Learn more about the implementation that helped automatically verify transactions for AML.

Overall SummaryOur 35th UI Suite Monthly was one of the most packed sessions yet — a full hour of demos, strategy updates, and an urgent call to action for the community. We covered major progress on the Display Builder (now mid-beta with half its scope completed), a breakthrough demo of symmetric and asymmetric translation support, a roadmap for cleaning up and refocusing UI Patterns this summer, the exciting new ability to use SDC components as form elements, and two critical core proposals — the Design Token API and the Style API — that need community support before the May 15th freeze. We also gave a first look at our AI strategy for display building, with a live demo coming next month. In short: our ecosystem is maturing fast, and the next week is decisive.

This is part five of a series of articles looking at HTMX in Drupal. If you are interested in reading more then there will be a list of related articles at the end of this article.

When I was thinking about ideas on demonstrating HTMX in Drupal I implemented things like infinite scroll, a tabbed interface, and a cascading select form. I basically recreating some things that I had done in non-Drupal HTMX inside a Drupal module.

I then had an idea to create something that I might actually find useful in my day to day work as a Drupal developer. This was some way of displaying nodes in different view modes.

In this article we will look at creating a simple form that allows users to enter a node ID and a view mode and see the node rendered in that view mode.

All of the code contained in this article can be found in the Drupal HTMX examples project on GitHub, but here we will go through what the code does and what actions it performs to generate content.   

Just like the other articles on HTMX, I'm going to start with the basics and define the route.

The Route

The route we need here just needs to point the path /htmx-examples/display-mode-preview at our form class.

drupal_htmx_examples_display_mode_preview_form: path: "/htmx-examples/display-mode-preview" defaults: _form: '\Drupal\drupal_htmx_examples\Form\DisplayModePreviewForm' _title: "HTMX Display Mode Preview Form" requirements: _permission: "access content"

There isn't anything unusual about this route, it's just a regular form route.

Let's create the form for this route.

The Form

The form class has a couple of injected dependencies, which are as follows:

Read more

Read moreSome places do not merely offer a view. They give you direction. Athens did that to me. During Drupal Dev Days, I found myself looking at the Acropolis from a distance. The Parthenon was there, standing above the city, glowing with a presence that is difficult to describe if you have not seen it in person.From Athens to Rotterdam: Why Drupal AI Needs an "Athena" ReleaseAISaturday, May 9, 2026 - 16:16

A new open-source Drupal module aims to reduce the repeated custom development often required to connect Drupal-managed content with Mautic campaigns. By exposing Drupal nodes and Views directly inside Mautic workflows, the module provides a more standardised approach to content delivery and segment-based personalisation.

Nic Laflin and Matt Glaman sit down to discuss Drupal caching and Matt's new Leanpub book, Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe016

Topics

• New Book on Caching
• Why Drupal Caching Shines
• Cache Tags Explained
• Cache Context Variations
• What Caching Really Is
• Invalidation Across the Stack
• NGINX Layer Pitfalls
• What Drupal Can Cache
• Writing Cacheable Render Arrays
• Debugging Metadata Issues
• Testing Caching Strategies
• Researching the Book
• Variation Cache Deep Dive
• Access Policy and Performance
• Permissions Caching and Disk IO
• Extension Discovery Tangent
• File Cache Explained
• Clearing File Cache in Tests
• Updating the Book Over Time
• Leanpub Pricing and Royalties
• Publishing Workflow and Tools
• Writing Process and Editing

Matt Glaman

Matt Glaman is an experienced software engineer and a prominent member of the Drupal community. With over a decade of experience in web development, he has developed a wealth of knowledge and expertise. He is the author of several books, including "Drupal 8 Development Cookbook" and "Drupal 10 Development Cookbook," which provide a comprehensive guide to building and customizing Drupal sites. And recently, the book Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers.

