Advent Calendar day 1 - Neurodiversity: An Underrated Superpower in Business james Mon, 12/01/2025 - 23:59

I really enjoy keynotes at DrupalCon, particularly those given by guests from outside the Drupal community. This year’s European DrupalCon in Vienna was no exception, and I think Vera Herzmann’s talk on Neurodiversity resonated with everyone present.

I loved how she highlighted neurodiverse people are not disabled or a problem to be solved, but people with superpowers valuable to business, and an asset to be cherished.

She also really engaged with the audience, giving us items to discuss with the people nearby, and I think the audience came back with some excellent points.

The video of her…

Tags

• Advent Calendar 2025
• Neurodiversity
• Keynote

Advent Calendar 2025 - the new plan james Mon, 12/01/2025 - 19:02 Image Body

So first, an apology. I have failed in my original plan. A nasty cold/flu thing sapped my energy, and I wasn’t organised enough to make it work.

The plan was to have initiative leads nominate people who have made an important contribution to their projects, and to feature those “People of Drupal” behind the doors.

Think you to all the people who made great suggestions, and thank you to the people they suggested who responded positively, but we’ve run out of time to make it work.

I still think “The People of Drupal” has great potential, and hopefully we can make it work if we start much earlier…

Contrast Issues -- can you read the text? Dec 01, 2025 0

One of the most common issues we run into making websites accessible is contrast -- making sure the difference between the color and brightness of the text against the background is enough that it's clearly readable.

Blue text on a dark background can be very difficult to read -- but it's not just brightness. Red-green color-blindness affects around 8% of males around the world. Take a screen out into bright sunlight and try to read text that's similar brightness to its background, and you can start to understand that contrast issues affect everyone.

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Drupal has been counted out for years, yet it continues to power some of the most active and trusted websites on the internet. Trends come and go, but the data keeps pointing to the same truth: Drupal remains central to major digital experiences people rely on every day. That is why we built the Discover page at The DropTimes, a space that shows this reality plainly and in real time.

The Discover page gathers top Drupal sites using Tranco rankings based on actual traffic, not assumptions. It cuts through noise and shows who is using Drupal at scale and why it matters. Along with the rankings, we are steadily adding case studies that explain how organisations put Drupal to work in the real world. These insights highlight the decisions, goals and impact behind serious digital projects across industries.

With more than 3,000 sites already listed and many more on the way, our goal is simple: make Drupal’s ongoing relevance visible, understandable and impossible to ignore. As the page grows, so does the picture of a platform that is stable, adaptable and backed by a global community. This is an open invitation to explore, learn and contribute to a clearer understanding of what Drupal continues to achieve.

INTERVIEW

• Oaisys 25 Is Almost Here; Vidit Anjaria Has the Inside Story
• How Witze Van der Straeten Uses AI to Build a Figma-to-Drupal Workflow

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Discover Leading Drupal Websites and Real-World Use Cases on 'TDT Discover'
• UI Suite Launches Display Builder Beta 1, Advances Core Integration and AI Component‑Generation
• Drupal AI Pushes Forward: MCP 1.2, LMStudio Integration, and 2.0 Development Underway
• Call for Drupal Core Subsystem and Topic Maintainers Following 2025 Check-In
• Drupal AI Initiative Launches Industry Guides to Bridge AI Strategy and Real-World Impact
• Drupal MCP 1.2 Released with Security Coverage, Tools API Integration, and OAuth Support

TUTORIAL

• Testing Isn’t Broken – But Your Method Might Be

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• DevBranch’s Remote Driesnote Watch Parties Reflect Wartime Resilience and Drupal Loyalty
• The Human Edge in Presales: Beating AI-Drafted Drupal Proposals
• Dropsolid AI Raises €1.4M to Build Europe’s First Open, Sovereign AI Digital Experience Platform

PHP

• PHP 8.5 Released with Major New Features for Developers

EVENTS

• DrupalCon Chicago 2026 T-Shirt Design Contest Opens—Submit Your Creative Vision!
• Call for Speakers Opens for Drupal Developer Days Athens 2026 

 

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. 

Sincerely, 
Alka Elizabeth, 
Sub-editor, 
The DropTimes.

DrupalCon Asia 2025 in Nara, Japan, was more than just a tech conference. With thousands of attendees converging in a city steeped in history, the event reflected a deep sense of purpose and place. Mayor Gen Nakagawa’s remarks underscored Nara’s commitment to fostering global collaboration and open-source innovation.

