This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.

Just over two years ago, I launched Drupal Starshot. I did it because I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can.

Starshot became Drupal CMS, which brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI, Drupal Canvas and more to make building websites easier.

Alongside that work, Drupal Core has become a faster and better framework for developers. A stronger Drupal Core helps us build a better Drupal CMS, while building Drupal CMS has driven further improvements in Drupal Core.

Unfortunately, many people outside the Drupal community haven't seen what Drupal can do today. In Rotterdam, I showed how far we have come and where we're going next, and we launched an advocacy program to help more people see how great Drupal has become.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (86 MB).

More ways to reach more people

The first part of my keynote showed improvements for multilingual sites, JavaScript front-ends, headless Canvas, and Drupal AI.

Drupal has long had strong multilingual capabilities, but Drupal Canvas, our powerful new page builder, didn't yet support multilingual sites. Not only did we add multilingual support to Canvas, but we made all multilingual sites easier to set up.

React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

At DrupalCon, we extended that same model with Drupal Canvas Headless. Developers can now use Drupal to manage content while building the front-end separately with frameworks like Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular, or Nuxt. Editors still get the visual experience of Drupal Canvas: they can build pages in Drupal and preview exactly how those pages will appear on the front-end.

This changes an important trade-off. Teams no longer have to choose between a modern JavaScript front-end and Drupal Canvas' visual authoring experience. They can have both. That opens Drupal to more developers, more front-end architectures, and more types of projects.

Drupal AI is moving so fast that I could have filled a whole keynote with it. Instead, we launched a new Drupal AI demo where people can experience Drupal AI for themselves. It comes preconfigured, making it easy to explore what Drupal AI can do or even show it to customers.

With the latest Drupal AI, you can ask questions and get answers grounded in your site's content. You can audit your content against brand guidelines, translate content, classify content, build pages and React components with AI, and more. Through MCP, AI assistants can work with Drupal content from outside Drupal.

What excites me most is the foundation underneath all of this. Drupal AI turns Drupal into an AI harness: organizations can connect AI models to structured content, tools, and workflows, while keeping control through permissions, guardrails, observability, metering, and a choice of AI models.

Opening Drupal's capabilities to other software

The second part of my keynote looked at another important shift: AI assistants can give people a new way to work with Drupal.

In one demo, an editor simply asked an AI assistant to unpublish a page. They didn't need to know where to click or understand Drupal's revisions, moderation workflows, or permissions. The assistant translated their intent into action, but Drupal remained in control: it checked whether the editor was allowed to unpublish the page and applied the site's publishing rules, just as it would if they had done it by hand.

If you want to see the demo in more detail, Scott Falconer, who worked on it, recorded a behind-the-scenes walkthrough showing how to set it up yourself, what happens under the hood, and how to get involved.

That demo was built on the Tool module, which I believe is one of the most important modules for Drupal developers to watch. Drupal modules already contain thousands of useful capabilities: publishing content, managing users, processing media, changing configuration, and much more. The Tool module gives developers a standard way to expose those capabilities so AI assistants and other software can discover and use them.

Today, exposing existing capabilities as tools can still require too much code. My own album module didn't expose tools, and making its existing capabilities available to an AI assistant took about 1,000 additional lines of code.

But once those tools were available, the value became obvious. Adding MCP support has already changed how I manage the more than 10,000 photos on my site. Tasks that used to take a lot of time can now be done much faster and more accurately with an AI assistant, while Drupal still manages the content, permissions, and workflows underneath.

That experience reinforced something I wrote about in AI and the great CMS unbundling: AI can take on more of the execution work while Drupal remains the control layer. I expect more organizations will want to manage parts of their sites through AI assistants. AI can make complex tasks much faster and easier without giving up the structure, governance, and safeguards that Drupal provides.

I believe thousands of module developers will eventually want to expose their capabilities in the same way, so I've been working with Matt Glaman to make it much easier. Matt has been developing a change to the Tool API that lets developers expose existing PHP methods as tools using attributes.

The idea is simple: add PHP attributes to an existing method to describe its name, purpose, inputs and outputs. In my album module, roughly 1,000 lines of integration code became about 20 attributes. My site already uses the experimental branch, and we're working to get it merged into the Tool module proper.

And this isn't only about AI. The same tools can be called by AI assistants over MCP, by other applications over HTTP, or used to generate schemas for JavaScript components and connect Drupal modules to workflow systems like ECA, FlowDrop, and Maestro. The video below shows FlowDrop using capabilities exposed by my album module:

Talk louder about Drupal

In the last part of my keynote, I came back to Drupal's reputation gap. We can make enormous progress with Drupal, but that doesn't automatically change what people or AI agents think of it. For example, an AI coding agent I tested in June didn't even mention Drupal CMS or Site Templates when it evaluated Drupal.

Over the past few years, much of my personal focus has been on accelerating innovation in Drupal. That work is paying off, and we have real product momentum. I'm now shifting more of my attention to the other side of the equation: making sure people see what we've built, understand what has changed, and know why it matters.

So I announced the Drupal Advocacy Program, led by the Drupal Association.

Drupal already has a contribution credit system. It recognizes the people who contribute to Drupal and the organizations that support their work. For businesses, those credits also help determine visibility in the Drupal marketplace. Until now, we've been much better at recognizing technical contributions and financial support than advocacy work.

The new Drupal Advocacy Program will change that. Advocacy work can now earn contribution credit, and work that reaches people outside the existing Drupal community can earn more weight.

If we want to close Drupal's reputation gap, we can't only talk to people who already know Drupal well. We need more talks at external events, articles in broader publications, customer stories, demos, tutorials, and other work that helps people see what Drupal can do today.

Blue Drop Labs is a good example of what I mean. The day after the DriesNote, they published a post on building a website with Drupal CMS and Canvas Headless. The project itself was already live, but they quickly turned that work into a story others could learn from, with demos showing how editors and developers work with Drupal today.

That is exactly what I mean by "talking louder". There is already a lot of impressive Drupal work happening. We need to do a better job of showing it to the world.

I was a little nervous about announcing the Advocacy Program. We've wrestled with Drupal's reputation gap for a long time, and I felt we needed to do more than acknowledge it. Using contribution credit to reward advocacy was a concrete way to change the incentives, but I wasn't sure how the community would react.

It turned out to be one of the best-received announcements of the keynote. That response gave me confidence that people were ready to act on the reputation gap, not just recognize it.

You can learn how to earn Drupal advocacy credit and submit your advocacy work.

My ask is simple: talk louder about Drupal, especially to people outside our community. Drupal doesn't need hype, but we do need a better public record. We need more people showing, with real examples, what Drupal can do today.

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who contributed to making my presentation and demos a success. A special thank you to Bálint Kléri, Christoph Breidert, Gábor Hojtsy, Lauri Timmanee, Matt Glaman, Michael Lander, Pamela Barone, Shibin Das, and the Drupal AI partners. Many others contributed indirectly to make this possible. If I've inadvertently omitted anyone, please reach out.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.

