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UUIDv5 with config name as input. Storage decorators that intercept every write path. A hashed-table edge case that almost caused data loss. Here is how the module works.

Every year, the global campaign organised by the Union for International Cancer Control invites people affected by cancer to share their personal experiences as part of World Cancer Day. These stories provide an important human perspective on the realities of cancer. They help build solidarity, encourage early diagnosis, and ensure the voices of patients, survivors, families and carers are heard around the world.

However, when a global campaign encourages participation at scale, the practical challenges quickly become clear. Hundreds of deeply personal stories can arrive from many different countries in a short period of time. Each submission needs to be reviewed carefully, handled with sensitivity, and prepared for publication. For a small team responsible for managing the campaign, this can create significant pressure during the peak period around World Cancer Day.

To address this challenge, the World Cancer Day team partnered with 1xINTERNET to explore how artificial intelligence could support their existing editorial workflow within Drupal.

Balancing efficiency and human oversight in AI assisted moderation

Rather than attempting to automate the process entirely, the approach focused on supporting human decision making. AI was introduced to assist moderators by helping them review incoming submissions more efficiently. This allowed the team to process stories more quickly while ensuring that personal experiences remained at the centre of the review process.

The result is a practical example of how AI can be applied responsibly. Technology is used to assist people rather than replace them, helping organisations manage growing volumes of content while maintaining appropriate oversight and care.

In this upcoming webinar we will explore the approach taken by the World Cancer Day team and the lessons it offers for other organisations facing similar challenges.

Register for the webinar

What the webinar will cover

Participants will hear about:

• The role that personal stories play in the global World Cancer Day movement
• The operational challenge of moderating hundreds of submissions from around the world
• How AI supported a human moderation process rather than replacing it
• Practical lessons for organisations considering responsible applications of AI

The session is designed for organisational leaders, communications teams, and others exploring how artificial intelligence can be introduced in a considered and practical way. Using a real global campaign as its foundation, it offers a practical example of how AI can support teams managing large volumes of user generated content.

Event details

Title: Helping people tell their cancer stories using AI: Lessons from World Cancer Day
Date: 16 March 2026
Time: 2:00 PM GMT*
Format: Live webinar

Register now to secure your place.

*If the timing is not convenient, the session will be recorded and shared with everyone who registers so it can be watched afterwards.

Speakers Charles Andrew Revkin

Communications professional working on the World Cancer Day campaign at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). Charles leads global storytelling efforts that amplify the voices of people affected by cancer around the world.

Diego Costa

Chief Operating Officer at 1xINTERNET. Diego works with organisations to design and deliver complex digital platforms using open-source technologies including Drupal.

Matthew Saunders

AI Ambassador at amazee.io and long-time member of the Drupal community. Matthew works on initiatives that help organisations adopt AI in ways that respect privacy, transparency, and human decision-making.

More webinars and events

This is part of a series of webinars and global events organised by Drupal AI. For full details visit our events calendar.

Can one open-source CRM manage all your donors and donations in one place? If you’re working for a nonprofit, you must read this blog to find out how CiviCRM can manage contacts and fundraising efficiently for you.

A fresh breeze of innovation is set to sweep through Chicago this spring. As March 23–26 draws near, the Windy City is gearing up to host DrupalCon 2026, the world’s largest Drupal gathering.

Written by guest blogger María Fernanda Silva

Something is shifting in how organizations think about AI. The early excitement around what it could do is giving way to a harder, more important question: how do you build AI that actually holds up — at scale, under pressure, and over time?

On 14 May 2026, New York City becomes the place where that question gets answered. The Drupal AI Summit brings together enterprise leaders, digital decision-makers, and senior practitioners from across the US and Europe — not to explore AI in theory, but to share what responsible, durable AI looks like in practice.

The decisions that define what AI becomes

Thirteen focused sessions. Real case studies. The Summit is built around the strategic and organizational questions that determine whether AI delivers real value or stays stuck in pilot mode: governance, investment, long-term architecture, and what it actually takes to scale. If you are responsible for those decisions, this is where you belong.

Open source and the architecture of trust

Most AI implementations fail quietly — locked into black boxes, disconnected from the workflows where real work happens, impossible to adjust without starting over.

There is a different path. When AI is embedded directly into content, data, and workflow systems (where enterprise work actually happens), teams maintain transparency, organisations retain control, and the architecture evolves alongside the business without the cost of replatforming. This is not a niche concern. It speaks to every enterprise leader navigating AI in environments where trust, regulation, and scale are not optional considerations — they are the entire challenge.

