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The Drupal CMS track is back at DrupalCon Europe! Whether you are a site builder, a contributor, an agency leader, or someone just getting started with Drupal CMS, this is the place to share your story, learn from others, and help shape the future of Drupal CMS together.

From Barcelona to Rotterdam

What began as a mini-track at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 has quickly grown into one of the most popular tracks at DrupalCon Europe. In Vienna 2025, the track showcased the journey toward Drupal CMS 1.0 — and the community responded with enthusiasm, filling sessions and sparking conversations across the event.

 

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          Foto by PD Johnson

Now, with Drupal CMS continuing to mature and gain adoption, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 is the perfect stage to highlight real-world experiences, new features, and the road ahead.

What We Are Looking For

We are interested in hearing from the innovators who are driving Drupal CMS development as well as organisations adopting Drupal CMS on topics such as:

• ​Amplify first impressions, onboarding, and quick wins for those getting started.
• ​Refine the conversation around site building, recipes, and extending functionality.
• ​Reframe the experience of moving from other platforms or upgrading from classic Drupal.
• ​Showcase how to get involved and why your contributions make an impact.
• ​Share case studies and lessons learned from real-world projects in production.
• ​Define the vision, roadmap, and community direction for the future.

Submit Your Session Proposal

Submit your session proposal today! Visit the DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 website to submit your proposal. Whether it is a talk, a panel, or a hands-on workshop, we want to hear from you.

Meet the Track Team

The Drupal CMS track is organized by a dedicated group of community members. This year's track team includes:

• Jeremy Chinquist
• Vladimir Roudakov
• Dan Lemon

Check out all tracks and track team members here. Have questions about the track? Reach out to us on Drupal Slack or e-mail Kuoni. 

DrupalCon Europe Rotterdam 2026 is shaping up to be an incredible event. The Drupal CMS track is your opportunity to contribute to the conversation, share what you have built, and connect with the community. We look forward to seeing you in Rotterdam!

 

This year, Drupal turned 25. DrupalCon Chicago felt like the right place to mark that milestone. My keynote was part celebration and part wake-up call. I talked about Drupal's foundations, how AI is putting pressure on them, and why I believe we can rebuild them stronger than before.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (32.6 MB).

Site templates and the marketplace

About a year ago at DrupalCon Atlanta, I introduced the idea of site templates and a marketplace to go with them. By DrupalCon Vienna, we had one site template, but no marketplace.

In Chicago, I showed eleven site templates available in a basic marketplace at marketplace.drupal.org. All eleven can be installed directly from the Drupal CMS installer.

AI for site building

For more than 20 years, Drupal's ecosystem has rested on a stable triangle: the platform itself, digital agencies who bring Drupal into the real world, and the community that builds and maintains it. That triangle has proven remarkably resilient through many waves of new technologies.

But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at the same time? In my keynote, I showed how we are responding.

I started off by showing a demo of a workflow I think will become common for Drupal agencies. You spend 15 minutes prototyping a website with AI, then convert it to a Drupal site with the help of AI and a skilled developer in a matter of hours.

AI gets you to a prototype fast. Drupal gives it the foundations that last.

Organizations will always need real workflows, permissions, security, scalability, integrations, compliance, and governance. Drupal is a great platform for this.

The demo worked because Drupal CMS ships with Drupal Canvas, which includes both CLI tools and AI skills. But the real magic comes from Drupal's foundations: the APIs, building blocks, and architecture we have developed over 25 years. This is the accidental AI advantage I talked about before. Drupal really is the best CMS for AI.

AI for content management

At DrupalCon Vienna, I introduced the Context Control Center as a rough prototype. Since then, we have added many features. It is now nearly production-ready.

The idea is straightforward: AI agents need good context to help manage tasks in Drupal. With the Context Control Center, teams define their brand voice, target audiences, key messages, product details, and editorial guidelines in one place. Then every AI agent on the site draws from this single source of truth. The result is that you create knowledge once, and scale it to all the pages and content on your website.

