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More content through AI? Too short-sighted. In 2026, it’s about scalable quality, governance, and learning websites. We analyze the newly released Drupal AI Roadmap for 2026.

   

Join AmyJune and Avi as they discuss the complexities of organizing large events in changing times. The discussion covers topics from past DrupalCons, the crucial coordination behind community health and safety, accessibility, and the evolving challenges involving inclusivity. They also touch on the intersection of community dynamics, the importance of creating shared realities, and the engaging experience of the Drupal community. Additionally, expect an overview of upcoming events, including keynotes and fun activities like the Drupal Coffee Exchange.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe014

Topics

• Catching Up with Abby and June
• Memories of DrupalCon and Camps
• The $2 Bill Tradition
• Open Y and Community Contributions
• Community Working Group and Governance
• Initial Reactions and Reflections
• Challenges of Organizing DrupalCon
• Accessibility and Safety Concerns
• Event Planning and Community Involvement
• Learning from Other Events
• Upcoming Keynote and Event Highlights
• Community and Collaboration

AmyJune Hineline

AmyJune works with the Linux Foundation as the Certification Community Architect, supporting the Education team in developing and maintaining exams and related documentation across the foundation's certification portfolio.

She's also a DrupalCamp organizer (Florida DrupalCamp, DrupalCamp Asheville, and DrupalCamp Colorado), a member of the Community Working Group's Conflict Resolution Team, and serves on the board of the Colorado Drupal Association.

Avi Schwab

Avi came to Drupal for the community and has been active in it since 2008. He is a founding organizer of MidCamp, Midwest Open Source Alliance, and the Event Organizer Working Group. In his role as a Technical Product Consultant at ImageX Media, he builds and supports Drupal sites for over 40 YMCA associations in the USA and Canada. For fun, he bikes, bakes, and enjoys time with his family.

Guests

AmyJune Hineline - volkswagenchick Avi Schwab - froboy

• This is cross-posted from Dries Buytaert's blog

For the past months, the AI Initiative Leadership Team has been working with our contributing partners to define what the Drupal AI initiative should focus on in 2026. That plan is now ready, and I want to share it with the community.

This roadmap builds directly on the strategy we outlined in Accelerating AI Innovation in Drupal. That post described the direction. This plan turns it into concrete priorities and execution for 2026.

The full plan is available as a PDF, but let me explain the thinking behind it.

Producing consistently high-quality content and pages is really hard. Excellent content requires a subject matter expert who actually knows the topic, a copywriter who can translate expertise into clear language, someone who understands your audience and brand, someone who knows how to structure pages with your component library, good media assets, and an SEO/AEO specialist so people actually discover what you made.

Most organizations are missing at least some of these skillsets, and even when all the people exist, coordinating them is where everything breaks down. We believe AI can fill these gaps, not by replacing these roles but by making their expertise available to every content creator on the team.

For large organizations, this means stronger brand consistency, better accessibility, and improved compliance across thousands of pages. For smaller ones, it means access to skills that were previously out of reach: professional copywriting, SEO, and brand-consistent design without needing a specialist for each.

Used carelessly, AI just makes these problems worse by producing fast, generic content that sounds like everything else on the internet. But used well, with real structure and governance behind it, AI can help organizations raise the bar on quality rather than just volume.

Drupal has always been built around the realities of serious content work: structured content, workflows, permissions, revisions, moderation, and more. These capabilities are what make quality possible at scale. They're also exactly the foundation AI needs to actually work well.

Rather than bolting on a chatbot or a generic text generator, we're embedding AI into the content and page creation process itself, guided by the structure, governance, and brand rules that already live in Drupal.

For website owners, the value is faster site building, faster content delivery, smarter user journeys, higher conversions, and consistent brand quality at scale. For digital agencies, it means delivering higher-quality websites in less time. And for IT teams, it means less risk and less overhead: automated compliance, auditable changes, and fewer ad hoc requests to fix what someone published.

We think the real opportunity goes further than just adding AI to what we already have. It's also about connecting how content gets created, how it performs, and how it gets governed into one loop, so that what you learn from your content actually shapes what you build next.

The things that have always made Drupal good at content are the same things that make AI trustworthy. That is not a coincidence, and it's why we believe Drupal is the right place to build this.

What we're building in 2026

The 2026 plan identifies eight capabilities we'll focus on. Each is described in detail in the full plan, but here is a quick overview:

• Page generation - Describe what you need and get a usable page, built from your actual design system components
• Context management - A central place to define brand voice, style guides, audience profiles, and governance rules that AI can use
• Background agents - AI that works without being prompted, responding to triggers and schedules while respecting editorial workflows
• Design system integration - AI that builds with your components and can propose new ones when needed
• Content creation and discovery - Smarter search, AI-powered optimization, and content drafting assistance
• Advanced governance - Batch approvals, branch-based versioning, and comprehensive audit trails for AI changes
• Intelligent website improvements - AI that learns from performance data, proposes concrete changes, and gets smarter over time through editorial review
• Multi-channel campaigns - Create content for websites, social, email, and automation platforms from a single campaign goal

These eight capabilities are where the official AI Initiative is focusing its energy, but they're not the whole picture for AI in Drupal. There is a lot more we want to build that didn't make this initial list, and we expect to revisit the plan in six months to a year.

We also want to be clear: community contributions outside this scope are welcome and important. Work on migrations, chatbots, and other AI capabilities continues in the broader Drupal community. If you're building something that isn't in our 2026 plan, keep going.

How we're making this happen

Over the past year, we've brought together organizations willing to contribute people and funding to the AI initiative. Today, 28 organizations support the initiative, collectively pledging more than 23 full-time equivalent contributors. That is over 50 individual contributors working across time zones and disciplines.

Coordinating 50+ people across organizations takes real structure, so we've hired two dedicated teams from among our partners:

• QED42 is focused on innovation, pushing forward on what is next.
• 1xINTERNET is focused on productization, taking what we've built and making it stable, intuitive, and easy to install.

Both teams are creating backlogs, managing issues, and giving all our contributors clear direction. You can read more about how contributions are coordinated.