Just over two years ago, I launched Drupal Starshot. I did it because I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can.

Starshot became Drupal CMS, which brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI, Drupal Canvas and more to make building websites easier.

Alongside that work, Drupal Core has become a faster and better framework for developers. A stronger Drupal Core helps us build a better Drupal CMS, while building Drupal CMS has driven further improvements in Drupal Core.

Unfortunately, many people outside the Drupal community haven't seen what Drupal can do today. In Rotterdam, I showed how far we have come and where we're going next, and we launched an advocacy program to help more people see how great Drupal has become.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (86 MB).

More ways to reach more people

The first part of my keynote showed improvements for multilingual sites, JavaScript front-ends, headless Canvas, and Drupal AI.

Drupal has long had strong multilingual capabilities, but Drupal Canvas, our powerful new page builder, didn't yet support multilingual sites. Not only did we add multilingual support to Canvas, but we made all multilingual sites easier to set up.

React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

At DrupalCon, we extended that same model with Drupal Canvas Headless. Developers can now use Drupal to manage content while building the front-end separately with frameworks like Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular, or Nuxt. Editors still get the visual experience of Drupal Canvas: they can build pages in Drupal and preview exactly how those pages will appear on the front-end.

This changes an important trade-off. Teams no longer have to choose between a modern JavaScript front-end and Drupal Canvas' visual authoring experience. They can have both. That opens Drupal to more developers, more front-end architectures, and more types of projects.

Drupal AI is moving so fast that I could have filled a whole keynote with it. Instead, we launched a new Drupal AI demo where people can experience Drupal AI for themselves. It comes preconfigured, making it easy to explore what Drupal AI can do or even show it to customers.

With the latest Drupal AI, you can ask questions and get answers grounded in your site's content. You can audit your content against brand guidelines, translate content, classify content, build pages and React components with AI, and more. Through MCP, AI assistants can work with Drupal content from outside Drupal.

What excites me most is the foundation underneath all of this. Drupal AI turns Drupal into an AI harness: organizations can connect AI models to structured content, tools, and workflows, while keeping control through permissions, guardrails, observability, metering, and a choice of AI models.

Opening Drupal's capabilities to other software

The second part of my keynote looked at another important shift: AI assistants can give people a new way to work with Drupal.

In one demo, an editor simply asked an AI assistant to unpublish a page. They didn't need to know where to click or understand Drupal's revisions, moderation workflows, or permissions. The assistant translated their intent into action, but Drupal remained in control: it checked whether the editor was allowed to unpublish the page and applied the site's publishing rules, just as it would if they had done it by hand.

If you want to see the demo in more detail, Scott Falconer, who worked on it, recorded a behind-the-scenes walkthrough showing how to set it up yourself, what happens under the hood, and how to get involved.

That demo was built on the Tool module, which I believe is one of the most important modules for Drupal developers to watch. Drupal modules already contain thousands of useful capabilities: publishing content, managing users, processing media, changing configuration, and much more. The Tool module gives developers a standard way to expose those capabilities so AI assistants and other software can discover and use them.

Today, exposing existing capabilities as tools can still require too much code. My own album module didn't expose tools, and making its existing capabilities available to an AI assistant took about 1,000 additional lines of code.

But once those tools were available, the value became obvious. Adding MCP support has already changed how I manage the more than 10,000 photos on my site. Tasks that used to take a lot of time can now be done much faster and more accurately with an AI assistant, while Drupal still manages the content, permissions, and workflows underneath.

That experience reinforced something I wrote about in AI and the great CMS unbundling: AI can take on more of the execution work while Drupal remains the control layer. I expect more organizations will want to manage parts of their sites through AI assistants. AI can make complex tasks much faster and easier without giving up the structure, governance, and safeguards that Drupal provides.

I believe thousands of module developers will eventually want to expose their capabilities in the same way, so I've been working with Matt Glaman to make it much easier. Matt has been developing a change to the Tool API that lets developers expose existing PHP methods as tools using attributes.

The idea is simple: add PHP attributes to an existing method to describe its name, purpose, inputs and outputs. In my album module, roughly 1,000 lines of integration code became about 20 attributes. My site already uses the experimental branch, and we're working to get it merged into the Tool module proper.

And this isn't only about AI. The same tools can be called by AI assistants over MCP, by other applications over HTTP, or used to generate schemas for JavaScript components and connect Drupal modules to workflow systems like ECA, FlowDrop, and Maestro. The video below shows FlowDrop using capabilities exposed by my album module:

Talk louder about Drupal

In the last part of my keynote, I came back to Drupal's reputation gap. We can make enormous progress with Drupal, but that doesn't automatically change what people or AI agents think of it. For example, an AI coding agent I tested in June didn't even mention Drupal CMS or Site Templates when it evaluated Drupal.

Over the past few years, much of my personal focus has been on accelerating innovation in Drupal. That work is paying off, and we have real product momentum. I'm now shifting more of my attention to the other side of the equation: making sure people see what we've built, understand what has changed, and know why it matters.

So I announced the Drupal Advocacy Program, led by the Drupal Association.

Drupal already has a contribution credit system. It recognizes the people who contribute to Drupal and the organizations that support their work. For businesses, those credits also help determine visibility in the Drupal marketplace. Until now, we've been much better at recognizing technical contributions and financial support than advocacy work.

The new Drupal Advocacy Program will change that. Advocacy work can now earn contribution credit, and work that reaches people outside the existing Drupal community can earn more weight.

If we want to close Drupal's reputation gap, we can't only talk to people who already know Drupal well. We need more talks at external events, articles in broader publications, customer stories, demos, tutorials, and other work that helps people see what Drupal can do today.

Blue Drop Labs is a good example of what I mean. The day after the DriesNote, they published a post on building a website with Drupal CMS and Canvas Headless. The project itself was already live, but they quickly turned that work into a story others could learn from, with demos showing how editors and developers work with Drupal today.

That is exactly what I mean by "talking louder". There is already a lot of impressive Drupal work happening. We need to do a better job of showing it to the world.

I was a little nervous about announcing the Advocacy Program. We've wrestled with Drupal's reputation gap for a long time, and I felt we needed to do more than acknowledge it. Using contribution credit to reward advocacy was a concrete way to change the incentives, but I wasn't sure how the community would react.

It turned out to be one of the best-received announcements of the keynote. That response gave me confidence that people were ready to act on the reputation gap, not just recognize it.

You can learn how to earn Drupal advocacy credit and submit your advocacy work.

My ask is simple: talk louder about Drupal, especially to people outside our community. Drupal doesn't need hype, but we do need a better public record. We need more people showing, with real examples, what Drupal can do today.