In my keynote, I showed two demos of the Context Control Center in action. First, Drupal's AI agents turn a simple marketing brief into a complete, on-brand page using Drupal Canvas, consulting the Context Control Center along the way. It followed brand rules, asked clarifying questions, generated structured data for search, and added cross-links.

Second, I showed a proof of concept for dynamic contexts, where the Context Control Center pulls in real-time data from Google Analytics to help improve content performance after publication.

Saying no to AI slop

AI is lowering the barrier to contribute to Open Source projects like Drupal. On paper, that sounds great. More contributors, more patches, more momentum.

But it can also be a real challenge. The volume of contributions is going up while the quality is going down. More patches are landing on a small group of maintainers, and reviewing low-quality code wastes their time.

If you're using AI to contribute, you are responsible for what you submit: don't submit code you don't understand. Our quality standards matter, and we will uphold them.

Drupal Growth Initiative

Having a great product is not enough. We also need to tell a great story. As we approach an important readiness milestone by DrupalCon Rotterdam this fall, the Drupal Association is ready to take marketing to the next level.

We are launching a Drupal Growth Initiative organized across three tracks:

• Enterprise Drupal growth
• Drupal CMS adoption
• AI leadership

Our craft always evolves

In my keynote, I also told the stories of two community members who embraced AI in a meaningful way.

Aidan Foster, who has been running Foster Interactive for 17 years, chose to go all in on the Drupal AI Initiative instead of staying on the sidelines. Together with his team, he is rebuilding the foundations of his agency to leverage AI and prepare for what is next.

And Jürgen Haas, a longtime contributor and creator of the ECA module, used AI to move at the speed of a team and make Drupal's ECA module much easier to use. In both cases, AI amplifies expertise. It does not replace it.

The world is being flooded with AI-generated average. Average is cheap now, but expertise remains hard-earned and valuable. This community has spent 25 years building it, and that is not something AI can replicate.

AI is the storm, and AI is the way through the storm. I said that first in Vienna. Six months later, I believe it more than ever. Not as a slogan, but as something I have watched happen. We need more people like Aidan and Jürgen. If you want to get involved, join us on Drupal Slack or attend DrupalCon Rotterdam this fall.

At DrupalCon Vienna, Dries Buytaert opened his keynote with a question the room was already asking: what happens to Drupal in a world full of AI?

He answered with a live demonstration showcasing three things the initiative had built and shipped:

• Pace of delivery: pages that used to take hours now get built in minutes. 
• Brand and voice control: a new Context Control Center feature lets teams set their brand voice once, and every AI agent applies it. 
• Governance at scale: autonomous agents scan the site, find internal references, and propose updates.

The keynote highlighted an important aspect: humans stay in the loop and approve every change before anything goes live.

The Drupal AI Initiative arrives in Chicago with more to show

Since Vienna, 10 new organisations have joined as partners, bringing the total to 31. The initiative has now secured the equivalent of $1.5 million in combined support, comprising both direct funding and a committed contribution of 50 staff dedicated to advancing the work.

What is most exciting to me is not just what we’ve built, but how we’ve built it. With a growing group of contributors and more than $1.5 million in funding, this is now a coordinated effort to bring AI into Drupal in a way that is open, trusted, and built to last.

Dries Buytaert 

A portion of funds is being invested in delivery management. The initiative conducted a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process to appoint delivery partners responsible for coordinating work across both the innovation and product development streams. QED42 and 1xINTERNET were selected to lead the innovation and product development work streams respectively.

Progress is also visible in what has shipped since Vienna. Drupal AI 1.2.0 came first. MCP support followed. Drupal CMS 2.0 launched with Canvas as the default editing experience.

Drupal AI 1.3.0 introduced governance controls, editorial workflows, and production visibility for organisations running AI seriously.

Dedicated AI Marketing Leads Appointed

With the increased momentum in development it has been essential to scale marketing capacity. Paul Johnson announced the appointment of 10 marketing leads. Each will specialise on delivering specific key elements of the marketing strategy.