This is a new model for Drupal. We're testing whether open source can move faster when you pool resources and coordinate professionally.

Get involved

If you're a contributing partner, we're asking you to align your contributions with this plan. The prioritized backlogs are in place, so pick up something that fits and let's build.

If you're not a partner but want to contribute, jump in. The prioritized backlogs are open to everyone.

And if you want to join the initiative as an official partner, we'd absolutely welcome that.

This plan wasn't built in a room by itself. It's the result of collaboration across 28 sponsoring organizations who bring expertise in UX, core development, QA, marketing, and more. Thank you.

We're building something new for Drupal, in a new way, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

— Dries Buytaert

File attachments:  Drupal AI Social Post.png

Scaling the Drupal AI Initiative

The Drupal AI Initiative officially launched in June 2025 with the release of the Drupal AI Strategy 1.0 and a shared commitment to advancing AI capabilities in an open, responsible way. What began as a coordinated effort among a small group of committed organizations has grown into a substantial, sponsor-funded collaboration across the Drupal ecosystem.

Today, 28 organizations support the initiative, collectively pledging more than 23 full-time equivalent contributors representing over 50 individual contributors working across time zones and disciplines. Together, sponsors have committed more than $1.5 million in combined cash and in-kind contributions to move Drupal AI forward.

The initiative now operates across multiple focused areas, including leadership, marketing, UX, QA, core development, innovation, and product development. Contributors are not only exploring what’s possible with AI in Drupal, but are building capabilities designed to be stable, well-governed, and ready for real-world adoption in Drupal CMS.

Eight months in, this is more than a collection of experiments. It is a coordinated, community-backed investment in shaping how AI can strengthen content creation, governance, and measurable outcomes across the Drupal platform.

Strengthening Delivery to Support Growth

As outlined in the 2026 roadmap, this year focuses on delivering eight key capabilities that will shape how AI works in Drupal CMS. Achieving that level of focus and quality requires more than enthusiasm and good ideas. It requires coordination at scale.

From the beginning, sponsors contributed both people and funding so the initiative could be properly organized and managed. With 28 organizations contributing more than 23 people across multiple workstreams, it was clear that sustained progress would depend on dedicated delivery management to align priorities, organize backlogs, support contributors, and maintain predictable execution.

To support this growth, the initiative ran a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process to select delivery management partners to help coordinate work across both innovation and product development workstreams. This was not a shift in direction, but a continuation of our original commitment: to build AI capabilities for Drupal in a way that is structured, sustainable, and ready for real-world adoption.

Selecting Partners to Support Our Shared Goals

To identify the right delivery partners, we launched the RFP process in October 2025 at DrupalCon Vienna. The RFP was open exclusively to sponsors of the Drupal AI Initiative. From the start, our goal was to run a process that reflected the responsibility we carry as a sponsor-funded, community-driven initiative.

The timeline included a pre-proposal briefing, an open clarification period, and structured review and interview phases. Proposals were independently evaluated against clearly defined criteria tailored to both innovation and production delivery. These criteria covered governance, roadmap and backlog management, delivery approach, quality assurance, financial oversight, and demonstrated experience contributing to Drupal and AI initiatives.

Following an independent review, leadership held structured comparison sessions to discuss scoring, explore trade-offs, clarify open questions, and ensure decisions were made thoughtfully and consistently. Final discussions were held with shortlisted vendors in December, and contracts were awarded in early January.

The selected partners are engaged for an initial six-month period. At the end of that term, the RFP process will be repeated.

This process was designed not only to select capable partners but to steward sponsor contributions responsibly and align with Drupal’s values of openness, collaboration, and accountability.

Delivery Partners Now in Place

Following the structured selection process, two contributing partners were selected to support delivery across the initiative’s key workstreams.

QED42 will focus on the Innovation workstream, helping coordinate forward-looking capabilities aligned with the 2026 roadmap. QED42 has been an active contributor to Drupal AI efforts from the earliest stages and has played a role in advancing AI adoption across the Drupal ecosystem. Their contributions to initiatives such as Drupal Canvas AI, AI-powered agents, and other community-driven efforts demonstrate both technical depth and a strong commitment to open collaboration. In this role, QED42 will support structured experimentation, prioritization, and delivery alignment across innovation work.

1xINTERNET will lead the Product Development workstream, supporting the transition of innovation into stable, production-ready capabilities within Drupal CMS. As a founding sponsor and co-leader within the initiative, 1xINTERNET brings deep experience in distributed Drupal delivery and governance. Their longstanding involvement in Drupal AI and broader community leadership positions them well to guide roadmap execution, release planning, backlog coordination, and predictable productization.

We are grateful to QED42 and 1xINTERNET for their continued commitment to the initiative and for stepping into this role in service of the broader Drupal community. We also want to acknowledge the strong level of interest in this RFP and the high standard of submissions received, and to thank all participating organizations for the time, thought, and care invested in the process. The level of interest and quality of submissions reflect the caliber of agencies and contributors engaged in advancing Drupal AI.

Both organizations were selected not only for their delivery expertise but for their demonstrated investment in Drupal AI and their alignment with the initiative’s goals. Their role is to support coordination, roadmap alignment, and disciplined execution across contributors, ensuring that sponsor investment and community effort translate into tangible, adoptable outcomes.

Contracts began in early January. Two development sprints have already been completed, and a third sprint is now underway, establishing a clear and predictable delivery cadence.

QED42 and 1xINTERNET will share more details about their processes and early progress in an upcoming blog post.

Ready to Deliver on the 2026 Roadmap

With the 2026 roadmap now defined and structured delivery teams in place, the Drupal AI Initiative is positioned to execute with greater clarity and focus. The eight capabilities outlined in the one-year plan provide direction. Dedicated delivery management provides the coordination needed to turn that direction into measurable progress.

Predictable sprint cycles, clearer backlog management, and improved cross-workstream alignment allow contributors to focus on building, refining, and shipping capabilities that can be adopted directly within Drupal CMS. Sponsor investment and community contribution are now supported by a delivery model designed for scale and sustainability.