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who contributed to making my presentation and demos a success. A special thank you to Bálint Kléri, Christoph Breidert, Gábor Hojtsy, Lauri Timmanee, Matt Glaman, Michael Lander, Pamela Barone, Shibin Das, and the Drupal AI partners. Many others contributed indirectly to make this possible. If I've inadvertently omitted anyone, please reach out.

The Drupal Security Team is pleased to announce that four provisional members have been added as full members of the team: Pierre Rudloff (prudloff), Joseph Zhao (pandaski), Bram Driesen (bramdriesen), and Swan Kalata (akalata). Each has demonstrated their commitment, trustworthiness, and effectiveness during their provisional membership, and we're proud to welcome them as full members of the team.

Meet the New Full Members

Pierre Rudloff (prudloff)

Pierre is a web developer based in Lille, France, working with Insite. He has been an active Drupal project contributor and software tester since 2019 and holds over 70 security advisory credits. Pierre recently created the Drupal Security Tips repository, a valuable resource that documents recurring vulnerability patterns drawn from two years of security advisories and their associated patches.

Joseph Zhao (pandaski)

Joseph is a solution architect and open-source developer who has been designing, building, and supporting open-source solutions since 2004. He is a prolific contributor to the Drupal ecosystem, having contributed patches, modules, themes, installation profiles, documentation, translations, and automated tests. Joseph has also reviewed project applications and serves as a mentor to newer contributors. He has been a Drupal.org community member for over 13 years.

Bram Driesen (bramdriesen)

Bram is a Drupal developer at Sopra Steria, based in Belgium, and has been an active contributor to the Drupal ecosystem since 2015. His involvement extends well beyond code: he is a co-organizer for the Drupal User Group Belgium (DUG BE) and Photography Lead for DrupalCon Europe, with experience organizing events such as the Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven DrupalCamps and Drupal Dev Days Ghent.

Swan Kalata (akalata)

Swan is an Architect and Technical Lead at Tag1 Consulting, Inc., based in the United States. They have been an active Drupal community member for nearly 17 years and are a prolific contributor with credits on over 180 issues—including nearly 70 for Drupal core. Their involvement extends well beyond code: they are a community mentor and have participated in numerous international DrupalCon events.

A Stronger Team for a More Secure Drupal

Promoting Pierre, Joseph, Bram, and Swan to full membership strengthens our ability to review vulnerabilities, coordinate with maintainers, and improve the overall security posture of the Drupal project. They join over 20 volunteers currently on the team.

Welcome to the team, Pierre, Joseph, Bram, and Swan!

If you would like to join the team, please read how to join the Drupal Security Team.

This post is a little late. Thanks for your patience :)

AI was used in the drafting of this post. Also thanks for support from pandaski, akalata, bramdriesen, prudloff, larowlan, benjifisher, poker10, xjm, mlhess in drafting this post.

During the Driesnote at DrupalCon Rotterdam, one of the closing points was that Drupal has evolved light years beyond its reputation. And that's true. But it's also true that there is a whole world of people out there who've never heard of Drupal, and we need to talk about it differently to them than we do when talking amongst the Drupal-aware.

Enter The October "Off the Drupal Island" challenge.

The gist: During this, the spoooookiest month, go out to a local event (meetup, hackathon, etc.) where Drupal isn't, and no one has ever heard of "Drush" or a render array. ;) And ideally, where their local community presence is larger than ours.

For example:

• AI events
• JavaScript events
• WordPress events
• ...

NOT to pitch Drupal! To learn, quickly, and at scale. Be curious. Talk to people. Find out more about what they're building, where they're struggling, and what they wish was better.

Then, post a mini "field report" about your journey to this issue (there's a handy template there if you like).

We'll circle back on these learnings in a November AI Learners Club meeting, and strategize what kind of demo(s) we think would resonate best with these audiences, reflecting back their words and their use cases and pain points.

Then, we get louder about Drupal to them. ;) #DevRel at global scale.

Note: If you need extra incentive, perhaps because the idea of talking to strangers is slightly terrifying to you ;) note that this community research work qualifies you for credits under the new Drupal Advocacy program. \m/

For discussion, see LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7513498359781826560/

A first look at Gutenberg AI, the AI writing tools Ramsalt is building for Drupal

Most AI writing tools live in another browser tab. You copy text out, write a prompt, copy the answer back and fix the formatting. We wanted to get rid of that loop for people who write online. Gutenberg AI is the product we are building to fix that. It brings AI into the Gutenberg block editor, right next to the content it works on.

It is built on the Drupal AI framework, so it works with the chat provider you already use, whether that is OpenAI, Anthropic or a model running locally through Ollama. Everything it produces is standard Gutenberg blocks, so there is no lock-in.

A quick note before the tour: this is not a finished service yet. Gutenberg AI is under heavy development, features change from week to week and some of what you see here is still being tuned. We are sharing it now because we want to shape it together with the people who will use it. Here is a first look at what already works in our development builds.

In this post

• Better writing, right where you write
• An assistant that edits the page
• Use AI block or the sidebar assistant and build a section
• A proofreader that works while you type
• Editorial Desk
• Images and alt text
• Built for organizations that need control
• Help us shape it

A few details we are especially happy with:

It can also do the heavy lifting on a blank page:

Every change is accountable. Applied changes are highlighted on the page, and each one has a before and after view and its own Revert button. Prefer to approve first? Turn on review mode and proposed edits show up as tracked changes, with added words in green and removed words in red, ready to accept or reject block by block.

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Author: Will Huggins

In enterprise digital experience, the conversation around generative AI has shifted dramatically. Digital leaders are no longer asking whether AI can write a paragraph or spin up a page. They are asking: 

• Can our AI deliver seamless customer journeys?
• Can it scale without diluting our brand voice?
• Will our IT and compliance teams actually approve it?

The release of Drupal AI 1.5 directly answers those questions.

Driven by 63 active contributors across 31 global organisations, Drupal AI 1.5 shifts the platform from one-shot text generation into an interactive, governed, and brand-safe digital experience engine.

For CMOs, Heads of Digital, and website owners, this release is not about backend developer plumbing - it is about practical marketing velocity, measurable ROI, and total brand sovereignty.

Here is a breakdown of what Drupal AI 1.5 unlocks for your digital roadmap.

1. Digital Assistants That Actually Remember the Customer Journey

Early AI chatbots suffered from digital amnesia: the second a visitor navigated to a new page or refreshed their session, their context vanished. For high-consideration purchases or complex self-service portals, this creates friction and frustrates users.

Drupal AI 1.5 introduces persistent, stateful conversation memory:

• Seamless Multi Page Engagement: Conversational assistants now securely remember previous interactions across a user’s entire browsing session. If a prospect asks about product specifications on a solutions page and later opens the chat on your pricing calculator, the assistant retains the context.
• Enterprise Privacy by Default: Conversation threads are sandboxed per user session. Visitors enjoy a personalised journey, while your data protection officers can rest easy knowing customer history is never exposed across sessions or leaked externally.
• Grounded in Your Content: Rather than relying on generic model knowledge, chatbots can now be plugged directly into your site’s verified content repository (Retrieval-Augmented Generation / RAG), ensuring every answer is accurate, factual, and backed by your brand’s single source of truth.