• Media Relations: Pritam Prasun, Open Sense Labs
• Social Media: Amber Henry, Morpht
• Webinars: Matthew Saunders, Amazee.io
• Events: Paul Johnson, 1xINTERNET
• Sales Enablement: James Tillotson, 1xINTERNET
• Case Studies: Rosie Gladden, ImageX
• Existing Capabilities: Duncan Worrel, Zoocha
• Upcoming Roadmap Capabilities: Will Huggins, Zoocha
• Demos: Dan Lemon
• Brand and Design Strategy: Dan Stratton, Zoocha

The initiative has been successful in bringing Drupal to external audiences across multiple global locations including Oaisys Conference in Pune, Drupal AI Summit Paris, DrupalCon Nara in Japan, the European Commission hackathon, and a growing number of workshops and meetups kept the work visible across contributors, regions, and practical discussions.

In the near future we have Drupal AI Summit New York City, May 14th, intended to bring the same conversation to enterprise leaders and practitioners. The team will exhibit at The AI Summit London as part of London Tech week which sees more than 45 000 attendees from around 90 countries across multiple days of programming.

In Chicago, that momentum was particularly easy to see

Drupal AI has moved beyond being merely a set of separate features. It is now realised through connected capabilities. Content, context, and editorial decisions begin to work together inside the same system.

Early in his Keynote at DrupalCon Chicago, Dries Buytaert widened the conversation. He said AI is now affecting three parts of Drupal at once. The product. The agencies around it. The open source community behind both.

That makes Chicago feel larger for Drupal AI. The releases matter. But they now sit inside a broader shift already affecting how Drupal is built, funded, and extended.

Photo: Paul Johnson

What Chicago made clear

Drupal AI is being deliberately designed as a native part of the platform, embedded within how Drupal operates rather than introduced as an additional layer on top. In doing so, AI becomes more useful as it works inside systems that already carry structure and context.

That is why Canvas AI mattered in Chicago. The demonstration was less about generating a page quickly and more about showing how content could move through Drupal while keeping structure, linking, and reusable patterns intact.

The same logic appeared when Dries returned to the Context Control Center, first introduced in Vienna. If AI is expected to assist meaningfully, organisational knowledge cannot remain outside the system. Brand rules, editorial priorities, and internal decisions need to stay close to where content is shaped. 

That is what Chicago makes clearer: Drupal AI is being positioned around context as much as capability.

What this means for agencies

One of the clearest shifts in Chicago came when the conversation moved from product to agency work.

AI is rapidly reducing the cost of production, but that does not reduce the need for judgment. It changes where the value sits.

Dries brought in Aidan Foster's observation directly: the bottleneck is no longer making things. The harder part is deciding what should be made, how it should work, and what quality still means when output becomes easier to create.

That is why agencies remain part of the same conversation. As production speeds up, strategy, interpretation, and institutional understanding begin to matter more, not less. 

In that sense, as production becomes easier, the harder part shifts elsewhere. Context, judgment, and internal knowledge begin to matter more, which is exactly where Drupal is placing more emphasis.

What do we want to accomplish by Rotterdam?

The initiative now feels materially different from where it stood even a few months ago. Prototypes are moving into alpha and beta stages, stable releases are approaching, and coordination across teams is visibly stronger. More people are involved, and the relationship between Drupal CMS, Drupal AI, and core has become easier to follow.

That shift matters because the work no longer reads as parallel experimentation. Product releases, editorial workflows, and context systems are beginning to move toward the same operating idea: AI becomes more useful when it works inside structures organisations already trust.

Photo: Jeremy Chinquist (jjchinquist)

The roadmap shown in Chicago reinforces that direction. For organisations already evaluating open source AI for digital platforms, Drupal AI now presents a clearer path to adoption.

For a complete view of how Drupal AI is framing that next stage, Dries Buytaert’s full DriesNote from Chicago is worth watching.

In his ‘#DriesNote’ presentation at DrupalCon Chicago 2026, Dries addressed the elephant in the room: AI is currently flooding the web with "average" content: fast to produce, but hard to distinguish. While there are tools that can generate beautiful prototypes in 15 minutes with no technical skill, those prototypes lack the structured data, governance, and durability required by serious organizations.