This next phase is about disciplined execution. It means shipping stable, well-governed AI capabilities that site owners can enable with confidence. It means connecting innovation to production in a way that reflects Drupal’s strengths in structure, governance, and long-term maintainability.

We are grateful to the sponsors and contributors who have made this possible. As agencies and organizations continue to join the initiative, we remain committed to transparency, collaboration, and delivering meaningful value to the broader Drupal community.

We are entering a year of focused execution, and we are ready to deliver.

Moving Forward Together

The Drupal AI Initiative is built on collaboration. Sponsors contribute funding and dedicated team members. Contributors bring expertise across UX, core development, QA, marketing, innovation, and production. Leadership provides coordination and direction. Together, this shared investment makes meaningful progress possible.

We extend our thanks to the 28 sponsoring organizations and the more than 50 contributors who are helping shape the future of AI in Drupal. Their commitment reflects a belief that open source can lead in building AI capabilities that are stable, governed, and built for real-world use.

As we move into 2026, we invite continued participation. Contributing partners are encouraged to align their work with the roadmap and engage in the active workstreams. Organizations interested in joining the initiative are welcome to connect and explore how they can contribute.

We have laid the foundation. The roadmap is clear. Structured delivery is in place. With continued collaboration, we are well-positioned to deliver meaningful AI capabilities for the Drupal community and the organizations it serves.

For the past months, the AI Initiative Leadership Team has been working with our contributing partners to define what the Drupal AI initiative should focus on in 2026. That plan is now ready, and I want to share it with the community.

This roadmap builds directly on the strategy we outlined in Accelerating AI Innovation in Drupal. That post described the direction. This plan turns it into concrete priorities and execution for 2026.

The full plan is available as a PDF, but let me explain the thinking behind it.

Producing consistently high-quality content and pages is really hard. Excellent content requires a subject matter expert who actually knows the topic, a copywriter who can translate expertise into clear language, someone who understands your audience and brand, someone who knows how to structure pages with your component library, good media assets, and an SEO/AEO specialist so people actually discover what you made.

Most organizations are missing at least some of these skillsets, and even when all the people exist, coordinating them is where everything breaks down. We believe AI can fill these gaps, not by replacing these roles but by making their expertise available to every content creator on the team.

For large organizations, this means stronger brand consistency, better accessibility, and improved compliance across thousands of pages. For smaller ones, it means access to skills that were previously out of reach: professional copywriting, SEO, and brand-consistent design without needing a specialist for each.

Used carelessly, AI just makes these problems worse by producing fast, generic content that sounds like everything else on the internet. But used well, with real structure and governance behind it, AI can help organizations raise the bar on quality rather than just volume.

Drupal has always been built around the realities of serious content work: structured content, workflows, permissions, revisions, moderation, and more. These capabilities are what make quality possible at scale. They're also exactly the foundation AI needs to actually work well.

Rather than bolting on a chatbot or a generic text generator, we're embedding AI into the content and page creation process itself, guided by the structure, governance, and brand rules that already live in Drupal.

For website owners, the value is faster site building, faster content delivery, smarter user journeys, higher conversions, and consistent brand quality at scale. For digital agencies, it means delivering higher-quality websites in less time. And for IT teams, it means less risk and less overhead: automated compliance, auditable changes, and fewer ad hoc requests to fix what someone published.

We think the real opportunity goes further than just adding AI to what we already have. It's also about connecting how content gets created, how it performs, and how it gets governed into one loop, so that what you learn from your content actually shapes what you build next.

The things that have always made Drupal good at content are the same things that make AI trustworthy. That is not a coincidence, and it's why we believe Drupal is the right place to build this.

What we're building in 2026

The 2026 plan identifies eight capabilities we'll focus on. Each is described in detail in the full plan, but here is a quick overview:

• Page generation - Describe what you need and get a usable page, built from your actual design system components
• Context management - A central place to define brand voice, style guides, audience profiles, and governance rules that AI can use
• Background agents - AI that works without being prompted, responding to triggers and schedules while respecting editorial workflows
• Design system integration - AI that builds with your components and can propose new ones when needed
• Content creation and discovery - Smarter search, AI-powered optimization, and content drafting assistance
• Advanced governance - Batch approvals, branch-based versioning, and comprehensive audit trails for AI changes
• Intelligent website improvements - AI that learns from performance data, proposes concrete changes, and gets smarter over time through editorial review
• Multi-channel campaigns - Create content for websites, social, email, and automation platforms from a single campaign goal

These eight capabilities are where the official AI Initiative is focusing its energy, but they're not the whole picture for AI in Drupal. There is a lot more we want to build that didn't make this initial list, and we expect to revisit the plan in six months to a year.

We also want to be clear: community contributions outside this scope are welcome and important. Work on migrations, chatbots, and other AI capabilities continues in the broader Drupal community. If you're building something that isn't in our 2026 plan, keep going.

How we're making this happen

Over the past year, we've brought together organizations willing to contribute people and funding to the AI initiative. Today, 28 organizations support the initiative, collectively pledging more than 23 full-time equivalent contributors. That is over 50 individual contributors working across time zones and disciplines.

Coordinating 50+ people across organizations takes real structure, so we've hired two dedicated teams from among our partners:

• QED42 is focused on innovation, pushing forward on what is next.
• 1xINTERNET is focused on productization, taking what we've built and making it stable, intuitive, and easy to install.

Both teams are creating backlogs, managing issues, and giving all our contributors clear direction. You can read more about how we are going from strategy to execution.

This is a new model for Drupal. We're testing whether open source can move faster when you pool resources and coordinate in a new way.

Get involved

If you're a contributing partner, we're asking you to align your contributions with this plan. The prioritized backlogs are in place, so pick up something that fits and let's build.

If you're not a partner but want to contribute, jump in. The prioritized backlogs are open to everyone.

And if you want to join the initiative as an official partner, we'd absolutely welcome that.

This plan wasn't built in a room by itself. It's the result of collaboration across 28 sponsoring organizations who bring expertise in UX, core development, QA, marketing, and more. Thank you.