The Strategic Win: You transform your website from a static brochure into an intelligent, conversational destination that guides prospects smoothly through the conversion funnel.

2. Real-Time Streaming Guardrails: Zero-Risk Brand Safety

For any marketing leader, the greatest fear with public-facing AI is reputational damage: a model hallucinating incorrect pricing, generating off-brand language, or leaking sensitive corporate information.

While traditional safety filters only check text after the entire response is completed—slowing down user experiences—Drupal AI 1.5 introduces active streaming guardrails:

• Live Stream Filtering: Guardrails now monitor the AI’s output token-by-token in real time. If an external model attempts to output confidential identifiers, internal instructions, or unvetted claims, the filter suppresses and replaces the content before a single character renders in the visitor’s browser.
• Semantic Topic Guardrails: Restricting an AI to approved topics used to be brittle. If a model said "coastal vacation" instead of "beach holiday," strict keyword filters would break. Version 1.5 uses intelligent semantic matching: the assistant understands intent, synonyms, and localised phrasing while remaining firmly inside your brand boundaries.
• Cost-Effective Compliance: User prompts can now be routed through dedicated, cost-free moderation channels instead of burning expensive generation tokens, protecting both your brand standards and your marketing budget

The Strategic Win: Complete brand safety. Your legal, compliance, and IT teams get auditable, proactive safeguards built into the core publishing architecture.

3. From "One-Click Prompts" to Interactive Editorial Copilots

Early CMS AI automations were rigid: an editor clicked an AI button, waited, and was forced to accept or discard whatever came back.

Drupal AI 1.5 turns AI Automators into an interactive creative partner inside the editing workspace:

• Interactive Refinement in the Edit Form: When generating campaign copy, headlines, or summaries, editors can now open an interactive refinement window. With plain-language prompts like "make this more urgent," "tighten to 30 words," or "adapt for our enterprise persona," the copy updates dynamically—while automatically preserving your overarching brand voice rules.
• Multi-Step Content Pipelines in One Click: Marketing teams can trigger automated workflows directly from a field. A single click can research a topic, draft copy, pull relevant taxonomies, and format the output—without leaving the edit screen or waiting on developer intervention.
• Vision-Aware Content Intelligence: The CMS can now "see" the imagery embedded in your articles. Multimodal vision models analyse uploaded graphics to automatically draft descriptive alt-text, optimise summaries, and ensure full accessibility compliance without manual overhead.

The Strategic Win: High-velocity content operations. AI handles the first 80% of drafting and repetitive formatting, leaving your team with complete creative control over the final 20%.

4. On-Site Search That Understands Customer Intent

If visitors cannot find the right product, resource, or service within seconds, they bounce. Traditional on-site search engines rely on exact keyword matches, frequently failing when visitors search using colloquial questions or conversational language.

Drupal AI 1.5 upgrades search into a semantic relevance engine:

• Intelligent Result Re-Ranking: Integrated directly with your site’s search architecture, the AI analyzes user queries semantically and re-orders results based on actual intent, not just raw word frequency.
• Instant Answers: New question-answering capabilities can pinpoint the exact passage answering a user's question, displaying direct snippets alongside high-confidence relevance scores.
• The Strategic Win: Higher digital engagement and increased conversion rates by eliminating the "dead-end" search experience across your digital properties.

5. Total Financial & Operational Governance

One of the fastest ways to lose executive support for AI initiatives is unpredictability—unexpected API bills or black-box operations that IT cannot audit.

Drupal AI 1.5 builds transparency directly into the dashboard:

• Real-Time Token & Cost Tracking: Product owners can monitor exact token consumption (input, output, and cached reasoning) alongside live provider rate limits. You know precisely what each campaign or automated workflow costs.
• Enterprise Observability: All AI actions emit standardized monitoring metrics compatible with leading enterprise platforms (such as OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or New Relic), ensuring full auditability for platform architects.

Move Fast, Stay in Control, Own Your Destination

Proprietary digital experience platforms lock your organization into their single, closed-ecosystem AI model—charging heavy licensing premiums while limiting your flexibility. Lightweight headless tools offer AI writing widgets, but leave you without enterprise governance, multilingual depth, or data sovereignty.

Drupal AI 1.5 delivers the best of both worlds: model-agnostic freedom to choose the best AI for the job, visual campaign acceleration for marketing teams, and bulletproof architectural security.

👉 Download Drupal AI 1.5 today.

Experience Drupal AI Today

Reading about capabilities is one thing; seeing them transform your digital operations is another.

Explore our live interactive environments to test chatbots with memory, stream-level guardrails, and interactive content workflows:

👉 Explore the Drupal AI Interactive Demos

Image: DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 by Paul Johnson

Author: Jeremy Chinquist

At DrupalCon Rotterdam on September 29, 2026, Dries Buytaert used his keynote to show how far Drupal has come and who it can reach next. Dries framed the keynote around three pillars that bring Drupal's strengths to more people: multilingual (reach people in more languages), JavaScript and headless (bring more developers and applications to Drupal), and AI (give people new ways to work with Drupal).

This post zooms in on the AI pillar. For the full keynote, including digital sovereignty, multilingual, headless and the new Drupal Advocacy Program, read the official recap: DriesNote Rotterdam: Drupal is Light-Years Ahead of Its Reputation. To watch the six demos from the keynote, see Proof, not promises. Watch the six demos from the DriesNote Rotterdam.

Watch the full keynote on YouTube

Exclusive interview: James Hall sat down with Dries Buytaert for the Drupal AI Initiative. Watch it on LinkedIn

Image: James Hall, Everyone TV interviews Dries Buytaert following the DriesNote

A strong start for the Drupal AI Initiative

Dominique De Cooman, Head of Partnerships for the Drupal AI Initiative, opened the conference with a short welcome and a clear message: the Drupal AI Initiative is strong and active. Dries later mentioned that over 100 people have contributed to the Drupal AI Initiative so far.

Try it now: "Drupal AI Demo: Northmoor University"

On stage, Dries showed off the demo that the Inside AI team, led by Christoph Breidert, had been developing over the past few months. "Drupal AI Demo: Northmoor University" is a complete university website that shows Drupal AI at work on realistic content. Anyone can try it today at drupal.org/ai/demo. To learn how the demo was built and what it can do, read Christoph's announcement: Introducing the Drupal AI Demo.