Drupal is bridging the gap between “AI speed” and enterprise assurance through two key innovations: the Context Control Centre (CCC) and Drupal Canvas AI, a new approach to building digital experiences.

The Context Control Centre (CCC): Institutional ‘Knowledge as a Service’

The most significant hurdle for AI today is a lack of context. Without it, AI simply gives you the "average response." The Context Control Centre changes this by allowing organizations to store their unique "DNA" directly within Drupal.

The CCC organizes institutional knowledge into actionable data:

• Brand Guidelines: Specific rules for tone, voice, and formatting.

• Personas: Detailed profiles of target audiences (e.g., Controllers vs. IT Ops).

• Dynamic Context: A groundbreaking feature where the CCC connects to live data sources like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Built into your Drupal CMS, AI tools don't just guess; they work within your specific business reality to ensure their output is always on brand, within guidelines, and relevant to the contextual nuances of the task at hand.

Drupal Canvas AI: Where Speed Meets Substance

The second half of the equation is Drupal Canvas AI, the next-generation page builder. 

Instead of dragging and dropping components, you can just tell the AI what you want with prompts that describe the page and content you want to produce. Canvas AI, in conjunction with the CCC, will create the page and include the components you need.

As Dries noted, production is becoming a commodity, but judgment and strategy remain human. Drupal AI doesn’t replace your teams, it amplifies their capability to deliver ‘Quality at Scale.’

I'm trying here…

I got Claude to help me set up my Drupal (AI) Playground using Drupal Recipes. Claude is also writing my /docs and generating the project's CLAUDE.md (also known as an AGENTS.md) file. My exploration uses a variation of the crawl-walk-run approach to learning to use Claude Code.

At this point in my journey, running feels a little out of reach, which I am okay with because Agentic coding is a major software development paradigm shift. I'm eager to run and have Claude generate some 'production' and reviewable quality code for me. Still, when researching CLAUDE.md files, people recommend using or creating skills that simply offer reusable instructions to guide a prompt in the right direction. Installing some Drupal-specific skills should increase Claude's reliability when working with Drupal.

Still unsure what I'm doing here

I'm not sure what I'm doing here and am always seeking advice. The suggestions on Reddit range from adding agent skills and plugins to give Claude superpowers to the idea that Claude is already superpowered and doesn't need much help.

I'm skeptical about how much nudging Claude really needs when using skills. For example, I have been using Claude's Chat to plan a module without any additional context or information, and Claude is doing an excellent job generating a 'simple' module project specification. Claude fully understands Drupal APIs and some Drupalisms, but AIs are known to make mistakes; therefore, exploring skills is worthwhile and helpful for repetitive custom tasks, such as upgrading or refactoring codebases.

Ask the AI for help getting started

At this point in my AI journey, I'm between asking Claude to generate documentation and searching Google for references to include. I value that all my /docs have become iterative with AI, and I'm very optimistic...Read More

The DrupalCon Chicago 2026 Driesnote kicked off with a keynote that was equal parts celebration and wake-up call. With 1,310 attendees in the room and Drupal turning 25, Dries Buytaert delivered one of his most candid Driesnotes yet. He acknowledged a tough market, AI disruption hitting all sides of the Drupal ecosystem at once, and then laid out a concrete plan for what comes next.

This wasn’t the typical “look what we shipped” keynote. Dries shared personal stories, showed real working demos, and ended with a direct challenge to every person in the room. I want to walk you through the 10 things that stuck with me the most.

The numbers are settled. The questions are not. Following Drupal’s infrastructure cost breakdown, developers and organisations are now debating how open source systems should be funded—and who is responsible for keeping them running.

Keegan presented today at DrupalCon Chicago on creating social feed style content on your Drupal site and publishing it out to different social media platforms, all from Drupal.

Read more and discuss at agaric.coop.

This week, the 1xINTERNET team lands in "Windy City" as DrupalCon Chicago 2026 takes place. From March 23-26 DrupalCon brings together over 1.300 developers, designers, strategists, and business leaders from all over the world to shape the future of the Open Web.