We're building something new for Drupal, in a new way, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

EverLMS, developed by Hai Nguyen, is an open-source, Drupal-based learning management framework designed for self-hosted deployment. Built for agencies and enterprises, it integrates AI-assisted authoring tools, SCORM and H5P support, structured reporting, and role-based access control within a single-tenant architecture. Rather than functioning as an LMS add-on, EverLMS presents a full learning system built directly on Drupal.

Switching from WordPress to Drupal raises many concerns. Will the migration be too complicated? Will I find equivalents for the tools I use every day? In this article, I compare five of the most important WordPress tools with their Drupal counterparts: Custom Post Types, ACF, WP Query, WP Forms, and Page Builders like Elementor. For each one, I show what working in Drupal looks like with real examples and a live demo in Drupal CMS. After reading this post, you’ll see that Drupal isn’t hard at all, and concepts familiar from WordPress translate to Drupal almost one-to-one. Feel free to read the article or watch the episode from the Nowoczesny Drupal series.

The Drupal Community Working Group (CWG) recently posted about Health and Safety at DrupalCon Chicago. We encourage all attendees to review their blog post and the updated DrupalCon Chicago 2026 Health & Safety information.

Have questions or concerns about DrupalCon Chicago? Feel free to drop by the Community Working Group's public office hours this Friday, February 13 at 10am ET / 1200 UTC.

Join the #community-health Drupal Slack channel for more information. A meeting link will be posted there a few minutes before office hours.

Chicago was booked as the venue for DrupalCon North America in late 2024. Since then, there has been a lot of news from Chicago.

Chicago has been the target of “enhanced” immigration enforcement operations by the US federal government under the name “Operation Midway Blitz”. Local news outlet Block Club Chicago has written in-depth about the ongoing situation:

• Chicago Under Siege How Operation Midway Blitz Changed Our City
• Feds Used Chemical Weapons On Chicagoans At Least 49 Times — Even After Judge Said To Stop 

While the government shifted the bulk of its operation to Minneapolis in December, operations continue around the city and across the country. We encourage attendees to inform themselves on the political climate in the USA before making the decision to attend DrupalCon.

Put very simply: If you feel unsafe attending an event in the United States, please do not attend. We regret the impact the current climate is having on our international community, LGBTQIA+ community, and others, and hope the US can be safe and welcoming for you in the future once again.

More information can be found at Chicago local news outlets:

• Block Club Chicago
• Chicago Tribune
• WBEZ 91.5FM

The CWG and the volunteer DrupalCon Steering Committee are monitoring the situation.

If you choose to travel to DrupalCon from abroad, we encourage you to take the following steps to ensure your trip is as safe as possible:

• Even if it is not required for your visa, request a Visa Letter and carry it with your travel documents at all times when in transit and at the event.
• Review information from the City of Chicago’s Protecting Chicago Initiative.
• Save the information for the ICIRR Family Support Network & Hotline in your phone. 1-855-HELP-MY-FAMILY (1-855-435-7693)
• Know your rights before you travel.

Need Help?

If you have a harassment concern or need to report a Code of Conduct violation, notify the event staff or contact us at conduct@association.drupal.org.

If you need help resolving a conflict, contact the Drupal Community Working Group: drupal-cwg@drupal.org.

In case of emergency, call 9-1-1.

The Drupal Association engineering team  is announcing the end of life (EOL) of the first generation of the Automatic Update API, which relies on a different original signing solution for update validation than later versions.

Drupal.org’s APIs for Automatic Updates 7.x-1.x and 8.x-1.x will be discontinued on May 4th, 2026. These versions of automatic updates have been unsupported since the versions of Drupal core they are compatible with, 7 and 8, became unsupported.

Release contents hash files (example) will not be updated and will expire May 12th, 2026. They may be removed after this date with no notice.

In place updates (example) will no longer be generated after May 4th, 2026. These are generated on demand and existing update files will be removed.

APIs for supported versions of Automatic Updates will continue to be supported indefinitely.

Automatic Updates v1 was an important early step toward improving the safety and reliability of Drupal updates. However, its underlying signing and validation model has now been superseded by a more robust and secure approach, with TUF and Rugged.

Next steps

If you are still using Automatic Updates under the 7.x-1.x or 8.x-1.x branches, now is the time to plan your update to a supported version, or implement custom updates using the supported API with your own CI, etc. Doing so ensures continued support, improved security, and alignment with Drupal’s long-term update strategy.

AI can write code in seconds today. But maintainable software is not created by tools, it’s created through responsibility and standards. Why the claim "AI code isn’t maintainable" misses the real issue - and what that means for teams and leadership.

Handling multiple domains within a single CMS is a challenge many organizations face. Choosing the right architecture at the start of a project can save significant time and money. Drupal offers three proven approaches: multisite, Domain Access, and headless CMS. In this article, I'll compare their strengths and weaknesses, show real-world implementation examples, and help you decide which approach works best for different business scenarios. I invite you to read the post or watch an episode from the series Nowoczesny Drupal.

"Buy European" is becoming Europe's rallying cry for digital sovereignty. At the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in Berlin in November 2025, France pushed for European preference in public procurement. The logic is intuitive: if you want independence from American technology, buy from European companies instead.

I think "Buy European" gets one thing right and one thing wrong. It's right that Europe benefits from a stronger technology industry. But buying European does not guarantee sovereignty. Sovereignty is not about where a company is headquartered or where software was originally written. It is about who ultimately controls the technology, and that control can change.

The right question to ask about any technology: can someone take the software away from you?

Sovereignty has two dimensions: how much control you have today, and how much of that control is structural, built into the legal foundations.

The proposed scale measures the second. It evaluates how resilient software is to change, whether through acquisition, relicensing, or loss of critical funding.

I used five levels, modeled on Europe's familiar A-through-E labels for energy efficiency and food nutrition, from structurally sovereign to fully dependent. This scale is meant as a starting point, and I expect it to improve through scrutiny and feedback.