Five parts of the demo were highlighted during the talk:

• Find weak content and fix it. Drupal AI scans the site's programs, courses, people, news, events and policies, checks them for accuracy, tone and inclusive language, and flags weak items.
• Fix it without the expert. Editors fix the flagged content themselves instead of waiting for a specialist.
• Grounded answers, every source cited. Visitors can ask the site questions. Drupal AI answers from the site's own content and cites its sources. If the answer isn't there, it marks the question as outside the site's scope and uses the content to point to the right person to contact. It is not allowed to invent an answer.
• Drafts, not surprises. Editors can connect their own AI assistant. Asked to update every page that mentions a newly promoted professor, the assistant finds 10 pages and drafts the changes, but publishes nothing. Every draft waits for a human to review and publish.
• Stay accountable. AI guardrails, one source of truth and every interaction logged.

Did you know?

Aidan Foster also used the demo site in the presentation "Encoding Expertise: How UX Research Powers Human-First AI" to show how AI guidelines can help review a site's content.

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

What this means for you: for agencies and site owners, this is the quickest way to see Drupal AI on a real site before planning a project. The guardrails matter as much as the features: the AI flags, drafts and cites, and people decide what gets published.

Building Drupal Canvas components with AI

Dries showed AI-assisted development for Drupal Canvas. Given a prompt such as "Build a content template for my articles," the AI assistant checks its work against Canvas Workbench, ESLint and the Canvas CLI. The result is a set of simple template files, pushed to the site with the Canvas CLI.

What this means for you: front-end developers can let an AI assistant write the first draft while Canvas' own tooling validates the result.

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

Connecting Drupal to AI assistants

Today, exposing a Drupal module's features to AI assistants via MCP takes around 1,000 lines of code. Dries showed a prototype that brings this down to around 20 PHP attributes, using a recipe that combines the Simple OAuth, MCP Server and Tool API modules. The principle is "describe once, use in multiple places": one description of a capability serves AI assistants, workflow tools and JavaScript components alike.

In the demo, a FindImages tool lets an AI assistant look up images on the site, with FlowDrop connecting the pieces.

What this means for you: this is a prototype, not a release. For module maintainers, it points to a future where one description makes a module usable by AI assistants.

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

On the roadmap: the Rosetta Sprint

The next step is the Rosetta Sprint: a four-day sprint with key maintainers to describe Drupal's capabilities once, in a form that AI agents, other systems and humans can all read. The goal is to make Drupal's data and capabilities easier to expose to AI agents, orchestration tools, frontends and more. The date and location are still to be announced.

Did you know?

Kristen Pol used the Drupal AI Demo to record the demo clips for her session "Context Control Center: Bringing AI Context to Drupal CMS." Curious how Drupal gives AI the right context? Take a look.

Talk louder about Drupal

Dries closed with a clear request: "Here is my ask: Talk louder about Drupal." Try the demo, share what you build with Drupal AI and join the Drupal Advocacy Program.

Image: Karl Hepworth (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

Thank you, Drupal AI Partners

During the keynote, Dries thanked the Drupal AI Partners, the organizations that back the Drupal AI Initiative. Want your organization to join them? Become a partner.

Image: Drupal Association (DriesNote, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026)

Author: Christoph Breidert, Product Lead, Drupal AI

Earlier this year, the Drupal AI Initiative set itself a clear goal: at DrupalCon Rotterdam, show one Drupal site where AI search, content review, chat-driven editing, and AI translation all work together on real content. Today we are delivering on that promise. The Drupal AI Demo is live, and Dries revealed it in the Driesnote.

You can open it, use it, and see for yourself what Drupal AI looks like when it is built as a complete product. The demo is the website of a fictional university, with the kind of content and structure a real organization's site would have.

The Drupal AI Demo: a realistic, multilingual university website where every AI feature runs on the same content

From a list of features to something you can try

Until now, Drupal AI has mostly been something we described. We had roadmaps, feature lists, module pages, and conference talks. All of that was accurate, but none of it was tangible. A list of features asks people to imagine how the pieces fit together. A demo lets them see it.

That difference matters to two groups of people in particular.

If you are evaluating Drupal, the demo lets you test the AI features instead of reading about them. I believe Drupal is the most powerful AI-powered CMS available today. Until now, that was a claim you had to take on trust. Now you can check it yourself, try the features on realistic content, and plan your own website around capabilities that are already implemented and working.

If you already build with Drupal AI, the demo shows how each feature is intended to be used. You can evaluate every feature, see how it is configured, and adapt that setup to your own use case. That is a much better starting point than piecing together a feature from documentation alone.

What you can try

The demo focuses on the features our Drupal AI Partners told us matter most. In May, we asked them which capabilities they most wanted to have ready to use in Drupal. They are at the heart of the demo.

AI content reviews. Check a page against criteria like brand voice, legal requirements, and reading level, and get concrete suggestions for improving it.

AI content review scores a page against brand, legal, and readability criteria and suggests concrete improvements

AI search. Ask a question and get an AI-generated answer, grounded in the site's own content and with the sources behind it.

AI search answers a question with a summary, the sources behind it, and ranked results from the site's own content

Chat-driven content editing. Describe what you want to change, and the AI edits the page for you, right inside the editing experience.

Chat-driven editing: an editor describes a change in the chat, and the AI updates the page directly

AI translation. Move content across languages, with results good enough to publish.

AI translation moves a page into another language, ready for review and publishing

Connect your own AI agents. Connect agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, and others to Drupal through MCP, and make changes to the website from the outside.

An external AI agent, connected through MCP, making a change on the demo website

What makes the demo different from trying these features one at a time is that they all run together on the same site and the same content. That is what building a real website involves, and it is where the hardest work was.

How we got here

The idea of a demo was always there. We knew from the start that Drupal AI would need one, but first we needed a foundation strong enough to build it on.

The official Drupal AI sprints started in January this year. We spent the first three months refining the core AI functionality. By the second quarter, we had a stable code base to build on. In May, we ran the partner survey, and that was the moment the demo became a shared goal. The partners bought into the idea, and together we agreed on the features it should show. June went into preparation. In July, we started building.

The last eight weeks were the most intense. Between 1 August and 26 September alone:

• More than 100 people contributed code, reviews, or merge requests
• 1,442 commits landed across 54 projects
• 616 merge requests were merged on drupal.org
• Roughly 596,000 lines were added. That figure covers module code as well as the demo's content, theme, and configuration, and leaves out build output and lock files.

Activity grew steadily over those weeks, from about 70 commits in the first week of August to more than 300 per week in September. And the part I am most proud of is not the size of those numbers. It is that the result simply works.

Weekly commits across the demo and the drupal.org projects it builds on, 1 August to 26 September 2026

The people who built it

The demo was built by contributors from across the Drupal AI Partners, the organizations that fund and staff this initiative, together with many contributors from the wider Drupal community. Working together, we could build a more advanced AI experience than any of us could have built alone, and everything we build for the demo makes Drupal AI better for everyone who uses it.

Most of the load of the demo itself was carried by four people: Marcus Johansson, Artem Dmitriiev, Aidan Foster, and myself. Marcus, Artem, and I also met in person for three days to do nothing but sprint on the demo. Some of the hardest problems got solved in that room.