Nic Laflin

Nic Laflin is an accomplished Drupal architect and the founder of nLightened Development LLC, a web development and design firm established in 2008 that leverages highly extensible CMS frameworks to solve complex business challenges. They've been working with Drupal since late 2008, delivering creative solutions for a diverse roster of clients—from government agencies and e-commerce platforms to higher-education institutions and HIPAA-compliant medical services. Recently, Nic has focused on Native Web Components for platform-agnostic design, and has deep experience integrating AWS and building mobile application back ends. A recognized Drupal guru, Nic speaks regularly at regional Drupal camps and co-hosts the Talking Drupal podcast, where they share best practices and innovations with the community. Outside of technology, Nic enjoys building with LEGO, experimenting in the kitchen, and designing home automation projects. You can learn more at www.nlightened.net.

Resources

Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers https://mglaman.dev/blog/leveraging-list-cache-tag-entity-types If you're using a reverse proxy then disable the internal page cache https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3414825

Guests

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan

Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman

Drupal Commerce powers live auctions involving thousands of concurrent users, serves catalogues with millions of products, and presents rich product pages with hundreds of attributes and variations. And it does so with speed and reliability. In fact, it was architected to manage high volume and high complexity.

So why does your Drupal Commerce site feel so slow? Why does it feel like you’re constantly fighting bottlenecks and performance problems?

It’s not the platform. It’s something else.

In this webinar, Ryan Szrama and Tom Ashe will cover the most common culprits behind slow Drupal Commerce sites and how you can start fixing them.

Whether you're troubleshooting a slow site yourself or managing a team that is, you'll walk away with a practical checklist to investigate and a process for diagnosing your performance issues.

Join us on Tuesday, June 9th, at 10:30 AM ET.

Register for the webinar.
 

Read more

The Enterprise Drupal Summit Europe 2026 will take place on 28 September 2026 in the SS Rotterdam.

We are now accepting session proposals.

Focus of the summit

The program focuses on Drupal in enterprise contexts, with emphasis on:

• Large-scale Drupal architectures
• Digital experience platforms built on Drupal
• AI use in enterprise content and delivery workflows
• Composable and API-driven architectures
• Governance, security, and compliance in regulated environments
• Operating Drupal at scale in complex organizations

The event is aimed at practitioners and decision-makers working on enterprise digital platforms.

What we are looking for

We are prioritizing submissions that are based on real implementations.

Relevant topics include:

• Case studies from enterprise or public sector deployments
• Architecture decisions in complex Drupal systems
• AI integration in content management or delivery
• Multi-site and multi-brand Drupal setups
• Sessions should be grounded in practical experience rather than product positioning.

Format

Accepted formats include:

• 20 minute talks (MAX)
• Case study presentations (focus on the business side)
• Architecture or strategy sessions

Selection criteria

Proposals will be evaluated on:

• Relevance to enterprise Drupal use cases
• Clarity of problem and solution
• Evidence of real-world implementation
• Transferable lessons for other enterprise organizations
• Technical or organizational depth

Submit a proposal

Submissions are open via Pretalx.

Looking forward to seeing you there!
 

Stability & Innovation: Web Acceleration with Drupal Core and Drupal CMS - session recording

I recently stood before a room of fellow builders at Drupal Developer Days Athens 2026 and asked a question: "How many of you use Drupal distributions?" Lots of hands shot up across the room. But when I followed up with, "And how many of you are actually happy with them?" the room went quiet, only a couple hands remained in the air. Distributions were our solution for long to make starting easier with Drupal, so this was sad.

Gábor Hojtsy Thu, 05/07/2026 - 13:35

Article by: Aidan Foster, Foster Interactive

The three human skills that turn AI into a multiplier.

Creativity, strategic thinking, and articulation are the three skills that decide whether AI makes you better or just faster.

• Strategic thinking comes from experience. There's no shortcut.
• Creativity can be learned, but it's more like going to the gym than reading a book. You build it through reps.
• Articulation lets you craft quality prompts and specs for AI, and it's the most trainable of the three. But it only matters when there's something worth articulating. The value lives in the other two.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

The AI discourse has one dominant message: automate faster, cut the grunt work, reduce headcount, ship more.

Most leaders are responding by getting better at execution. Better prompts. Faster workflows. More output per person.

Execution still matters. It's just not where the constraint is anymore. The leaders who pull ahead in the next three years won't be the ones who automated the most; they'll be the ones who understood where the real constraint moved.

The Bottleneck Moved

Think back to five years ago. A new landing page meant a brief, a copywriter, a designer, a developer, a round of revisions, and three weeks of calendar time. A campaign asset required coordinating four people across two time zones for something that might run for six days before you killed it.