The Summit explores what this looks like in practice, with sessions grounded in the architectural and organizational choices that make responsible AI adoption real, not just possible.

What to expect on 14 May

From 9:00 am to 5:45 pm at 360 Madison Avenue in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, you will have access to thirteen sessions built entirely around case studies from peers who are applying AI in production environments. No theoretical frameworks. No technical deep-dives. Just honest, grounded conversations about what works, what doesn't, and what it takes to build AI your organization can trust for the long term.

Practitioners and leaders are flying in from across the US and Europe to share first-hand experience and to learn from each other. Your pass also grants access to the wider apidays New York event running across both days, connecting you with communities exploring APIs, AI agents, cybersecurity, and modern digital infrastructure — all under the same roof.

Explore the Summit

Early Bird tickets available until 13 April

Secure your place at the Drupal AI Summit NYC for $150 USD before 13 April 2026. After that, tickets are $200 USD.

The Paris edition sold out. If you're planning to join us in New York, early is the right call.

The foundations for enterprise-grade AI already exist. Come and see how they're being built — openly, responsibly, and together.

Secure your Early Bird ticket today!

Photos by Paul Johnson

File attachments:  54974791880_b1bdd50c90_k.jpg 54974505341_252617ffea_k.jpg

Open Source software is free to download. But the infrastructure that makes it usable is not.

When developers install or update dependencies through npm, Composer, pip, or Cargo, those tools rely on package registries that host and distribute millions of software packages. When maintainers collaborate, they depend on hosted services: Git repositories, CI pipelines, and other tools to build, test, and release software.

Most of this infrastructure is invisible to end users, and almost no one thinks about what it costs to run.

But it is not free. Someone has to operate the servers, pay for bandwidth, respond to support questions, patch security issues, and keep everything reliable.

Much of the modern software ecosystem depends on these services working reliably. And yet the organizations operating them are almost always scrambling to fund them.

A patchwork of fragile arrangements

Every large Open Source project has found some way to keep its infrastructure running. Usually that means a mix of donated services, sponsorships, fundraising, cross-subsidy, or patronage from a single company.

The table below highlights the primary funding mechanisms various Open Source projects depend on, even though most projects combine several.

Donated infrastructure Multi-company sponsorship Community funding Single-company patronage PyPI ☑ ☐ ☐ ☐ Packagist ☐ ☐ ☐ ☑ npm ☐ ☐ ☐ ☑ WordPress ☐ ☐ ☐ ☑ RubyGems ☐ ☑ ☑ ☐ Drupal ☑ ☑ ☑ ☐

The mix differs across ecosystems, and some rely on several mechanisms at once. But one thing stands out: none of these approaches tie funding directly to how much the infrastructure is used.

PyPI, the Python Package Index, illustrates the sponsorship model. It handles billions of downloads a day on infrastructure donated by Fastly, AWS, and Google Cloud. The Python Software Foundation described this arrangement's fragility in a post last October: if a single sponsor decides not to renew, it would cost them tens of thousands of dollars a month to replace the lost infrastructure.

Packagist, the main PHP package repository, follows a different approach. It is run by a private company that also sells a commercial product called Private Packagist. Revenue from the paid product subsidizes the free public registry. It's one of the more sustainable models out there, though it means a public good depends on one company's continued success.

npm tried to operate as an independent company, ran into serious financial trouble, and was eventually acquired by GitHub in 2020. The end result is that critical JavaScript infrastructure is now owned by Microsoft.

WordPress.org runs on a different version of the same dynamic: corporate patronage. Automattic, by far the ecosystem's largest commercial beneficiary, subsidizes most of the infrastructure. It works, but it also means that whoever funds the infrastructure controls it.

The FAIR project, a federated package manager backed by the Linux Foundation, was designed to give the WordPress ecosystem an independent alternative. The software works but its organizers recently stepped back after failing to secure long-term funding commitments.

RubyGems took the community fundraising route, launching a program last year asking businesses for $2,500 to $5,000 annually, with about 110 supporters needed to cover the registry's operations.

Drupal, the Open Source CMS I help lead, depends on the Drupal Association to run much of the infrastructure behind the project: Composer endpoints, GitLab repositories, CI pipelines, automatic update notifications, and more. Running all of this costs roughly $3 million a year. Funding comes from a mix of donated infrastructure, community funding, DrupalCon revenue, and sponsorship.