Marcus Johansson, Artem Dmitriiev, and Christoph Breidert during their three-day, in-person demo sprint

Many others did substantial work on the demo itself. I want to thank Darren Oh, Kristen Pol, Abhisek Mazumdar, Dan Lemon, Eric Homanchuk, Akhil Babu, and Kiran Kadam.

Of course, a demo is only as good as the modules underneath it, and many projects were heavily developed to be ready for Rotterdam. The main contributors there include Giorgio Alfredo Pagano on AI Disclosure, Michael Lander and Matt Glaman on the Tool API, MCP Server, and Canvas tools, Kristen Pol on AI Context, Rob Loach, Scott Euser on AI Search, Ahmad Khader on AI Content Review, and Sven Decabooter on AI Translate. Much of this work also depended on review: Artem and Marcus alone merged more than 100 merge requests from other contributors in these two months.

A personal note

Coordinating a distributed effort of this size, with contributors across many organizations, countries, and time zones, in such a short time is its own kind of challenge. My role was to set the direction, define the work packages, and align with key contributors and organizers to make sure we were building the right things. I also reviewed a great deal of work along the way. The day-to-day operations were led by our delivery managers, Arian Raeesi and Vidit Anjaria, who planned the work into sprints and kept it moving every day.

What I had never seen before is so many people building something together that actually works as one. Being part of that is amazing.

The demo was something I had in my head for a long time. Seeing so many people take that idea and make it real, and seeing it work, is one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in the Drupal community.

To everyone who contributed: thank you. This demo is yours.

Try it, and help us make it better

The demo is live at drupal.org/ai/demo. Try it, test it, and tell us what you think.

If you want to help shape what comes next, join us in the #ai-initiative channel on Drupal Slack, or explore becoming a Drupal AI Partner.

Everyone who contributed between August and September 2026

Abhinav Jha, Abhisek Mazumdar, Abhishek Dhariwal, Adam G-H, Adrian McKee, Ahmad Khader, Ahmad Khalil, Aidan Foster, Akhil Babu, Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, Andrei Mateescu, Andrii Sakhaniuk, Angela Saldaña, Anikó Viola, Ann Mary Sruthy, arne michiels, Artem Dmitriiev, Ashish Dalvi, attilatilman, Avinash jha, Bharat Kelotra, Brooke Mahoney, Bruna Emerich, Bruno Bruno, calmforce, Carlos Romero, Cesar Miquel, Chad Peppers, Christian Burk, Christoph Breidert, Craig Wood, Dan Goodwin, Dan Lemon, Daniel Rodriguez, Darren Oh, Dave Long, David Bravo, Denise Spangler, Dezső Biczó, Dimitris Spachos, Dries Buytaert, Emma Horrell, Eric Homanchuk, George Kastanis, Giorgio Alfredo Pagano, Ignacio Pérez Puertas, István Csáki, Jeff Warrington, Jeremy Cerda, Jibran Ijaz, Joonas Meriläinen, Jordan Graham, JoshHayter, Joshua Fernandes, Juan Correa, Jurriaan Roelofs, Jérôme Tchania, Jürgen Haas, Kenneth Bolívar Castro, Kieran Cott, Kiran Kadam, KJ Monahan, Konstantine Kirkitadze, Kristen Pol, Lee Rowlands, Levente Besenyei, Manuel Garcia, Marcus Johansson, Markus Kalkbrenner, Mateu Aguiló Bosch, Matt Glaman, Matthew Tift, Michael Lander, Miguel Guerreiro, Narendra Singh Rathore, Nick Opris, Nick Pasiuk, Nik LePage, Norman Kämper-Leymann, Pieter Frenssen, Prabhavathi Vanipenta, Pravesh Poonia, Punam Aseem Beedkar, Reinhold Schachner, Ricardo Castañeda, Richard Porter, Rob Loach, Rodel Duterte, scontzen, Scott Euser, Scott Falconer, Sergiu Nagailic, Shashank Rai, Shibin Das, Shivam Sen, Simon Morvan, Sven Decabooter, szato, Tamas Balog, Tekla Aivazashvili, Tormi Tabor, tribekk, Valery Lourie, Will Huggins, Wolfgang Ziegler.

The DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam made one argument above all: Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The strongest evidence was on screen. These six demos show a platform that speaks more languages, welcomes JavaScript developers as first-class citizens, and treats AI assistants as another interface to Drupal, with governance built in.

Everything here is open source and available today. Here are the demos, with the story behind each one.

1. Multilingual sites, easier to build

80% of the world doesn't speak English as a first or second language, so multilingual is how Drupal reaches billions more people. Two things used to hold teams back: setup was hard, and Drupal Canvas didn't yet support multilingual content. Drupal CMS 2.2 changes both, with a language selector right in the installer, a guided Multilingual add-on, three levels of translation configurability, and full translation support in Canvas, including review workflows and optional AI translation. Watch for Dashi, a multilingual food magazine template made entirely by Drupalers.

2. JavaScript as a first-class citizen

JavaScript front ends are where many developers start their careers, and Canvas is built for them: a standalone front-end project scaffolded in one command, with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, previews via Canvas Workbench with zero configuration, and AI coding agents in the workflow. One push with the Canvas CLI and everything is ready for content teams to use visually. No Drupalisms, no trade-offs.

3. Canvas Headless: your choice of front end

Organisations often compose experiences from multiple backends, and that calls for a headless front end. Canvas Headless connects yours by configuring a URL, with Canvas visual editing built in: editors see a live preview of the real application while developers build in the framework they prefer. Starter templates cover Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and Angular support arrived the very week of the keynote, five frameworks in all.

4. Try Drupal AI for yourself

There's been so much Drupal AI work that demoing it all would fill the keynote. Instead, there's now a demo experience anyone can try: a fictional university site where AI reviews every page against your standards, visitors get answers drawn from your own content with sources shown, and guardrails, a central knowledge hub, and full logging keep it accountable. It's working today, open source, built by leading Drupal AI companies, and pre-configured so you can also use it to show customers. Try it at drupal.org/ai/demo.

5. Fixing content with an AI assistant

A content editor spots Dutch translations showing prices that shouldn't be live yet. From ChatGPT, connected with her own account, she asks for the previous Dutch versions back, English untouched. It happens, with every change recorded as a new revision under her name. She didn't need to know where to click or how revisions, moderation, and permissions work; Drupal handled the governance behind the scenes. You can do this today with a recipe combining Simple OAuth, MCP Server, and the Tool module, built by Michael Lander, Matt Glaman, and others: drupal.org/project/agent_access

6. One module, many interfaces

The most surprising demo wasn't about AI at all. Dries's personal site holds more than 10,000 photos in a custom album module he tool-enabled himself, the work behind his "describe once, use everywhere" idea. The creator of FlowDrop, a visual workflow tool for Drupal, showed that module's MCP server powering a plain form, searching photos and albums with no AI anywhere, and then an agent that chooses its own tools to answer questions. When capabilities are described once and answers come back structured, AI becomes a choice, not a requirement. That idea is what the upcoming Rosetta Sprint will take forward.