Type Can someone take it away? Examples A Copyleft + distributed copyright No. Relicensing requires consent from thousands of contributors. Practically impossible. Linux, Drupal, WordPress B Copyleft + single copyright holder Partially. Existing code is permanently open. One owner controls future versions. MySQL → MariaDB C Permissive Open Source
(BSD, MIT, Apache) Partially. The license doesn't require derivatives to stay open. Anyone can create proprietary derivatives and shift control and value into closed software. Redis (relicensed), Valkey (fork) D European proprietary software Yes. A single acquisition transfers all control. Funding can disappear. You're a customer, not a stakeholder. Skype E Foreign proprietary software Already taken. Subject to the vendor's pricing, roadmap, and their government's jurisdiction. You're a customer, not a stakeholder. Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce

At the bottom, grade E, is foreign proprietary software: no source code, no right to modify, and no alternative if the vendor changes terms. Your vendor is subject to its home government's jurisdiction, and by extension, so is your data.

Grade D is European proprietary software, which is where "Buy European" usually comes in. It has real benefits: European jurisdiction, GDPR alignment, local accountability, and it keeps investment circulating in the European ecosystem. As someone who has started companies and invests in startups, I want more technology companies to succeed, not fewer. But "European" can be a temporary property of a company, one that can change with a single board meeting.

Skype was founded by a Swede and a Dane, built by Estonian engineers, and headquartered in Luxembourg. eBay acquired it in 2005, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011. The eBay transaction turned a world-leading European technology into an American one, and it was cemented with the Microsoft deal.

Under the US CLOUD Act, American companies must surrender data to US authorities under lawful orders, regardless of where it is stored. European companies are not subject to this compulsion. A French ministry using SAP has legal protections that the same ministry using Salesforce does not. But jurisdiction protects against one specific threat: foreign government demands. It does nothing against acquisition, license changes, or vendor lock-in.

Not all Open Source is equally sovereign

So jurisdiction matters, but it is not enough. Open Source offers something deeper: it separates the code from any one company.

This is also why drawing lines between "European" and "non-European" Open Source misses the point. Open Source separates software from geography by design. What matters is not where a project began, but whether anyone can take control of it later.

But Open Source sovereignty exists on a spectrum. The level of protection comes down to two legal levers: the license itself, and the copyright ownership, which determines who has the power to change the license.

Grade C is Open Source under a permissive license like BSD, MIT, or Apache. You can view the code and fork it if needed, but the license does not require improvements to remain open. A company can take the code, build on it, and release a proprietary version.

If a closed commercial version becomes the standard through branding, hosted services, or enterprise features, governments that depend on it can become legally and operationally locked in again. They are back at grade E.

Redis shows how this dynamic unfolds. It was Open Source under a BSD license for fifteen years. In March 2024, Redis Ltd. relicensed it under restrictive terms that the Open Source Initiative does not approve as Open Source.

Fortunately, the community forked the last open version as Valkey, and Valkey is thriving. That is the strength of permissive Open Source: you can escape when terms change. Governments were fortunate Redis was forked, but the structural risk remains.

Grade B is Open Source under a copyleft license like the GPL, with a single copyright holder.

Copyleft adds a protection permissive licenses lack: any derivative of released code must also remain Open Source. For policymakers, this is a meaningful upgrade. Once code is published, it can always be forked, inspected, and maintained independently, even if future versions change direction.

This is the level that saved MySQL. MySQL AB, the Swedish company behind MySQL, released it under the GPL, so when Oracle acquired MySQL through the Sun Microsystems deal, the GPL ensured the code remained open. Michael Widenius, MySQL's original creator, took the code and built MariaDB. Oracle got the brand, but the world kept the code.

And because MariaDB inherited MySQL's GPL license, it must stay open too. No future acquirer can make MariaDB proprietary. That is the difference between copyleft and a permissive license: copyleft lets someone fork, and forces the fork to stay open.

But grade B still has one limitation. The copyright holder can release future versions under a different license. The existing code is protected by the GPL, but the project's future license is controlled by whoever holds the copyright.

Some projects amplify this risk by requiring contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement, or CLA, which grants the project owner the right to relicense contributed code. Elasticsearch, founded in Amsterdam, used its CLA in 2021 to relicense from Apache 2.0 to a non-open-source license, despite having over 1,500 contributors.

Finally, grade A is copyleft Open Source with distributed copyright ownership. When hundreds or thousands of contributors each own their portion of the code, relicensing requires the consent of every one of them. For anyone who refuses, the project must rewrite their contributions from scratch.

Drupal has had contributions from tens of thousands of people across 25 years, which makes relicensing structurally impossible. No acquisition, no board vote, no change in strategy can take these projects away from the people who build and depend on them. The code is structurally sovereign by design.

Sovereignty is a long-term commitment

Not every system needs to be grade A, and grade A projects take decades of community investment to build. Moving from grade E to grade D is progress. Moving from D to C is more progress. The scale is not a filter that disqualifies; it is a tool that makes tradeoffs visible, so that when governments choose a lower grade, they do it knowingly, not unknowingly.

Building and sustaining grade A projects requires long-term investment. It takes years of sustained community commitment and, likely, public funding that treats Open Source as infrastructure.

A grade A project that loses important funding often needs investment to remain viable. But unlike acquisition or relicensing, funding risk is largely within the EU's control through government procurement and public investment.

Recommendation for the European Commission

Sovereignty involves many things: data location, supply chains, technical talent, and standards. Licensing and copyright form the structural foundation because they determine whether legal independence is even possible.

The European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework reflects this broader view. It evaluates cloud software across eight sovereignty objectives, including Technology Sovereignty, which asks whether software is "accessible under open licenses". This is a welcome step. But it treats open licensing as binary: either software is open or it isn't.

As this blog post shows, that is not enough. The European Commission's framework should distinguish between software that is open today and software that is open permanently.

I would encourage the Commission to strengthen its Technology Sovereignty objective in two ways:

1. Distinguish between license types. Permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache) place no obligation on derivatives to remain open. Copyleft licenses (GPL, AGPL) require derivative works to be released under the same open terms.
2. Assess copyright concentration and relicensing risk. A project with a single copyright holder or a Contributor License Agreement can be relicensed regardless of its current license. A project with distributed copyright ownership cannot. This is the difference between a revocable and an irrevocable commitment to openness.