When the economics break, the consequences become visible. In February 2026, GNOME began redirecting Git traffic from its own GitLab to GitHub mirrors to reduce bandwidth costs. As a result, GitHub and its owner Microsoft now absorb some of GNOME's bandwidth cost.

Taken together, these examples point to the same underlying problem. Most Open Source infrastructure does not have a real business model. It survives through donations, corporate sponsorship, and community fundraising, rather than revenue tied to the value it delivers.

From steward to service provider

One direction that makes sense to me is a simple value exchange: keep core infrastructure free for individuals and small projects, while organizations using it at scale help pay for what they consume. Not as a donation, but as payment for the infrastructure their software depends on.

Some people will instinctively resist the idea of charging for the infrastructure behind an Open Source project. That reaction may feel familiar to anyone who remembers the early debates about paid contributors. At the time, many feared corporate money would drive volunteers away. In practice, the opposite happened. Projects grew, contributor bases expanded, and paid engineers became some of their most active contributors.

That does not mean every new funding idea is a good one. But instinctive discomfort alone is not a reason to reject it.

In Open Source, what looks like fairness often is not. Free for everyone sounds equitable, but the cost does not disappear. It is absorbed by those who can least afford it, while the organizations that benefit most often pay the least. When a Fortune 500 company consumes Open Source infrastructure for free, that is not a neutral outcome. It is a subsidy flowing in the wrong direction.

If the problem is that costs are disconnected from usage, the obvious place to start is linking them. Exactly how that would work in practice is a separate design question, and the answer will likely differ from one Open Source project to another. One possible approach is usage-based fees, tiered by download volume or API consumption. Questions about measurement, thresholds, and enforcement would need careful community discussion.

Governance is downstream of funding

If infrastructure funding models need to change, the obvious question is who decides. In Open Source, questions like this ultimately belong to the community.

But communities do not decide these things in a vacuum. In practice, governance tends to follow funding.

Discussions about Open Source infrastructure often focus on governance: who should control it and who gets to make the decisions. In reality, those questions are often settled by something simpler: who pays for it.

FAIR is a recent example. The project didn't fail because federation was the wrong idea. It failed because nobody built a business case compelling enough to fund it as an alternative.

When one organization pays for the infrastructure, it ultimately controls it. When a broader set of stakeholders funds it, governance broadens with it.

That is why Open Source infrastructure needs more than better fundraising. It needs a business model that connects the cost of operating shared infrastructure to the organizations that rely on it most.

Infrastructure that entire ecosystems depend on cannot rely indefinitely on goodwill alone. It deserves a business model.

Solving the funding problem is a prerequisite to solving the governance problem.

Thanks to Tiffany Farriss, Tim Lehnen, Gábor Hojtsy and Lauri Timmanee for reviewing my draft.

Across the Drupal ecosystem, much of the work that keeps the project moving forward happens through sustained community effort. Developers maintain modules and review patches, accessibility specialists improve inclusive design practices, documentation writers clarify complex workflows, and organisers run DrupalCamps, DrupalCons, and local meetups that bring contributors together.

Women across the Drupal community play visible roles in many of these areas. They lead accessibility initiatives, maintain projects, organise community events, and guide product and platform discussions that influence how Drupal evolves. In recent years, these contributions have shaped areas ranging from documentation and mentoring to platform initiatives such as Drupal CMS and accessibility-driven improvements across the ecosystem.

International Women’s Day offers a moment to acknowledge that work without separating it from the technical core of the project. The stories in this week’s issue highlight the broader ecosystem in motion—from new developer tools and experimental modules to DrupalCon Chicago announcements and community initiatives reported over the past week.

With that context, here are the major stories from last week.

EVENT

• Mike Herchel Previews DrupalCon Chicago Sessions on Theming, Contributions, and Drupal CMS
• Managing Multisite Configuration with Config Split at DrupalCon Chicago 2026
• Drupal Community Summit Scheduled at DrupalCon Chicago 2026
• Drupal 25th Anniversary Gala Set for 24 March in Chicago
• DrupalSouth 2026 Splash Awards Opens Submissions for Wellington Event
• Stanford WebCamp 2026 Opens Call for Session Proposals
• Decoupled Days 2026 Scheduled for 6–7 August in Montréal

ACCESSIBILITY

• AmyJune Hineline Releases Accessibility Microlearning for Open Source Contributors

DRUPAL COMMUNITY

• Fundraiser Launched to Support “Drupal in a Day” Workshop at DrupalCon Chicago

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Ivan Zugec Builds Node Tool to Auto-Clip Drupal Live Streams Using Remotion and FFmpeg
• New AEO Module Targets AI Search Optimization in Drupal
• A Practical Workflow for Tracking Drupal Core Changes
• Shortlink Manager 1.1 Beta Adds Analytics, QR Codes, and Automated Health Checks
• Form Layout Module Introduced for Drupal Edit Form Organisation
• Mark Conroy Publishes Experimental WebMCP Module for Drupal User Forms

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now. To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you.

Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The DropTimes

Staging-server bottlenecks often slow releases, compress QA into the final days of a sprint, and leave stakeholders reviewing work too late to give meaningful feedback. In this DrupalCon North America 2026 session, Jasmyne Epps of Digital Services Georgia and James Sansbury of Tugboat explain how the State of Georgia redesigned QA and UAT for GovHub by moving testing and stakeholder review directly into pull requests. The result is a workflow that helps teams catch issues earlier, collaborate continuously, and scale delivery across more than 80 state agency websites.

Dreaming about Claude Code

I lost sleep last night, dreaming about Claude Code. The night before, I was working too late and too hard on a coding problem, and I ended up dreaming about it and circling the solution. I was ruminating on how Claude Code fits into my development workflow. In my dream, I kept circling back to the question of how to code Drupal using AI.

I want to emphasize that I had a dream, not a nightmare. The dream was triggered by spending an entire day clauding at Symfony, more generally using Claude Code to improve my understanding of Symfony and how it is used in Drupal.

Improving my understanding of Symfony within Drupal

First and foremost, I see AI as a powerful tool, not a replacement for developers. AI is a disruptor affecting both junior and senior developers, requiring them to learn to use AI to develop and maintain software applications. An AI tidal wave is underway, and we need to get ahead of it rather than ignore it.

My long-term goal is to bring AI into my Drupal development workflow, yet I like circling around big challenges and seeking a learning task that is somewhat Drupal-adjacent. There are two Symfony-related issues/tasks on Drupal.org that I want to understand and maybe help resolve.

The first one is really simple. The latest version of Drupal CMS and, in turn, the AI Agents module can't generate content types. i.e., "create an Event content type" because the AI agent throws a passing generic $value parameter triggers an error. This is a minor bug, but I honestly don't understand Drupal's integration with Symfony's validation component well enough to contribute a patch.

A much larger second discussion I have been following for several years is the addition of integration...Read More

The weekend of 28th February to the 1st March saw the second DrupalCamp England event with around 100 people attending the University of Salford, not far from Manchester, for the two day event.

I had submitted a talk and the camp organisers had accepted it and also decided to make me a featured speaker, which was an incredible honour. As such I was part of the communications being sent out in the weeks before the event.

Since this is more or less a local event for me I decided to travel in on both days rather than get a hotel or anything. The rain and wind of the previous week had abated and the Saturday morning saw some of the warmest (and driest) weather we had seen in the north west for a few months.

Saturday

The keynote on Saturday morning was The Augmented Future: Winning with AI with Dr. Phininder Balaghan, founder of Traversally. This was an look through the current state of AI, which Dr. Balaghan said changes every time he gives the talk.

Most companies these days have adopted an agile methodology, which has taken about 20 years to become widespread. Since the introduction of LLM AI systems a few years ago we have seen massive adoption across all industries.

Dr. Balaghan joked that we have reached the age of AI-gile, the new agile methodology.

At the moment we are using a collection of LLM agents that work together in a so-called "agentic" system to provide a coherent service. The next true advancement in AI systems will be thinking AI systems that are able to properly think about the input and respond. I think we are quite a long way from that yet and no amount of processing power or RAM is going to solve the problem that LLMs are just statistical word engines.

Read more

My experiment in bringing Drupal Module Upgrader back from the dead in less than 24 hours

Drupal Module Upgrader (DMU) was created by Angie Byron and Adam Hoenich way back in 2014 at Acquia to help folks upgrade custom Drupal 7 modules to modern Drupal. It was magic. Cameron Zemek at PreviousNext built the crucial underlying library, Pharborist, which abstracted PHP manipulation into a generic dependency. Many relied on DMU to upgrade custom code, and it was even updated for Drupal 9; however, keeping it current over time proved challenging.

Gábor Hojtsy Sat, 03/07/2026 - 09:13