That friction was real. Teams were sized around it. Agencies were built on it. Budgets accounted for it. That friction is gone.

A capable team can now produce a landing page in hours. Drafts, variants, and structured content at a pace that would have required six people two years ago. The execution ceiling collapsed.

The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved upstream, to the quality of thinking that goes in before AI touches anything.

Strategic clarity. Creative direction. Precise articulation of what you actually want.

That's where the value lives now. That's where most teams are dangerously underprepared.

Strategic Thinking

A CMO walks into a strategy review and knows something is wrong. They've seen this pattern fail before, in a different market with a different product. They remember exactly how it ended.

That's not intuition in the mystical sense. It's pattern recognition built through immersion. You watch your confident calls go wrong, you figure out why, you adjust.

Strategic thinking requires experiencing consequences. You have to have been wrong, and had something depend on you being right.

Researchers studying scientists at the frontier of human knowledge found the same principle. The best of them use cultivated judgment to ask better questions, to know where to go next. AI needs to be pointed. It executes brilliantly within a defined frame. The frame has to come from somewhere.

Our sense for aesthetics, meaning and embodiment give us a vital advantage over our technological creations.

Why Human Intuition Is Still Science's Greatest Tool In The Age Of AI - Noema Magazine, 2026

Creativity

Most people believe creativity is an innate trait. Either you have it or you don't. That's wrong.

86% more ideas after 3 months of training. The untrained control group barely changed.

Creativity is a muscle. It responds to reps, to practice, to deliberate exposure to new inputs. A controlled study at Radboud University found that students who went through structured creativity training nearly doubled their ideation output in under a year. The untrained group stayed completely flat. (PLOS ONE, 2020)

You cannot read your way to it. You have to do the reps.

Research across Nobel laureates and major creative contributors identified two distinct types of creativity with two distinct peak ages. Conceptual innovators - the ones who execute one brilliant overarching idea - tend to peak young. Experimental innovators - the ones who synthesize across years of accumulated experience and observation - peak in their 50s. (Galenson and Weinberg, via Big Think)

The kind of creativity that matters most in marketing is the experimental kind. The kind that gets better the more you've seen.

The senior strategist who's been in the game 15 years isn't past their creative peak. The research says they may not have hit it yet.

Articulation

Articulation gets your thinking and creativity out of your head and into a form AI can use.

A VP with sharp strategic instincts and genuine creative range can still get generic output from AI if they can't extract what's in their head and structure it precisely.

Imprecise input produces generic output. Always.

The model doesn't know what your brand sounds like. It doesn't know who your buyers are, what language they use, or what keeps them up at night. It doesn't know what you've learned over three years about what actually converts.

All of that has to come from you, structured in a way AI can use. Articulation responds to deliberate practice faster than the other two. Most people never treat it as something worth developing. (Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook, 2025)

Experience Is the Advantage If You Use It Correctly

The skills AI cannot replicate are the ones that take years to build. But knowing that doesn't help unless you act on it. Three things worth doing now:

Audit your process assumptions, not your expertise. The judgment you've built is the asset. The habits formed around the old production bottleneck are what need to change.

Treat articulation as a skill to develop deliberately. Document what you know about your buyers, your brand, your market. Structure it. That structured knowledge is what separates useful AI output from generic noise.

Do the creative reps. Consistent exposure to new inputs and new problems. New disciplines.

Give yourself and your team time to be creative. Whiteboard ideas as a group. Collect interesting work and express what specifically about it grabbed your attention.

Skip the reps and your creative edge fades.

Leaders who invest in all three first will pull ahead. The advantage compounds.

Where does your team sit?

Most teams I talk to are strong on execution. The upstream work - the strategic clarity, the creative direction, the structured articulation of what makes them different - is where the gap is.

That gap is also where the opportunity is.

Drop a comment. I'd like to hear how others are thinking through this.