This week, the 1xINTERNET team lands in "Windy City" as DrupalCon Chicago 2026 takes place. From March 23-26 DrupalCon brings together over 1.300 developers, designers, strategists, and business leaders from all over the world to shape the future of the Open Web. 

April Sides has been named the recipient of the 2026 Aaron Winborn Award, recognising her sustained contributions to the Drupal community through organising, accessibility advocacy, and community support initiatives. Presented at DrupalCon Chicago, the award honours individuals who demonstrate integrity, kindness, and long-term commitment to open source collaboration. Announced by members of the Drupal Community Working Group, the recognition situates her work within broader efforts to sustain participation and community health across Drupal.

Missed the Driesnote? You can watch it here.

Drupal, the open source content management platform that runs some of the most demanding websites on the planet, turned 25 in January. But while the community is celebrating what is a remarkable milestone for any open source project, it is actively strengthening its foundations to lead in the AI era and looking ahead to a future it intends to shape.

This week at DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert delivered his annual keynote, the DriesNote, and it was one of the more honest talks you'll hear at a tech conference. A clear-eyed look at what's working, what's under pressure, and what the plan actually is.

AI is Disrupting Everything, But Deep Expertise is Irreplaceable

For more than two decades, the Drupal ecosystem has rested on three things: the platform itself, the agencies that build with it, and the community that maintains it. That triangle has survived waves of new technology and constant change. It's been remarkably resilient.

But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at once? When anyone can spin up a decent-looking site in fifteen minutes, what does that do to the people who've spent years building something better? That’s what is happening at the moment, as the world is being flooded with AI-generated “average”. Average content, average code, average websites - average is easier to attain than ever.

What it means is that the only thing that will actually matter, to customers, to organisations, to the people trying to build something lasting on the open web, is genuine, hard-won, deep expertise.

What AI Actually Can't Do

Here's something worth understanding, because it gets lost in the noise.

AI can generate a beautiful website in about fifteen minutes. Tools like Lovable and Replit are genuinely impressive. You give them a prompt, they give you something that looks polished and professional. It feels like magic.

But a prototype is not a production system.

The moment you need structured content that editors can actually update, workflows that a real team can follow, permissions, governance, security, accessibility, multilingual support, compliance... you're not building a website anymore. You're building a system. And building systems is exactly what Drupal has excelled at for 25 years.

The demo at DrupalCon made this tangible. A beautiful event site built in Lovable in minutes, then migrated into Drupal CMS using AI coding tools, where the hard-coded layout became structured, reusable, editable content. Same visual ambition. Completely different foundation.

The pitch is simple: AI gets you to visual ambition fast. Drupal makes that ambition durable.

What's Actually Shipping

This isn't a vision talk. Things are being built and released.

DrupalCMS 2.1 landed at DrupalCon, built on top of Drupal Core 11.3. Over the last 18 months, core database and cache utilization have roughly halved, meaning every Drupal site in the world gets faster when it upgrades. That's not a minor thing. That's the compounding benefit of a serious engineering community.

Site templates and a marketplace are now live at marketplace.drupal.org, with more than ten purpose-built templates covering nonprofits, education, healthcare, events, government, and SaaS, built by agencies that understand those sectors. Free and premium options, with direct access to the people who made them if you need help.

Canvas, Drupal's new page-building layer, lets teams create and customise pages at speed without sacrificing the structured content underneath.

The Context Control Centre is a system for storing and managing your organisation's institutional knowledge (brand guidelines, content strategy, audience personas, live analytics) and it's moving from prototype to production. The idea is that AI tools are only as good as the context they're given. Without it, you get the average of the internet. With it, you get something that actually knows your brand.

And in the AI layer itself, a demo showed what it looks like when a marketer can drop a raw content brief into Drupal, have the system read it, load the right brand and strategy context, ask clarifying questions, and generate a production-ready page, with proper cross-linking, structured data for AI search engines, and an accessibility check built in.

