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We're excited to announce that the DDEV Foundation has officially established a Board of Directors! This is a significant milestone in our journey toward enhanced governance and long-term sustainability for the DDEV project.

Today we filed an amended Articles of Incorporation with the Secretary of State of Colorado, which includes the Board of Directors.

Introducing the New Board Michael Anello (@ultimike)

Mike Anello is a seasoned Drupal developer with over 15 years of experience. He specializes in Drupal consulting and training through his business, ensuring clients leverage Drupal's full potential. Mike is a notable community contributor and advocate, sharing his expertise and insights widely. Mike is already serving as the Treasurer of the Foundation.

Jen Lampton (@jenlampton)

Jen Lampton has been building websites since 1997 and participating in Open Source communities since 2006. She is a co-founder of Backdrop CMS and a provisional member of the Drupal security team. Jen currently maintains dozens of Open Source projects and contributes to other projects (including DDEV!) as it applies to her work.

Benni Mack (@bmack)

Benni Mack is a long-time TYPO3 core developer and contributor, serving as TYPO3 CMS Team Lead. He brings extensive experience in open source project governance and community building. Benni is passionate about developer experience and has been instrumental in modernizing TYPO3's development practices.

Andrew Berry (@deviantintegral)

Andrew Berry has been a member and contributor in the Drupal community since 2006. He is also the VP of Technology at Lullabot, where teams rely on DDEV for local development. When not doing Drupal and DDEV, Andrew spends his time working on home automation and related open source projects.

Randy Fay (@rfay)

Randy is the original maintainer of DDEV, enjoying it since 2016. He has deep roots in the Drupal community and has done loads of traveling by bike.

Our Vision: Sustainability and Financial Stability for the Project

Improved governance is one of our key long-term goals for the project, and was a key goal for 2025. We know that this will be an ongoing process that we'll have to grow into, and we invite your participation. We meet every two months as a group, and the entire community is invited. Subscribe to the meeting announcements and summaries and ask for a calendar invitation if you'd like. These meetings are also announced in the monthly DDEV Newsletter.

Of course the key long-term goal is sustainability in general. We don't want to depend on any single maintainer, and we want to ensure that DDEV can continue to thrive and grow for years to come. Financial sustainability is a key part of that, but just one part. Read more about our path to sustainability.

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to hear from you! Or get active and join our DDEV Advisory Group.

Do you have questions or want to talk (about sponsoring or anything else)? Contact us! or join us in Discord.

Have you signed up for the monthly DDEV Newsletter? We'd love to have you.

Claude Code was used for editing and formatting in the blog post.

When we launched Drupal CMS 1.0 eleven months ago, I posted the announcement on Reddit. Brave of me, I know. But I wanted non-Drupal people to actually try it.

There were a lot of positive reactions, but there was also honest feedback. The most common? "Wake me up when your new experience builder is ready". The message was clear: make page building easier and editing more visual.

I was not surprised. For years I have heard the same frustration. Drupal is powerful, but not always easy to use. That criticism has been fair. We have never lacked capability, but we have not always delivered the user experience people expect.

Well, wake up.

Today we released Drupal Canvas 1.0, a new visual page builder for Drupal. You can create reusable components that match your design system, drag them on to a page, edit content in place, preview changes across multiple pages, and undo mistakes with ease.

Watch the video below. Better yet, show it to someone who thinks they know what Drupal looks like. I bet their first reaction will be: "Wait, is that Drupal?". That reaction is exactly what we have been working toward. It makes Drupal feel more modern and less intimidating.

I also want to set expectations. Drupal Canvas 1.0 helps us catch up with other page builders more than it helps us leap ahead. We had to start there.

But it helps us catch up in the right way, bringing the ease of modern tools while keeping Drupal's identity intact. This isn't Drupal becoming simpler by becoming less powerful. Drupal Canvas sits on top of everything that makes Drupal so powerful: structured content, fine-grained permissions, scalability, and much more.

Most importantly, it opens new doors. Frontend developers can create components in React without having to learn Drupal first. And as shown in my DrupalCon Vienna keynote, Drupal Canvas will have an AI assistant that can generate pages from natural language prompts.

Drupal Canvas is a remarkable piece of engineering. The team at Acquia and contributors across the community put serious craft into this. You can see it in the result. I'm thankful for the time, care, and skill everyone brought to it.

So what is next? We keep building. Drupal Canvas 1.0 is step one, and this is a good moment for more of the Drupal community to get involved. Now is the time to build on it, test it, and improve it. Especially because Drupal CMS 2.0 ships in less than two months with Drupal Canvas included.

