surface was touched, report whether verification passed, and provide a preview, rollback, or recovery path.

5. Rebuild, migrate, and launch

The same governed path has to support a real way onto Drupal and a real handoff toward production. That includes source audits and discovery, content and pattern mapping, Drupal-native architecture advice, redirects, Canvas and configuration integrity, parity evidence, editorial review, and an explicit boundary between structured Migrate API work and agent-led re-architecture.

Issues such as Canvas configuration data integrity and reconciling updates to already-imported default content are part of this path even though they do not carry an "AI" label. 

The standard: given a real source site, when an agent proposes or builds a Drupal replacement, the handoff includes source-site findings, mapped content and patterns, Drupal-native architecture, parity evidence, unresolved gaps, and a clear line where human judgment is required before launch.

Measurement is the spine across all five. The Drupal Agent Readiness Scorecard exists to tell us whether Drupal improved while the workflow held steady - separately from the normal improvement of the models themselves.

Rotterdam should prove direction, not victory

The Rotterdam plan - the proof we are aiming to have ready by DrupalCon Rotterdam - is intentionally narrow: one real rebuild of an existing non-Drupal site into Drupal CMS. The question it answers is precise: can an outside operator turn a real non-Drupal site into a defensible Drupal starting position, with independently reviewable evidence?

• The operator should be outside the Drupal CMS team.
• The source site should contain enough structural complexity to require judgment.
• The result should include a source audit, a governed Drupal build, recorded decisions, independent verification, and explicit gaps.
• A Drupal expert should review it against a predeclared rubric - architecture, permissions, content integrity, editorial usability, maintainability, verification evidence, and known gaps.
• The final question should be binary: would that expert stake their name on this as a sound starting position for a senior team?

The bar we’re setting is not, are we "ready to launch.", it is "is this defensible enough to continue?"

One successful build would demonstrate a viable path in that case. A second site with a second operator would begin to test repeatability. Neither would prove that the market has moved - and we should not claim otherwise.

The question then is what remains after the agent is done. A clear test is: give the finished build to a fresh person or agent with none of the original context, and ask them to make a consequential change safely - add an editorial role, alter a workflow without weakening access, explain why the architecture is what it is, recover from a deliberately broken change - while we measure time-to-understand, mistakes, expert intervention, and whether the site's own state carried the reasoning. That tests "decisions as data" far more directly than a second build.

A head start is not a win

Drupal already has much of what builders need for serious sites. Again, that is the good news.

But the bad news is that potential has little value if agents reject Drupal before reaching it.

We should be careful not to declare victory because Drupal has structured content, permissions, workflows, and configuration management -  The work that remains is to turn those properties into a clear, measurable advantage: make Drupal easy enough to choose, explicit enough to understand, safe enough to change, and verifiable enough to trust.

Outside AI needs real workflows more than speculative feature lists. If you are using an external agent to build with Drupal, calling Drupal from another system, or encountering friction anywhere from setup through launch, bring us the real task.

A use case, failed run, repeated workaround, missing capability, or existing issue is enough; you do not need to arrive with a solution or even know where the work belongs. Add it to the Outside AI meta issue or bring it to the #ai-initiative channel in Drupal Slack. We will help reproduce it, map it to the agent journey, connect it with the right maintainers and implementation work, and determine whether it belongs in the scorecard.

If you maintain a project agents need to use, tell us what they repeatedly misunderstand or work around. Those workarounds are requirements documents.

Drupal's earned advantage gives us the right to play. What we build, and what we prove next, determines whether we win.

Evidence note: the measurements described here are early and deliberately narrow; several are exploratory rather than claim-grade. The scorecard work publishes fixed tasks, retained failures and nulls, explicit evidence boundaries, and paired pre/post results before claiming that Drupal itself improved.