In follow-up posts, I will share two more recommendations for the Commission's framework: one about the relationship between the eight sovereignty objectives, and one about infrastructure jurisdiction. Together, these three posts aim to help strengthen what is already a serious and welcome effort. If you'd like, you can subscribe to follow along.

I think the Software Sovereignty Scale should be part of European procurement policy. When a government selects a content management system for its public websites or a database for its national health records, it should know the structural sovereignty grade of the technology it depends on.

For critical software, the question is simple: how easy is it for someone to take the software away from us?

A client of ours has millions of items on their Drupal website that they index into Solr using the fantastic Search API Solr module. 

However, they've been stuck on a set of very old Solr servers until earlier this year, when moving to some shiny new Solr servers became possible. 

ComputerMinds helped them to make the leap from the legacy version they were on to the latest Solr 9 version. We were going to do so with minimal or no downtime to their busy site that gets more than 10 search-related page views every second. 

Our first job was to get the Solr 9 server configured to use config and schema written for the legacy Solr server. Thankfully most of this task had been done for us, because we leverage open source software and so the configuration had already been updated by other members of the community and we simply got to benefit from that work for free. Thank you open source maintainers!

We stood up a Solr 9 server in our DDEV development environment, added in the updated configuration, and then we pointed Drupal's Search API Solr module at the new development server. We indexed our small development database into Solr and tested out all the site functionality: everything was working perfectly, we just needed to repeat those steps on production, right?

We stood up a new Solr 9 server in production and again configured the Search API Solr module to connect to this server additionally. Then we cloned the configuration for the index so that we had two indices: one pointing at the legacy server, and one at the new server. Our plan was to let the indexing of the production data run over the weekend and then we'd be able to cut the traffic over from one server to the other without interruption. However, by Monday morning the indexing hadn't really got that far through the data at all. It turns out that millions of items is really quite a lot for Drupal to index to Solr.

We needed to change our approach, and decided that a better way to do it would be to do a direct copy of the items from the old Solr server into the new one, effectively creating a replica.

We asked ChatGPT to generate me a script to do this, and after a bit of back and forth it produced something like this:

import urllib.request import json # Solr legacy source SRC_CORE = "collection1" SRC_URL = f"http://old-solr:8983/solr/{SRC_CORE}/select" # Solr 9 target DST_CORE = "collection1" DST_URL = f"http://new-solr:8983/solr/{DST_CORE}/update?commitWithin=5000" BATCH_SIZE = 1000 start = 0 while True: # Build Solr legacy request URL params = f"?q=*:*&fl=*&sort=id+asc&rows={BATCH_SIZE}&start={start}&wt=json" url = SRC_URL + params print(f"Fetching batch starting at {start}...") with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response: data = json.load(response) docs = data['response']['docs'] if not docs: break # finished all docs # Prepare JSON for Solr 9 payload = json.dumps(docs).encode("utf-8") req = urllib.request.Request( DST_URL, data=payload, headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"}, method="POST" ) with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as r: print(f"Pushed batch of {len(docs)} docs to Solr 9.") start += BATCH_SIZE print("All documents migrated from Solr legacy to Solr 9!")

Now, this isn't the exact script I ended up using for lots of reasons, but the bare bones of it are there.

We are simply grabbing the documents out of the old server, and sending them over to the new one for indexing.

This was so fast... like 20 minutes to transfer all that lovely data.

So, we had a solid plan now: we'd pause the indexing on the Drupal side for the old legacy Solr server, we'd run the script to copy the data over to the new Solr server and then once it's there make a quick change in the Search API index to say that it lives on the other server now, and then it all just works!

And it did! We didn't have any downtime because of this. Writes to the Solr index were paused, but because we've got our client's website using queues all over the place, it was simple to pause the queue, and then restart it after the change to the new Solr server was made.

No one noticed, a search index was available for read only queries the entire time, and there was no downtime for the site at all.

That's the perfect sort of upgrade, right? When no one notices what you've expertly done.

Relying on keyword search alone? Read this blog to add semantic search and AI-powered search terminologies to your SEO dictionary to build smarter, modern enterprise websites.

January 2026 marks Maestro’s 23rd birthday!  

 

From very humble beginnings using what was coined the “card interface” for stitching together workflow patterns to today where we have drag-and-drop online editing, AI and AI agents, Maestro has and continues to power workflows around the world. 

 

Maestro’s origins were borne out of the ashes of the 2001/2002 recession when IT budgets were slashed to the bone and we knew that productivity increases were needed in order for companies to continue lean operations without breaking the bank on ridiculously expensive “work automation” solutions.

As DrupalCon Chicago 2026 draws closer, conversations about community are extending beyond sessions, socials, and contributions to include how we care for one another in shared spaces. The Drupal Community Working Group's Community Health Team has been working with event organizers to gather practical, community-informed health and safety guidance that reflects how people actually experience DrupalCon.

The information below provides resources for navigating the conference, the venue, and the city with confidence, while reinforcing Drupal's longstanding commitment to an inclusive, respectful, and supportive community where everyone can show up as their whole selves.

Have questions or concerns about DrupalCon Chicago? Feel free to drop by the Community Working Group's public office hours this Friday, February 13 at 10am ET / 1200 UTC.

Join the #community-health Drupal Slack channel for more information. A meeting link will be posted there a few minutes before office hours.

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 Health and Safety

All attendees, speakers, trainers, sponsors, volunteers, vendors, and event staff at DrupalCon are required to abide by the DrupalCon Code of Conduct at the conference and at social or other events hosted or sponsored by DrupalCon sponsors. 

The following information is meant to supplement and clarify information specific to DrupalCon Chicago 2026. 

Need Help?

If you have a harassment concern or need to report a Code of Conduct violation, notify the event staff or contact us at conduct@association.drupal.org.