Watch the DriesNote in full, or read the full recap of everything Dries announced, from digital sovereignty to the Drupal Advocacy Program.

The DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam made one argument above all: Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The strongest evidence was on screen. These six demos show a platform that speaks more languages, welcomes JavaScript developers as first-class citizens, and treats AI assistants as another interface to Drupal, with governance built in.

Everything here is open source and available today. Here are the demos, with the story behind each one.

1. Multilingual sites, easier to build

80% of the world doesn't speak English as a first or second language, so multilingual is how Drupal reaches billions more people. Two things used to hold teams back: setup was hard, and Drupal Canvas didn't yet support multilingual content. Drupal CMS 2.2 changes both, with a language selector right in the installer, a guided Multilingual add-on, three levels of translation configurability, and full translation support in Canvas, including review workflows and optional AI translation. Watch for Dashi, a multilingual food magazine template made entirely by Drupalers.

2. JavaScript as a first-class citizen

JavaScript front ends are where many developers start their careers, and Canvas is built for them: a standalone front-end project scaffolded in one command, with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, previews via Canvas Workbench with zero configuration, and AI coding agents in the workflow. One push with the Canvas CLI and everything is ready for content teams to use visually. No Drupalisms, no trade-offs.

3. Canvas Headless: your choice of front end

Organisations often compose experiences from multiple backends, and that calls for a headless front end. Canvas Headless connects yours by configuring a URL, with Canvas visual editing built in: editors see a live preview of the real application while developers build in the framework they prefer. Starter templates cover Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and Angular support arrived the very week of the keynote, five frameworks in all.

4. Try Drupal AI for yourself

There's been so much Drupal AI work that demoing it all would fill the keynote. Instead, there's now a demo experience anyone can try: a fictional university site where AI reviews every page against your standards, visitors get answers drawn from your own content with sources shown, and guardrails, a central knowledge hub, and full logging keep it accountable. It's working today, open source, built by leading Drupal AI companies, and pre-configured so you can also use it to show customers. Try it at drupal.org/ai/demo.

5. Fixing content with an AI assistant

A content editor spots Dutch translations showing prices that shouldn't be live yet. From ChatGPT, connected with her own account, she asks for the previous Dutch versions back, English untouched. It happens, with every change recorded as a new revision under her name. She didn't need to know where to click or how revisions, moderation, and permissions work; Drupal handled the governance behind the scenes. You can do this today with a recipe combining Simple OAuth, MCP Server, and the Tool module, built by Michael Lander, Matt Glaman, and others: drupal.org/project/agent_access

6. One module, many interfaces

The most surprising demo wasn't about AI at all. Dries's personal site holds more than 10,000 photos in a custom album module he tool-enabled himself, the work behind his "describe once, use everywhere" idea. The creator of FlowDrop, a visual workflow tool for Drupal, showed that module's MCP server powering a plain form, searching photos and albums with no AI anywhere, and then an agent that chooses its own tools to answer questions. When capabilities are described once and answers come back structured, AI becomes a choice, not a requirement. That idea is what the upcoming Rosetta Sprint will take forward.

Watch the DriesNote in full, or read the full recap of everything Dries announced, from digital sovereignty to the Drupal Advocacy Program.

In a major shake-up, your advocacy work now earns Drupal contribution credit.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. It's time we changed that.

The Drupal Advocacy Program is a new Drupal Association pilot that awards contribution credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal.

Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The platform has changed dramatically in recent years, but the market's picture of Drupal runs years behind. If you have ever heard "oh, is Drupal still around?", you have felt that gap first-hand — and research by major Drupal agencies confirms it. The fix is not a bigger ad budget. It is education at community scale: authentic stories from the people who build with Drupal, told in their own voices to the audiences they know best.

Our community can be uneasy with the word "marketing". But you are already advocates for Drupal, day in and day out — and that is exactly what this moment needs. If you have ever written a tutorial, recorded a demo, translated an article, or shared someone else's talk with a new audience, you have been doing advocacy. Starting today, that work earns recognition.

How it works

Tell the story. Create, share, and boost content about modern Drupal. A blog post for your market. A video for your audience. A talk at a non-Drupal conference. A customer story in your language. And amplification counts: share someone else's DrupalCon talk or case study, tell us about it, and you earn credit too.

Themes multiply your impact. Four to six times a year, we will roll out a theme — a consistent message with messaging and proof points ready to build on. Take it and make it your own: translate it for your language, reframe it for your industry, make it relevant to your network. Advocacy content on the current theme earns 2x–3x credits, because 126 certified partners and a huge global community telling one story at the same moment is what moves the market. 

Credits flow back. Advocacy runs through the same contribution credit system that recognises code. It counts toward your standing in the ecosystem, including Drupal Certified Partner visibility. Credits will be awarded in bulk each month, guided by a published scale (to come), weighted by quality and reach, because we want content that travels beyond the Drupal world. Each month we will also spotlight the best advocacy content and award it extra credit.

The ground rules are simple. This is about promoting Drupal and what Drupal can do. You can mention where you work, and you can absolutely draw on case studies from your own business — as a way of showing what Drupal makes possible.

Ways to take part

• Post. A thoughtful LinkedIn article or thread in your own words
• Write. A blog post specific to your audience, region, or industry
• Record. An explainer, tutorial, reaction, or customer-story video
• Boost. Share and amplify someone else's talk, case study, or post
• Adapt. Translate or localise the story for your language and market
• Speak. A talk or lightning talk, especially at non-Drupal events and meetups
• Pod. Appear on or host a podcast episode
• Show your work. A customer or project story that highlights what Drupal can do
• Teach. A tutorial, demo, or code walkthrough that shows modern Drupal in action

Choose something that fits you. You do not need to become a salesperson. As Dries put it in his DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote: Drupal doesn't need hype. It needs a better public record.

Submitting is simple

For now, it is a short form at drupal.org/advocacy. In the coming days you will also find a submission form across many Drupal Slack channels. Either way, telling us about your content should take a minute — because for this to work, submitting needs to be exceedingly easy.

This is very much a pilot. We will start by reviewing and crediting submissions by hand, look for ways to automate over time, and let what we learn from your submissions shape how the program grows. And we want to celebrate the people who lead the way: at next year's DrupalCons, we will present awards to Drupal's biggest advocates.

Start today

Every story you tell adds to Drupal's public record — the record that search engines, AI assistants, and agentic search increasingly draw on when people ask what to build with. More authentic voices means Drupal showing up where decisions are actually made.