Shipping Drupal Canvas 1.0 is a major milestone. It shows we are listening. And it shows what we can accomplish when we focus on the experience as much as the capability. I cannot wait to see what people build with it.

For years, Drupal has been the platform of choice for organizations that need serious digital capabilities—think universities managing millions of pages, government agencies with complex workflows, and Fortune 500 companies running mission-critical websites. The power is undeniable, but there's always been a catch: you needed technical expertise to unlock it.

That’s why one of the most exciting areas of Drupal’s journey has been the work underway on more intuitive, visual building experiences. The community has spent years exploring how to make Drupal feel more accessible to site builders and content teams without sacrificing the flexibility and robustness that define Drupal.

Drupal Canvas is the next step in that journey.

More than a “new feature drop,” Drupal Canvas represents an ongoing, community-driven effort to modernize how we build with Drupal. Canvas adds a more visual, flexible way to arrange and adjust page components, helping non-developers work more independently while providing developers space for deeper technical work.

No More Trade-offs 

As Lauri Timmanee, Drupal Canvas's product lead, explained: "There's a trade-off that exists in Drupal - either you're forced into building sort of a cookie cutter website...or you go into complex coding. We want to break that trade-off by providing better tools so that you can actually build websites that are custom to your brand without having to know complex code."

What's Included in Drupal Canvas 1.0

Drupal Canvas provides the foundation for a more intuitive page-building workflow in Drupal. Built with React on the frontend and integrated with Drupal's core APIs on the backend, it focuses on helping site builders arrange and adjust content more easily, with features such as:

• Component based visual page building with a drag-and-drop interface
• In-browser code components that allow you to add new building blocks
• Create and preview multiple pages before publication with multi-step undo

Try It Out and Get Involved

Drupal Canvas represents the Drupal community's collaborative innovation at its best—open and with a foundation of real-world use cases. As work continues, community feedback will continue to play a large role in shaping the next phases.

• Check out the Drupal Canvas demo with the Drupal brand. Local installation instructions at https://github.com/phenaproxima/canvas-demo
• Join the #drupal-canvas channel in Slack for active community discussion.

Your feedback and involvement will directly shape the future of content management in Drupal.

Day 4 - Focus Order and Visibility Dec 04, 2025 0

Have you ever tried to fill out a form on a website using only your keyboard? Maybe your mouse died, or you're working on a laptop with a finicky trackpad. You hit Tab to move from field to field, and suddenly you're jumping all over the page, or worse - you have no idea which field you're actually in.

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Many of the current strategic initiatives in Drupal are based on the principle of user-centered design. When executed well, this means that the needs, goals, and feedback of the end-user are part of the decision making process at every step of development. 

Historically, gathering meaningful user feedback has required community volunteers, user surveys, the occasional academic user study, and the expertise of UX experts in our community. And those efforts will continue to be crucial. But we have always hoped to be able to gather real user data on a much broader scale, and proposed a telemetry initiative as early as 2018.

One of the primary tools of modern software development is integration of an telemetry/analytics platform. This can take many forms, from the kinds of analytics data we're used to gathering on the websites, to crash reporting, to user interface heatmaps, to full session/user journey recording. We see these tools integrated with just about every piece of software we use today— whether proprietary or open source—including operating systems like Mac OS, or browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

We'd like to collect similar data to inform the development of Drupal. At this scale, the data can provide us statistically significant insights into what features of Drupal are most commonly used, what creates the most friction, and what most needs our attention in future development. It can also allow us to run UX experiments, ensuring we produce software that is as intuitive as it can be. 

    

In order to do this in alignment with Drupal's principles, we must implement any such system on a foundation that respects user-privacy and choice. Site owners, especially those in regulated industries, must be able to opt-out of data collection, and any telemetry platform we choose must be built with privacy-first principles, ensuring compliance with GDPR and other regulations, and allowing us to house the data in jurisdictions we can trust. 

The Drupal Association has been evaluating a number of platforms and potential partners, first through the lens of privacy and regulatory compliance, and then through the lens of scalability and data management. For reasons of internal resource constraints, it's our preference to find a partner that is willing to run this telemetry platform as a managed service, and who will be accountable and liable to protect our community's data.

We've chosen to explore this idea with PiwikPro, a European organization that specializes in privacy and regulatory compliance, including in highly regulated contexts like HIPAA compliance. They offer data warehousing in a variety of jurisdictions around the world, including the ability to 'bring-your-own-keys'. And they have a shared origin with the Matomo project, meaning that they have a strong understanding of Open Source communities and values. They are used by a number of large Drupal organizations around the world, including one of the institutions most strongly advocating for user privacy: the European Commission. 