That's not a concept. That's a demo running on real code.

One Developer, Six Weeks, 90,000 Lines of Code

The most striking moment of the keynote was a contribution from Jurgen Haas, one of the Drupal community's most experienced developers. He builds ECA, Drupal's automation engine, running on thousands of production sites.

Three years ago, he knew what ECA needed. He knew how to build it. He never had the time.

Six weeks ago, he started. With AI as a collaborator, handling scaffolding, generating tests, refactoring code, he shipped a completely rebuilt workflow editor: a new visual interface, built-in debugging and replay, in-context automation for non-technical users. 90,000 lines of code. Full test coverage. One person.

"This is what one Drupal developer can build in six weeks," he said. "Imagine what all of us can build next."

The key detail: Jurgen could explain every line. He could defend the architecture. He owned what he built. AI removed friction. It didn't replace expertise.

The Harder Conversation

Not everything in the keynote was product news.

Dries was honest about the pressure on Drupal agencies. When AI commoditises production, and it is, the business models that agencies have built over years start to look shaky. An agency leader named Aidan Foster, seventeen years into running a Drupal shop, described the feeling plainly: "AI had converted making things into a commodity. That shook the foundations I had spent 17 years building."

But Aidan's conclusion was interesting. The bottleneck isn't production anymore. It's creativity, strategy, and judgement. If you use AI without asking the hard questions, who are we, who are our audience, what makes us different, you get the boring average. The agencies that will win are the ones that get good at encoding expertise, not just delivering outputs.

There's also a challenge for the community itself. AI lowers the barrier to contribute code, which sounds good, until you realise the burden of reviewing that code falls on the same small group of maintainers. And when people use AI to skip the deep learning that used to come from contributing, the community gets shallower. A shallow community can't maintain what's been built.

Dries' response was a new mantra:never submit code you don't understand. It doesn't matter what tools you used to write it. If you submit it, you own it.

The Bet Worth Making

Twenty years ago, Dries was a bedroom inventor who collapsed from stress on a street in Belgium. He had a choice: take a safe job, walk away from the thing he'd built, or ask for help and become a deliberate leader.

He made the harder choice. The community that grew up around that choice is why Drupal is still here, still relevant, still running critical infrastructure for organisations around the world.

Now there's another crossroads. AI is both the flood and the drainage system. It destabilises the foundations and it can help rebuild them stronger.

Twenty-five years of Drupal is twenty-five years of expertise built patch by patch, merge request by merge request. A community that showed up not because it had to, but because it cared. That's not a liability in the age of AI. That's exactly what this moment needs.

DrupalCon Chicago runs through this week. The marketplace is live at marketplace.drupal.org. The Context Control Centre is approaching production. The Drupal AI initiative is moving fast.

File attachments:  DriesNote1.png DSC_8250.JPG DSC_8272.jpg

Great digital experiences don't happen by accident, they're built with intention, inclusion, and users at the heart of every decision. At DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the UX, Accessibility and Usability track is bringing together designers, developers, content strategists, and decision-makers to explore how Drupal powers truly user-centred digital products.

We're looking for speakers with real stories to tell. Whether you've transformed an accessibility audit into lasting organisational change, built a design system that scaled beautifully across channels, or used user research to completely reshape a development roadmap — we want to hear from you.

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          Foto by Matthew Saunders

We're particularly interested in sessions covering:

·    Accessibility beyond compliance - embedding WCAG and ATAG into everyday workflows

·    User research that drives real development decisions

·    Design systems and collaborative design-development workflows

·    Usability improvements backed by evidence and data

·    Content design and strategy, including practical uses of AI

·    Digital sustainability - designing for efficiency and longevity

 

This track is for anyone who believes that inclusion, usability, and good design aren't nice-to-haves — they're essential. Whether you're sharing a case study, a practical toolkit, or a freshperspective, your session could help Drupal practitioners everywhere build better, more inclusive digital experiences. 

 

Submissions close 13 April. 

Submmit your session: https://events.drupal.org/rotterdam2026/program-glance 

Don't wait! Share your expertise and help shape the conversation at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.