If you need help resolving a conflict, contact the Drupal Community Working Group: drupal-cwg@drupal.org.

In case of emergency, call 9-1-1.

Health Measures Onsite Personal Protection

• Hand sanitizing stations will be available throughout the event venue.
• A limited supply of face masks will be available upon request at Registration.
• We respectfully remind all attendees, speakers, sponsors, and staff to:
  • Stay home if you experience any cold or flu-like symptoms.
  • Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds.
  • Stay healthy! Engage in responsible health practices such as avoiding touching eyes/nose/mouth with unwashed hands.

Food Allergies

• We believe it’s essential to prioritize the safety and well-being of all attendees, including those with food allergies.
• We aim to provide a variety of choices to cater to various needs such as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, and peanut-free.
• All food items will be clearly labeled at the event, indicating the ingredients used and any potential allergens present.
  • Please note the venue kitchen still works with nuts, so while individual choices may be nut-free, they may have been prepared in an environment containing nuts.
• If you have any food allergies we need to be aware of, please indicate your needs when you register and/or contact registration@association.drupal.org.

Safety Resources & Tips

Attendee safety is our top priority. Always exercise common sense and good judgment when traveling.

General Safety

• Safety in numbers: Exploring the city can be safer when done with a friend or colleague.
• When walking around the city, remember to take off your conference badge.
• Walk with purpose and stick to well-lit areas and on main streets.  
• If alone after dark, use a ride service such as Lyft, Uber, or a taxi. 
• Save the address and phone number of your accommodation in your phone.
• Be aware of your surroundings and keep your eyes up and not on your phone.
• If something doesn’t feel right, walk into a business/hotel for help.
• Be careful and alert when using a cash machine.
• Carry your purse or wallet safely. Purses should be closed and held in front of your body. Wallets should be carried in a front pants pocket or in an interior jacket pocket.

When Visiting Any Venue

• Know your location: the venue name, street address, or cross street.
• Take a moment to identify at least two exit routes from any building or event and emergency exit signs.
• If an alarm sounds, evacuate immediately. Follow directions from First Responders and venue staff.
• Do not carry any unnecessary valuables with you, or leave personal items unattended.
• Do not leave drinks unattended, or accept open drinks or food products from strangers.

Emergency Evacuations

• In the event of an emergency evacuation, make your way quickly and calmly to an emergency exit. Be aware of any hazards or dangers around you and proceed to a safe area.
• Follow the advice of venue staff, security personnel, and First Responders.
• Do not put yourself in danger by stopping or returning to collect belongings unless directed by First Responders.

Medical Resources Nearest Hospital

• Northwestern Memorial Hospital
  • 251 E Huron St, Chicago, IL 60611
  • 13129262000

Nearest Urgent Care

• UChicago Medicine Dearborn Station
  • 47 W Polk St # G-1, Chicago, IL 60605
  • +18888240200
• Rush South Loop
  • 1411 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605
  • +13124542700

Nearest Pharmacies

• CVS Pharmacy
  • 520 S State St, Chicago, IL 60605
  • +13126970021
• Walgreens
  • 2 E Roosevelt Rd, Chicago, IL 60605
  • +13122121583
• Printer’s Row Pharmacy
  • 701 S Clark St, Chicago, IL 60605
  • +17732002616

Emergency

• Emergency (Police, Fire, Medical): 9-1-1
• Non-Emergency City Services (Police, Warming Centers, Housing): 3-1-1
• Mental Health/Suicide Crisis Lifeline: 9-8-8
• If you need assistance due to an ICE detention, or to report ICE sightings, call the ICIRR Family Support Hotline 1-855-HELP-MY-FAMILY (1-855-435-7693) 

Safety & Trauma Resources

• Police - 311
• Sexual Assault Hotline - 888-293-2080 (Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline)
• Crime Victim support line - 988, or Victim Services – Chicago Police Department 
• Taxi - 312-TAXI-CAB (312-829-4222 Chicago Yellow Cab)

Weapon Policy

As per our Code of Conduct, “no weapons of any kind or illegal drugs are permitted at DrupalCon venues”.

DrupalCon does not permit firearms or other weapons — regardless of whether they are licensed or not, or whether they are concealed or not — to be brought into our events.

Know Your Rights

• Download “Know Your Rights” pamphlets for immigrants and international travelers from the City of Chicago Resource Hub.
• If you might need a U.S. immigration attorney, consider searching the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) portal before you arrive to save the information of an attorney in Chicago, or save the link for reference.
• Download a list of pro-bono attorney services by state.
• Review additional information on Immigrants’ Rights from ACLU.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers this guide for Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border.

Name Badges

• Anyone within the conference space, whether they are an attendee, speaker, staff, volunteer, or vendor, must be credentialed and verified. Only attendees with official DrupalCon conference name badges and staff/vendors with approved name tags are allowed to attend sessions, events, activities and be in the conference space.
  • Conference-specific areas will have signage designating them as “reserved exclusively for registered attendees of DrupalCon”. All other areas in the Hilton Chicago should be considered “public spaces”.
• All attendees, including speakers, staff, volunteers, vendors and exhibitors, are required to wear their name badges at all times within the conference area during conference hours. If you are not a registered attendee, you may register on-site. If you do not wish to register, we will ask you to leave.
• We do not allow name badge swaps. If you cannot attend, you cannot give your name badge to a colleague to attend in your stead. Everyone is required to have their own registration. If we notice that you are using someone else’s name badge, we will ask you to go to the registration desk to register or we will ask you to leave. 

International Travel

Attendees, especially non-U.S. citizens and those traveling from outside the U.S., should take care to stay informed on what you may expect when traveling, including crossing the border, going through customs, and encountering federal officials at the airport or land border during travel. Please consider the following guidance:

• Know what to expect beforehand by reviewing the travel laws both in the United States and the country you are traveling from and/or returning to.
• Have the physical version of all required travel documents (e.g., passport, visa, etc.) and keep these on your person at all times. You may want to have multiple printed copies of documentation.
• Have documentation of your affiliation and role at the event (e.g., your registration confirmation) and keep this on your person at all times. You may request a Visa Letter from the Drupal Association.
• Have contact information for your country's consulate to be used as a resource while in the United States.