Piwik PRO has joined this project with The Drupal Association because we want to help the DA better understand real usage patterns and shape the future of the Drupal platform with data driven insights.
~ Nicolai Munch Andersen

We'll start our exploration by instrumenting the Drupal CMS trial, and limiting our data gathering to a small initial set of information about application usage. We intend to work closely with the Drupal CMS leadership team to decide what user journeys we want to measure, and how we can share that data in a responsible way with initiative leads and key maintainers to make Drupal the best it can be.

Join Drupal AI Summit Paris 2025, Europe's largest Drupal AI event, on December 9-11. Discover practical AI applications, hear from leading experts, and connect with innovators across 25+ tech conferences. Free tickets available!

Advent Calendar day 4 – AI and Drupal in Action james Thu, 12/04/2025 - 09:00

Welcome to day 4 of the Drupal Advent Calendar, and today we are joined by Mike Anello to tell us about one of his favourite presentations of the year…

AI and Drupal in Action: Real World Implementation and Future Market ImpactPresentation by Dr. Christophe Breidert at Drupal Dev Days Leuven, April 2025

 

 

The rise of artificial intelligence has captured attention (both good and bad) over the last couple of years, and its impact on Drupal and its ecosystem is still evolving. Dr. Breidert provided an easily digestible introduction into both the dangers and opportunities that AI provides in his…

Tags

• ai
• generative AI
• ai agents

The Drupal Community Working Group is seeking a community member or organization to design and create the Aaron Winborn Award for 2026.

2020 award created by Bo Shipley

Each year, this award honors a Drupal community member who embodies the spirit of generosity, collaboration, and contribution that Aaron represented. We’re looking for someone to help us bring this recognition to life through a meaningful, handcrafted award.

2019 award by Rachel Norfolk

If you or someone you know would like to design the 2026 award, please send your ideas or proposals to drupal-cwg@drupal.org.

2023 & 2025 Awards by Russell Eck

Let’s continue celebrating the individuals who make our community stronger, one thoughtful creation at a time.

File attachments:  IMG_5792.jpg aaronwinborn_lg2019.jpg 6da0edfa-af39-4fab-bacc-5e7b69049a4b~1.jpg IMG_9153.jpg

Day 3 - Headers and Labels Dec 03, 2025 0

So much of accessibility is about making your content clear and understandable to a wide range of users. Structuring your content can really help here. Adding headings for each section of text particularly helps with assistive technologies like screen readers. Headers can help organize your content into groups, and show the relationships within your content.

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Last month I was fortunate enough to be invited on the Community + Code podcast with host Chris Reynolds!

The conversation was pretty lively. We talked a lot about the Drupal ecosystem, our place in the wider web ecosystem, the upcoming Drupal marketplace, and of course Dripyard!

It’s a fun conversation. Check it out below! 

Hey nonprofit Drupal users, do you want a free ticket to DrupalCon Chicago? Submit to be a breakout discussion leader at the Nonprofit Summit!  

What are you talking about?

The DA is interested in supporting community-driven content that is specifically relevant to nonprofit organization staff and related agencies at DrupalCon North America in Chicago, Illinois, at the Nonprofit Summit on March 23, 2026. 

We are looking for volunteers who would be interested in giving back to the community by contributing some subject matter expertise via a day of informal breakout sessions or other group activities. We are open to ideas!

Who are we looking for?

Do you have some Drupal expertise or a recent experience with a Drupal project that you would like to share with others? Is there something about Drupal that you think is really cool that you would love to share with the nonprofit Drupal community?

What’s required?

You will not be required to make slides! You don’t need to have lots of (or any) speaking experience! All you need is a willingness to facilitate a discussion group or engaging activity around a particular topic, and some expertise or enthusiasm for that topic that you wish to share.

How do I submit an idea or topic?

Please fill out this form by December 31st.

https://forms.gle/RnFdAat5fQvffbm48

Discussion leaders will be selected by the Nonprofit Summit Planning Committee and will be notified by the middle of January.

Questions?

Email drupalcon.nonprofitsummit@gmail.com.

When I tell people that Acquia Source will let customers export their entire website and leave our platform anytime, I usually get puzzled looks.

We really mean the entire site: the underlying Drupal code, theme, configuration, content, and data. The export gives you a complete, working Drupal site that you can run on any infrastructure you choose.

Most SaaS platforms do the opposite. They make it hard to leave. When you export, you may get all your content, but never the code.