Submit your advocacy work at drupal.org/advocacy. You will find the current theme, its messaging and proof points, and guidelines on attribution and what qualifies for credit.

You have done the work. Now start talking.

In a major shake-up, your advocacy work now earns Drupal contribution credit.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. It's time we changed that.

The Drupal Advocacy Program is a new Drupal Association pilot that awards contribution credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal.

Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The platform has changed dramatically in recent years, but the market's picture of Drupal runs years behind. If you have ever heard "oh, is Drupal still around?", you have felt that gap first-hand — and research by major Drupal agencies confirms it. The fix is not a bigger ad budget. It is education at community scale: authentic stories from the people who build with Drupal, told in their own voices to the audiences they know best.

Our community can be uneasy with the word "marketing". But you are already advocates for Drupal, day in and day out — and that is exactly what this moment needs. If you have ever written a tutorial, recorded a demo, translated an article, or shared someone else's talk with a new audience, you have been doing advocacy. Starting today, that work earns recognition.

How it works

Tell the story. Create, share, and boost content about modern Drupal. A blog post for your market. A video for your audience. A talk at a non-Drupal conference. A customer story in your language. And amplification counts: share someone else's DrupalCon talk or case study, tell us about it, and you earn credit too.

Themes multiply your impact. Four to six times a year, we will roll out a theme — a consistent message with messaging and proof points ready to build on. Take it and make it your own: translate it for your language, reframe it for your industry, make it relevant to your network. Advocacy content on the current theme earns 2x–3x credits, because 126 certified partners and a huge global community telling one story at the same moment is what moves the market. 

Credits flow back. Advocacy runs through the same contribution credit system that recognises code. It counts toward your standing in the ecosystem, including Drupal Certified Partner visibility. Credits will be awarded in bulk each month, guided by a published scale (to come), weighted by quality and reach, because we want content that travels beyond the Drupal world. Each month we will also spotlight the best advocacy content and award it extra credit.

The ground rules are simple. This is about promoting Drupal and what Drupal can do. You can mention where you work, and you can absolutely draw on case studies from your own business — as a way of showing what Drupal makes possible.

Ways to take part

• Post. A thoughtful LinkedIn article or thread in your own words
• Write. A blog post specific to your audience, region, or industry
• Record. An explainer, tutorial, reaction, or customer-story video
• Boost. Share and amplify someone else's talk, case study, or post
• Adapt. Translate or localise the story for your language and market
• Speak. A talk or lightning talk, especially at non-Drupal events and meetups
• Pod. Appear on or host a podcast episode
• Show your work. A customer or project story that highlights what Drupal can do
• Teach. A tutorial, demo, or code walkthrough that shows modern Drupal in action

Choose something that fits you. You do not need to become a salesperson. As Dries put it in his DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote: Drupal doesn't need hype. It needs a better public record.

Submitting is simple

For now, it is a short form at drupal.org/advocacy. In the coming days you will also find a submission form across many Drupal Slack channels. Either way, telling us about your content should take a minute — because for this to work, submitting needs to be exceedingly easy.

This is very much a pilot. We will start by reviewing and crediting submissions by hand, look for ways to automate over time, and let what we learn from your submissions shape how the program grows. And we want to celebrate the people who lead the way: at next year's DrupalCons, we will present awards to Drupal's biggest advocates.

Start today

Every story you tell adds to Drupal's public record — the record that search engines, AI assistants, and agentic search increasingly draw on when people ask what to build with. More authentic voices means Drupal showing up where decisions are actually made.

Submit your advocacy work at drupal.org/advocacy. You will find the current theme, its messaging and proof points, and guidelines on attribution and what qualifies for credit.

You have done the work. Now start talking.

The Women in Drupal Awards returned this year to celebrate the outstanding achievements of women making remarkable contributions to the global Drupal community. Presented during DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the awards recognize women whose talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment are helping strengthen the Drupal community and shape the future of open source.

Photo Credits: Dan Lemon

Now in its fifth year, the Women in Drupal Awards continue their mission of amplifying women’s voices and recognizing the many different ways they contribute to technology and the Drupal ecosystem. From technical expertise and project leadership to community building, mentoring, advocacy, and innovation, the awards celebrate women whose work creates meaningful impact across projects, organizations, and communities.

Three awards celebrating three different forms of contribution

This year, the Women in Drupal Awards recognize three outstanding nominees across three distinct categories:

• Antonella Severo, Project Manager at Nestlé, has been an active contributor to the Drupal community and has been involved in the Success Stories track at DrupalCon, helping highlight the impact and achievements of Drupal projects and organizations.
• Nikita Aswani, Senior Front-end Developer on Open Social, combines technical expertise with a strong commitment to the Drupal community. She is also a member of the Drupal Asia steering committee, contributing to the growth and development of the regional Drupal ecosystem.
• Rachel Lawson, who works at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, has made a lasting contribution to the Drupal community through mentoring and community engagement. She is also a former Community Liaison at the Drupal Association, where she played an important role in supporting and connecting members of the community.

Together, the three nominees represent the breadth of contributions that make the Drupal ecosystem stronger: from leading projects and showcasing success stories, to developing technology, supporting regional communities, mentoring others, and fostering collaboration.

Photo Credits: Joris Vercammen

The Women in Drupal Awards were created to ensure that women’s stories and successes in technology are visible and celebrated. The awards recognize contributions in many forms, whether through building Drupal projects, leading teams and organizations, designing digital experiences, driving innovation and strategy, mentoring others, strengthening the community, advocating for inclusion, or championing open source and collaboration.

A key contributor to this year’s awards is JAKALA, the official sponsor of the Women in Drupal Awards. JAKALA created the award and has supported the initiative since its inception, helping ensure that the achievements and contributions of women across the global Drupal community are recognized and celebrated. As the awards enter their fifth year, JAKALA continues to support their mission of highlighting diverse talent, leadership, and impact within the Drupal ecosystem.

The ceremony has become a highlight of DrupalCon. Beyond the awards themselves, the wider Women in Drupal initiative fosters mentorship, networking, recognition, and greater visibility for women working in Drupal and open source. This year, the initiative also includes a dedicated Women in Drupal networking lunch, organized in collaboration with JAKALA, providing an opportunity for women and gender-diverse members of the community to connect, share experiences, and build relationships.

The Women in Drupal Awards are supported by the Drupal Association and organizations across the industry. The 2026 jury brings together members of the Drupal Association, previous award winners, and JAKALA, combining perspectives from across the Drupal community to recognize this year's outstanding contributors.

About Women in Drupal

Women in Drupal is a community-driven initiative dedicated to celebrating, supporting, and empowering women in the Drupal ecosystem. Through recognition, networking, mentorship, and community events, the initiative fosters inclusion and encourages greater participation and leadership in open source.

The Women in Drupal Awards recognize women from across the Drupal community, regardless of role or area of expertise, celebrating the talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment that help strengthen Drupal and shape its future.