For more details, or if these policies are updated, please go to the DrupalCon Chicago official page:
DrupalCon Chicago Health & Safety

Today we are talking about EvolveDigital, What it is, and how it started in Drupal with guest Maya Schaeffer. We'll also cover Drupal CMS 2.0 as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/539

Topics

• Comparing Drupal and WordPress
• Evolve Digital Summit Insights
• Marketing and Drupal Integration
• Evolve Digital and CMS Comparisons
• Summit Structure and Networking
• Speaker Selection and Outreach
• Balancing Content and Community
• Lessons from Different Cities
• Future Plans and New Formats

Resources

• EvolveDigital
• Drupal CMS documentation
• Decoupling Content & Frontend Nika Karliuchenko, John Picozzi, Pete Navarra
• Drupal Canvas Webinar

Guests

Maya Schaeffer - evolvedigital.com mayalena

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Catherine Tsiboukas - mindcraftgroup.com bletch

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Do you want to start your next Drupal site using a variety of best practices, including Canvas for page layouts, or site templates for an opinionated architecture out of the box? Then the recently released Drupal CMS 2.0 could be just what you need.
• Module name/project name:
  • Drupal CMS
• Brief history
  • 2.0 release was created by phenaproxima less than a week ago, and requires Drupal 11.3
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation guide linked in the show notes
  • 145 issues on the development project, 24 of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • No direct way to track, but drupal_cms_helper was added as a dependency late in the Drupal CMS 1.x cycle, so the fact that it has been installed 3,780 times likely indicates that Drupal CMS has been installed several thousand times at a minimum
• Module features and usage
  • The biggest change in Drupal CMS 2 is the addition of Canvas for creating and managing layouts. We talked about Drupal Canvas in depth back in episode #518 so I won't go into too much detail here, but having it set up for you as an out-of-the-box feature is a big benefit
  • Drupal CMS 1.0 included a carefully curated content architecture, including some optional recipes for additional capabilities. With version 2, the intent is for site templates to be the source of the content architecture. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about site templates, including a marketplace where people can find them, in the coming and in particular with DrupalCon Chicago fast approaching
  • Drupal CMS 2.0 also ships with much more sophisticated AI capabilities. There's a dedicated Canvas AI that can be used to generate and populate entire layouts, as well as generating code components, based on a user's prompt. And listeners may remember the demo in the Vienna Driesnote of using the Context Control Center to automatically create drafts of content updates when marketing information changes
  • And of course, starting with Drupal core 11.3 means you'll get all the performance and other improvements in the latest version

Chris McGrath, known for enterprise Drupal innovation, is bringing a modular “Lego blocks” philosophy to AI with Oceanic, a no-code platform for assembling enterprise-ready AI systems from composable components. Built by Cetacean Labs, it mirrors Drupal’s modular architecture through domain-tuned models, intelligent agents, and zero-code deployment.

Friday, February 20 at Florida DrupalCamp in Orlando and Thursday, March 12 at DrupalCamp NJ in Princeton.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build websites and create content — and the Drupal AI ecosystem is making it easier than ever for site builders to harness that power responsibly.

If you've been curious about integrating AI into your Drupal workflow but aren't sure where to start, this is the workshop for you.

Responsible Drupal AI Basics

This full-day, hands-on workshop designed for beginners who want to learn the fundamentals of using AI within Drupal. Over the course of the day, you'll work directly with key modules in the Drupal AI ecosystem — including AI Automators, Field Widget Actions, and AI Agents — gaining practical experience with setup, configuration, and real-world content generation techniques.

The emphasis throughout is on responsible AI usage: leveraging these tools to assist (not replace) your effectiveness and efficiency as a developer or content author. You'll explore various setup options, companion modules for auditing and exploring AI capabilities, and walk away with hands-on experience generating content in a thoughtful, responsible manner.

Who Is This For?

This workshop is aimed at Drupal site builders at the beginner level. No prior Drupal AI experience is necessary. If you can navigate the Drupal admin interface and have a basic understanding of AI prompt engineering, you're ready to dive in.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of AI prompt engineering, basic Drupal site-building skills, and a paid API account with an AI provider (OpenAI, Gemini, or Anthropic recommended). Alternatively, a free 30-day trial with the Amazee.ai AI provider is available. 

About the Instructor

Mike Anello (@ultimike) has been teaching Drupal professionally for over 15 years. As co-founder and lead instructor at DrupalEasy, he runs several well-known training programs including Drupal Career Online, Professional Module Development, and Professional Single Directory Components. Mike is a frequent presenter at Drupal events across the United States and Europe, and is deeply involved in the Drupal community as an organizer, code contributor, and documentation contributor. You'll be learning from one of the most experienced Drupal educators in the community.

Two Chances to Attend

This full day workshop is being offered at two upcoming DrupalCamps on the US East Coast:

• Florida DrupalCamp — Friday, February 20, 2026 Orlando, FL
• DrupalCamp NJ — Thursday, March 12, 2026 Princeton, NJ

Registration for both events is now open, and space is limited. Don't wait to secure your spot.

Register Now

• Florida DrupalCamp: View workshop details and register
• DrupalCamp NJ: View workshop details and register

Spread the Word

Know a colleague, client, or friend who's been wanting to explore AI in Drupal? Please share this article with anyone who might benefit from a hands-on, beginner-friendly introduction to the Drupal AI module ecosystem. The more people in the Drupal community who understand how to use AI responsibly, the stronger our ecosystem becomes.
 

Extracting structured metadata from legal documents is one of the most challenging AI tasks in regulated industries. Through careful prompt engineering with GPT-4o-mini and OpenAI's Structured Outputs, teams can achieve 95%+ accuracy in categorizing complex regulatory documents across multiple taxonomies. This technical guide reveals how BetterRegulation built production-grade prompt templates that reliably extract document types, organizations, subject areas, and legal obligations from UK/Ireland legal texts—reducing manual correction time from 15 minutes to 3 minutes per document.