Why do we want to make it easy for customers to leave?

First, when leaving is easy, customers stay because they want to, not because they are trapped. That accountability pushes us to build better products. It means that at Acquia, we have to earn our customers' business every day by delivering value, not by making it hard to leave.

Second, the ability to leave means teams can start small and scale without hitting a wall. All SaaS products have constraints, and Acquia Source is no exception. When your application reaches a level of complexity that requires deeper customization, you can take your entire site to Acquia Cloud or any other Drupal hosting environment. You never need to start over.

Last but not least, because Acquia Source is built on Drupal, we want it to reflect Drupal's open source freedoms. Full export is how we make those principles real in a SaaS context.

We call this Open SaaS.

We first tried this idea with Drupal Gardens in 2010, which also allowed full exports. I loved that feature then, and I still love it now. I have always believed it was a big deal. More importantly, our customers did too.

One of Acquia's largest customers began on Drupal Gardens more than a decade ago. They used it to explore Drupal, then naturally grew into Acquia Cloud and Site Factory as their needs became more complex. Today they run some of the world's biggest media properties on Drupal and Acquia.

Trust comes from freedom, not lock-in. The exit door you'll never use is exactly what makes you confident enough to stay. It does seem counterintuitive to make leaving easy, but not all SaaS is created equal. With our Open SaaS approach, you get the freedom to grow and the ability to leave whenever you choose.

At DrupalCon Nara 2025, long-time Drupal agency Studio Umi embraced its dual role as sponsor and community advocate. In an interview with The DropTimes, Tomoka Moriyama shared how the company’s legacy, technical leadership, and local roots shaped their participation—and why the event felt especially meaningful.

Changing the agency that supports your Drupal system or obtaining quotes from several companies usually requires sharing the technical details of your project. The problem is that the database contains customer data, the configuration stores API keys, and the custom code reveals the company's business logic. In this article, I’ll show you an open source tool that solves this problem. Druscan collects all the technical information needed for analysis, while protecting sensitive data. I invite you to read the blog post or watch an episode from the “Nowoczesny Drupal” series.

Advent Calendar day 3 – Beyond 99 Red Balloons: a guide to alternative text and accessible images james Wed, 12/03/2025 - 09:00

An important aspect of every website project is accessibility, and an important part of that is giving your images meaningful “alt” text to describe their contents.

At this year’s European DrupalCon in Vienna, AmyJune Hineline and Chris Vickery discussed aspects of alt text images, with many examples, mostly from their favourite album covers.

I think when AmyJune says “Hi James” near the start, it was me arriving late, so apologies for my tardiness.

Here is the talk video:

The video makes reference to bonus slides in the presentation, which they didn’t get to in the talk. It includes helpful…

Tags

• Advent Calendar 2025
• accessibility
• alt text

Every business on the planet has invested time and money into their infrastructure. Infrastructure which includes the applications the business uses on a day to day basis.  Think of that one application in any of the organizations you've ever worked for that was so mission critical that if it were to disappear tomorrow, the business would struggle to operate. Generally speaking, that application tends to be something so fundamental to the business that just about everyone uses it. What makes process automation powerful is allowing the customer to keep using their applications of choice while connecting Maestro's business process automation to them.

 

Every page with insightful content is a fresh opportunity to engage, inspire, and inform your audience. Plus, the more valuable content you have, the better your chances of ranking higher in search results. That’s how websites with hundreds — or even thousands — of pages can become true online powerhouses for their organizations.

 

Day 2 - Multiple Ways Dec 02, 2025 0

If you have a lot of content, finding something specific can be a challenge for your users. For accessibility, this guideline was created to support people that have different ways of thinking or finding things -- but I find this useful in all sorts of contexts. Strong navigation implies structure on your site, structure that can help people find what they are after.

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Drupal Canvas is almost stable, and we are excited to host another live Dripyard webinar to show how powerful and easy it is to use. We will walk through real workflows, highlight what makes Canvas special, and demonstrate how Dripyard’s premium themes make the experience even better.

By default, drush updb clears the cache after applying database updates. For deployments where you want to avoid an unnecessary performance hit, you can prevent this default behavior using a Drush pre-command hook. The updb command has a --cache-clear flag that you can set up in your CI workflow, but what about local testing? Will you or your team remember to set that flag every time?

I've come to learn this may be a controversial take. This requires having a deployment identifier set and crafted update hooks for specific cache invalidations, router rebuilds, etc. But if you want a highly performant Drupal application with faster deployment times, it's crucial.