Sources: Noema Magazine (2026), Radboud University / PLOS ONE (2020), Galenson and Weinberg / De Economist (via Big Think), Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook (2025)
 

Ten years of Drupal Code history

When I setup the Drupal contrib search engine, the goal was to detect modules we'd break with a code change in Drupal Core. It works but I wanted to know more than that, so I spent a couple of weeks getting more data. I want to start with a huge thank you to my long time sponsors: Palantir.net and Vardot.

theodore May 7, 2026

Keeping up with major Drupal Core releases takes real effort. Each release deprecates APIs and introduces new coding patterns, forcing module developers to update their code.

That is how most software evolves: old patterns are gradually replaced by better ones.

Tools like Drupal Rector help automate parts of that work, but still rely on hand-written rules. Historically, that hasn't scaled well. Writing Rector rules is often more tedious than difficult: reading change records, understanding edge cases, finding real-world usage patterns, and testing rules.

So I asked a different question: what if we didn't have to write Rector rules at all?

If AI can generate Rector rules automatically, Drupal Core can keep evolving without every API change turning into manual migration work.

That idea led me to extend Drupal Digests, the tool I built to follow key Drupal developments. In addition to generating summaries, it now also analyzes Drupal Core commits and generates Rector rules automatically.

When a Drupal Core commit deprecates an API or introduces a new pattern, the tool reads the related issue, analyzes the discussion around it, reviews the code changes, and generates a corresponding Rector rule.

The system has only been running for a few weeks, yet it has already generated over 175 Rector rules, with new rules continuously added as the pipeline processes more Drupal Core issues.

AI-generated code is far from perfect. Some rules will have bugs, and others will miss edge cases. But that is exactly why I wanted to publish them now: the more people test them on real projects, the faster they will improve.

Special thanks to Björn Brala, co-maintainer of Drupal Rector, who discovered I was working on this and quickly jumped in to help test and validate some of the generated rules. That kind of feedback is incredibly valuable.

You can try them as follows:

git clone https://github.com/dbuytaert/drupal-digests.git composer require --dev rector/rector vendor/bin/rector process web/modules/custom \ --config drupal-digests/rector/all.php --dry-run Example

Take Drupal's modernization of the $entity->original property, which exposed the unchanged copy of an entity. Drupal 11.2 deprecated the property in favor of explicit $entity->getOriginal() and $entity->setOriginal() methods. The old property will be removed in Drupal 12 so various module maintainers have to update their code.

Drupal Digests generated a Rector rule that rewrites read access to getOriginal() and write assignment to setOriginal().

Before:

$entity->original->field->value; $entity->original = $unchanged;

After:

$entity->getOriginal()->field->value; $entity->setOriginal($unchanged);

AI-generated upgrade rules will not eliminate all upgrade work anytime soon. But even partial automation can reduce a surprising amount of repetitive work while helping Drupal evolve faster.

Synthetic Personas Have Never Been More Real kdavis Wed, 05/06/2026 - 14:14 Topic Artificial Intelligence Summary Ever wonder why your customer personas feel outdated the moment they're finished? Static personas can't keep up with audiences that shift constantly, so the fix is pairing two AI-powered approaches: synthetic personas that act as interactive thought partners for early ideation, and research-bounded tools that surface trustworthy insights from your existing research. The takeaway? Empathy and evidence aren't opponents, they're partners, and the smartest teams use both. Promo Image Synthetic Personas Whitepaper gif.jpg

DrevOps has released Vortex 1.38.0 “Prism”, updating its Drupal project template with JavaScript unit testing, email safeguards, deployment controls, and security hardening. The release focuses on operational reliability for Drupal teams, including changes to CI, configuration import handling, Renovate, and runtime support. It also moves the template baseline to PHP 8.4, Lagoon containers 26.4.0, and Drupal core 11.3.x.

Learn how incomplete tracking affects your analytics, why it leads to wrong decisions, and how Google Tag Manager helps create a reliable tracking setup.

Master fault-tolerant enterprise hosting with Kubernetes self-healing, multi-zone HA, and canary deployments. Learn how we ensure 24/7/365 reliability.

In January 2025, Anoop John of TheDropTimes sent a LinkedIn message that set things in motion:

"Happy New Year. I was thinking we could put a live sponsorship tracker for DDEV on TDT. We should ask for people for $5 per month and we need 1000 people to hit the target right? What do you think?"