My LocalGov Drupal contributions for November 2025

This month I focussed on fewer, but larger, issues. Let's see ...

markconroy 1st Dec 2025

If you run an education business today—whether it’s an online academy, coaching platform, corporate training portal or skill-development institute—choosing the right Learning Management System (LMS) is one of the most important decisions you will make. Your LMS becomes the backbone of your teaching, course delivery, student engagement and business growth. Among the many LMS plat

The Drop Times spoke with Witze Van der Straeten about his AI-driven Figma-to-Drupal workflow and how experimenting with SDCs, Canvas, and MCP shaped his approach to front-end work. He also reflects on how the Drupal community influenced his growth as a developer.

With Oaisys 25 just days away, QED42 Engineering Manager Vidit Anjaria sits down with The DropTimes to talk about the evolution of engineering culture, the lessons that shaped his approach to architecture, and why this weekend’s open-source AI practitioners’ event could mark a turning point for the community.

Today is Thanksgiving in the US. I know it's not a global holiday, but it has me thinking about gratitude, and specifically about a team that rarely gets the recognition it deserves: the Drupal Security Team.

As Drupal's project lead, I'm barely involved in our security work. And you know what? That is a sign that things are working really well.

Our Security Team reviews reports, analyzes vulnerabilities, coordinates patches across supported Drupal versions, and publishes advisories. They work with Drupal module maintainers and reporters to protect millions of websites. They also educate our community proactively, ensuring problems are prevented, not just fixed. It can be a lot of work, and delicate work.

To get an idea of the quality of their work, check out recent advisories at drupal.org/security. I know it's maybe strange to point out security advisories, but their work meets the highest standards of maturity. For example, Drupal is authorized as a CVE Numbering Authority, which means our security processes meet international standards for vulnerability coordination.

Whether you're running a small blog or critical government infrastructure, the Security Team protects you with the same consistency and professionalism.

While I'm on our private security team mailing list, they do all this without needing me to oversee or interfere. In fact, the team handles everything so smoothly that my involvement would only slow them down. In the world of open source leadership, there is no higher compliment I can pay them.

Security work is largely invisible when done well. Nobody celebrates the absence of breaches. The researchers who report issues often get more recognition than the team members who spend hours verifying, patching, and coordinating fixes.

All software has security bugs, and fortunately for Drupal, critical security bugs are rare. What really matters is how you deal with security releases.

To our Security Team: thank you for your excellence. Thank you for protecting Drupal's reputation through consistent, professional, often invisible work, week after week.

Vector databases have become a key component of modern AI applications in Drupal. Thanks to integration with the AI Search module, they enable semantic content search, reduction of hallucinations in AI chatbots, and implementation of advanced RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) functions. Choosing the right VDB provider can significantly impact the performance, cost, and scalability of your AI solution in your Drupal project.

LocalGov Drupal Week 2025 recap: Explore key takeaways from the conference that brought together brilliant minds to advance public sector digital transformation and build better citizen services.

AI has sped up proposal writing—but made them all sound the same. In this DrupalCon Vienna session, Monisha Navlani explores how Drupal agencies can rise above the noise with real-world context, trust, and a human voice.

Several years ago, I built a photo stream on my Drupal-powered website. You can see it at https://dri.es/photos. This week, I gave it a small upgrade: infinite scroll.

My first implementation used vanilla JavaScript using the Intersection Observer API, and it worked fine. It took about 30 lines of custom JavaScript and 20 lines of PHP code.

But Drupal now ships with htmx support, and that had been on my mind. So a couple of hours later, I rewrote the feature with htmx to see if it could do the same job more simply.

It's something I love about Drupal: how we keep adding small, well-chosen features like htmx support. Not flashy, but they quietly make everyday work nicer. Years ago, Drupal was one of the first CMSes to adopt jQuery, and our early adoption helped contribute to its widespread use. Today, we're replacing parts of jQuery with htmx, and Drupal may well be among the first CMSes to ship htmx in core.

If, like me, you haven't used htmx before, it lets you add dynamic behavior to pages using HTML attributes instead of writing JavaScript. Want to load content when something is clicked or scrolled into view? You add an attribute like hx-get="/load-more" and htmx handles the request, then swaps the response into your page. It gives you AJAX-style interactions without having to write JavaScript.

To make the photo stream load more images as you scroll, I added an "htmx trigger". When it scrolls into view, htmx fetches more photos and appends them to the right container. The resulting HTML looks like this:

<div hx-get="/photos/load-more?offset=25" hx-trigger="revealed" hx-target="#album" hx-swap="beforeend"> <figure> ... </figure> </div>

The hx-get points to a controller that returns the next batch of photos. The hx-trigger="revealed" attribute means "fire when scrolled into view". The hx-target="#album" tells htmx where to put the new content, and hx-swap="beforeend" appends it at the end of that #album container.