 

 

When making code changes or fixing issues, it's easy to leave @todo comments behind. Sometimes they mark areas waiting on an upstream fix, sometimes they're reminders that never got revisited. Either way, they accumulate — and the ones tied to the specific issue you're working on should be resolved before the MR merges.

phpstan-drupal 2.0.12 adds TodoCommentWithIssueUrlRule to catch this in the GitLab CI jobs on Drupal.org.

This rule is inspired by staabm/phpstan-todo-by, which handles expiring todos by date, version constraint, and issue tracker status. It doesn't currently support custom issue fetchers or alternative detection mechanisms, such as matching ticket IDs to branch names — but that flexibility could make its way there someday.

Simply ranking high in Google is not enough today. Learn how to get your content chosen by AI in this brief guide to AI Search Optimization.

As autonomous agents increasingly interact with technical documentation, traditional HTML can introduce challenges by filling limited context windows with layout elements, navigation, and scripts. This structural cluttering not only drains computing resources but directly causes context pollution and AI hallucinations.

Discover how you can reduce this “token tax” and create cleaner, more AI-friendly documentation experiences.

When I wrote my last post one year and one day ago, “vibe coding” was new. In fact, I heard about it for the first time while walking to some DrupalCon Atlanta social event — Bálint and Lauri were talking about it after a long conference day. By the end of 2025, it was in the dictionary. Three months into 2026 and it’s everywhere — for better or worse.1

Also at the end of 2025, Bálint did a very impressive demo for the Canvas team: AI tools that knew nothing about Canvas were able to successfully generate Canvas code components. During his demo he called out something unexpected (for 2024 Wim): the demo worked with minimal prompting thanks to Canvas’ code components’ detailed validation. 

Drupal’s 25th anniversary keynote in Chicago moves beyond retrospective framing to address a structural shift affecting the CMS ecosystem. Dries Buytaert outlines how artificial intelligence is changing how websites are built, where value is created, and how Drupal must respond through product changes, new workflows, and a renewed emphasis on structured content and governance.

Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it's used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We'll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545

Topics

• What Is DKAN
• Who Uses Open Data
• 20:08 DKAN Origin Story
• Why Drupal Fits DKAN
• From Distribution to Module
• DKAN 2 Rebuild and JSON Shift
• Async Jobs and API First
• How Teams Publish Data
• What a Dataset Really Is
• Metadata vs Data Access
• Why DKAN Left Drupal Org
• Migration Path to DKAN Four
• Harvesting and Data Store ETL
• APIs Visualizations and Bots
• Roadmap Data Store and AI
• Contributing and Where to File Issues

Resources

• DKAN
• DKAN Drupal Module
• DKAN on GitHub
• Public sites using DKAN 2
• DKAN channel on Drupal Slack
• JSON Form Widget

Guests

Liz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to have your Drupal site admins start with a fast, widget-based interface that surfaces key site metrics, system health, and operational insights? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Modern Drupal Dashboard
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Feb 2026 by Gaurav Kapoor (gaurav.kapoor) of werk21 in Berlin
  • Versions available: 1.0.5, which works with Drupal core 10.3 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Number of open issues: no open issues
• Usage stats:
  • 4 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, site visitors with the new "Access modern dashboard" permission can access a React-based dashboard with widgets to provide insights on topics like:
  • Content overview: total content count, published vs unpublished, and per content type breakdown.
  • Users overview: user count per role (users with multiple roles are counted in each role), plus pie chart visualization.
  • Additional Content (Entity overview): lists all entity types (content + configuration), shows counts, and provides direct "Manage" links.
  • Modules overview: installed modules summary, including enabled/disabled and core/contrib breakdown.
  • System & status: key environment details such as Drupal core version, PHP version, and database information.
  • Health checks: displays Drupal requirement checks grouped by status (pass/warning/error) with a dedicated detail view.
  • Each widget can be clicked to open a detail view of the extended data, making it easy for admins to dig into any area
  • The widget-based architecture should also help to pull in data from other sources, potentially including things like analytics