That message led to live, auto-updating DDEV sponsorship displays on multiple web properties, a public data repository, and a reusable web component—all feeding from a single source of truth.

The Challenge

DDEV's financial sustainability depends entirely on sponsorships (we have no other income). Communicating that need—and showing progress toward goals—requires getting accurate, up-to-date data in front of people where they already spend time. We wouldn't really expect to be successful with manual updates across multiple web and CLI properties.

What we needed was a data feed that could be consumed anywhere, updated (mostly) automatically, and displayed consistently.

The sponsorship-data Repository

Anoop's request spurred the creation of ddev/sponsorship-data, a public repository that aggregates sponsorship information from GitHub Sponsors and other sources, updated automatically. The data is published as structured JSON—for example, all-sponsorships.json—that any site or tool can consume.

Mark Conroy's Web Component

Mark Conroy stepped up with a reusable web component that reads from the sponsorship-data feed and renders live sponsorship information. The component lives at web-components.mark.ie and is open source at markconroy/web-components. (DDEV has forked the original in order to maintain it for our particular uses.)

The component makes it trivial to embed a live sponsor list on any site—no backend required, no manual updates.

Integration into DDEV Web Properties

With the data feed and component in place, we integrated the live sponsor display into ddev.com. Since then, it has been added to addons.ddev.com and docs.ddev.com. Source for each:

• ddev.com SponsorsBanner.astro
• addons.ddev.com sponsors-banner.html
• docs.ddev.com sponsors-banner.html

Now, when sponsors join or leave, the banner updates automatically. No manual edits, no stale lists.

What ddev start Shows

Most dedicated DDEV users aren't spending time on websites—they're in the terminal. ddev start has long provided a tip of the day, so we integrated the sponsorship feed into that output as well:

Some people report watching the numbers change day to day, cheering the project toward its goal.

Why This Matters

The sponsorship situation for DDEV is something we take seriously and we know you do also: the project needs ongoing financial support to continue development and be maintained over the long term. Getting that message in front of people—accurately and consistently—helps. We're all a community working together to make this work.

The path from Anoop's January 2025 LinkedIn message to live sponsor feeds across multiple properties took a few months of work by community members who cared.

Thanks to Anoop, The Drop Times, and Mark Conroy

More than a year later, The Drop Times is still featuring the DDEV sponsorship banner!

Thank you for your support, and thank you for your encouragement to go down this path. It has resulted in better communication with our community and a shared sense of ownership around DDEV's future.

Mark, your packaging of a nice banner made things so much easier!

Join in

If you use DDEV and find it valuable, consider sponsoring at github.com/sponsors/ddev. Every bit that you and your organization can contribute helps all of us. Thank you!

At DrupalCon Chicago, the Driesnote included a visualization with “community” as one of the three pillars of Drupal, along with “platform” and “agencies.” That framing felt memorable, and worth exploring further.

If you attended DrupalCon Chicago, you might have experienced a slightly differently shaped triangle. I don’t know the attendance numbers, but I saw technical sessions with packed rooms, while community-focused sessions had plenty of empty seats. That’s not new. It’s been true for years. People care about community, but when the schedule forces a choice between a session on AI integration and one on community health, most folks choose the technical session. I understand why. Technical work feels concrete. Community work is generally not why employers send folks to a DrupalCon.

This raises a question: how can all of us work together to close that gap without having to attend community sessions at DrupalCon?

Consulting our Code of Conduct

I serve on the Community Working Group (CWG), specifically on the Community Health Team. A lot of people don’t know there are two teams inside the CWG, so here’s the short version:

• The Conflict Resolution Team handles incidents after they happen. If you file an incident report, they’re the ones who review it.
• The Community Health Team works on everything that happens before an incident report, such as workshops, resources, and other preventive work. Our goal is to help the community build the kind of culture where fewer situations reach the reporting stage in the first place.

Both teams matter. And beyond the CWG, the DrupalCon Code of Conduct offers advice for all of us. It includes a section titled “We are collaborative,” which says:

If and when misunderstandings occur, we encourage people to work things out between themselves where this is practical. Where support is beneficial to achieve this, participants agree to ask for help. People are encouraged to take responsibility for their words and actions and listen to constructively-presented criticism with an open mind, courtesy, and respect.

I suspect that many people read the harassment list and the reporting email and stop there. That’s understandable. Those parts exist for a reason. But the passage above describes the wide middle ground where most friction in our community occurs.

The middle ground of community health

If the only two options we envision are “this is fine” and “file a report,” we end up with a lot of buried resentment, a few dramatic blowups, and not much in between. Most day-to-day friction doesn’t rise to the level of a Code of Conduct violation. It’s tone. Assumption. Misread intent. A comment in an issue queue from someone who didn’t scroll up to read what had already been said. A joke that came off differently than it was intended.

The Community Health Team’s work is to strengthen the middle. That means helping people develop the habits and skills to address friction directly, kindly, and early, so it doesn’t compound into something that needs the Conflict Resolution Team. The Code of Conduct invites everyone to do this work. Not just CWG members. Everyone.

Some ways we work things out

Here are four situations I’ve seen in the community, and in some cases been part of. None of these are scripts. They’re illustrations. The point is that the Code of Conduct invites you to try, and that you’re allowed to. You don’t need permission.

• Late at night at a DrupalCon, after hours of sprinting and drinks in the hotel lobby, someone says something about another contributor that turns a few heads. That person might realize it the next day. The generous move, the one the Code asks for, is to find that person and say “I said something last night I want to walk back.” Not a grand apology. Just a small, honest correction. Most of the time, that’s the whole fix.
• Someone drops a comment in an issue queue without reading the full thread above. Their comment reads as dismissive of work that’s already been done, or repeats a point that was already addressed, and it comes off as rude. They might not know that’s how it came across. A direct message from someone in the thread (“hey, I think you may have missed a few comments, here’s where we landed”) can turn that into nothing. A pile-on in the issue turns it into something else.
• You witness an exchange between two people at DrupalCon that makes you wince. Maybe it’s cultural. The Drupal community spans continents, and directness that comes across as rude in one country seems normal in another. Maybe it’s a power dynamic, or a bad day, or both. Checking in with the person on the receiving end, just between the two of you (“I could not help but notice your conversation and I wanted to ask, are you doing okay?”), doesn’t escalate anything. It lets them know they weren’t invisible.
• Someone keeps doing something that just doesn’t feel right. Not harmful, but grating. You can do your best to describe how it made you feel before it becomes a grudge you carry into every future interaction. “Hey, can I mention something? The way we’re doing X did not sit well with me, and I want to figure out how to talk about it.”

If you need help figuring out the best way to handle a situation like this, the Community Health Team is available. We can help you talk through a situation, decide whether a direct conversation is possible, or offer a second perspective. You can reach out at any time. We don’t investigate, and we don’t take sides. We think with you.

When it isn’t practical

The Code says “where this is practical.” Sometimes it isn’t.

We live in a world with power differences. If the person on the other side holds significant authority over your ability to contribute, a direct conversation may not be safe for you. Ongoing patterns of behavior are different from single incidents. Safety concerns are different from style concerns. And if the other person has shown they aren’t willing to engage in good faith, you are not obligated to keep trying.

Those are incidents for the Conflict Resolution Team. Those are the situations the people on that team signed up for, and you can reach them through the incident report form. Filing a report is not escalation for its own sake. It’s using the right tool for the situation.

The three-pillar framing

Returning to the Driesnote, if community is one of three pillars holding up Drupal, then the pillar can’t only be carried by the folks who show up to CWG sessions. The math doesn’t work. Community health has to happen in the rooms with the technical sessions, on the Slack channels where the code review happens, or at the dinner table where someone just got interrupted for the third time.

Most of the work the Community Health Team cares about isn’t work you need a whole session to learn. It’s work you’re already in a position to do. The next time something said in an issue queue doesn’t feel right, you catch yourself venting about someone, or you see a newcomer get talked over, you have a chance to support Drupal’s community.

Community is a pillar, which means it doesn't get held up by a small group of people with CWG in their session title. It gets held up, or it doesn't, by how we talk to each other on a Tuesday afternoon when no one's watching.

Drupal’s Code of Conduct doesn’t just give you a way to report harm. It also asks you to do the smaller, harder thing first. That’s where most community health happens.

File attachments:  pillars-of-drupal.png