I didn't want users to hit the last photo and have to wait for more to load. To keep the scrolling smooth, I added the trigger a few photos before the end. This pre-fetches the next batch before the user even realizes they are running out of photos. This is what the code in Drupal looks likes:

// Trigger 3 images before the end to prefetch the next batch. $trigger = array_keys($images)[max(0, count($images) - 4)]; foreach ($images as $key => $image) { … if ($key === $trigger) { // Add htmx attributes to the <div> surrounding the image. $build['#attributes']['hx-get'] = '/photos/load-more?offset=' . ($offset + $limit); $build['#attributes']['hx-trigger'] = 'revealed'; $build['#attributes']['hx-target'] = '#album'; $build['#attributes']['hx-swap'] = 'beforeend'; } }

And the controller that returns the HTML:

public function loadMorePhotos(Request $request) { $offset = $request->query->getInt('offset', 0); $limit = 25; $photos = PhotoCollection::loadRecent($offset, $limit); if (!$photos) { return new Response(''); } $build = $this->buildImages($photos, $offset, $limit); $html = \Drupal::service('renderer')->renderRoot($build); return new Response($html); }

Each response includes 25 photos. It continues fetching new photos as you scroll down until there are no more photos, at which point the controller returns an empty response and the scrolling stops.

As you can tell, there is no custom JavaScript in my code. It's all abstracted away by htmx. The htmx version took less than 10 lines of PHP code (shown above) instead of 30+ lines of custom JavaScript. The loadMorePhotos controller I needed either way.

The savings are negligible. Replacing a couple dozen lines of JavaScript won't change the world. And at 16KB gzipped, htmx is much larger than the custom JavaScript I wrote by hand. But it still feels reasonable. My photo stream is image-heavy, and htmx adds less than 0.5% to the initial page weight.

Overall, I'd say that htmx grew on me. There is something satisfying about declarative code. You describe what should happen, and the implementation disappears. I may try it in a few more places to improve the user experience of my site.

Florida DrupalCamp voted best DrupalCamp on the planet (and sessions are now open)! mherchel Wed, 11/26/2025 - 16:24

“Where did I put the key?” — you might ask yourself this when searching for your house or car keys, and the same can happen on a Drupal site. Almost all modern websites rely on keys for integrations with other services, secure authentication, and sensitive data protection. They can be used by anyone — a developer wiring up a complex integration or a marketer adding credentials from a user-friendly service like Mailchimp.

 

The following is a guest post from DrupalCon Vienna Marketing Committee.

When the Drupal community gathers, something extraordinary happens.

From 14 to 17 October 2025, nearly a thousand people came together at the Austria Center Vienna, Austria to celebrate open source, exchange ideas, and contribute to the future of Drupal.

DrupalCon Vienna 2025 was not only a conference, it was a living example of collaboration, diversity, and innovation in action.

A Community in Numbers

This year’s event welcomed 935 registered participants, with an impressive 96.04% check-in rate.

Interest in DrupalCon Vienna built steadily through the year, with the highest number of registrations coming in June (307) and September (236).

A Truly Global Audience

DrupalCon Vienna brought together a remarkable mix of voices and perspectives.
Participants represented over 40 countries, with 85% coming from across Europe, 8% from the United States, and 7% from other regions.

The top ten countries represented were:

• United Kingdom (112)
• Germany (107)
• United States (75)
• Belgium (74)
• Austria (71)
• France (67)
• Spain (34)
• Netherlands (31)
• Sweden (26)
• Italy (24)

From Costa Rica to Kenya, from Armenia to New Zealand, attendees crossed borders, time zones, and languages to connect through one shared passion - Drupal.

New Faces and Familiar Friends

One of the most inspiring aspects of the Drupal community is its balance between newcomers and long-time contributors.

In Vienna, 28% of participants attended their first DrupalCon, while 38% had taken part in four or more DrupalCons. This mix of fresh enthusiasm and deep experience keeps the community dynamic and forward-looking.

For the first time, this year’s DrupalCon introduced Drupal in a Day, organized by Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson. The training session welcomed 113 learners, aged 18 to 52, highlighting the wide range of people discovering Drupal for the first time.

Attendee Background

An impressive 38% of attendees were delegated by their company to attend DrupalCon Vienna.

Attendees were mainly represented by:

• Technical users: 37%
• Technical decision-makers: 27%
• Owners or business decision-makers: 21%

In terms of expertise:

• 36% described themselves as Drupal experts
• 28% reported strong Drupal expertise

The majority of participants (53%) came from digital agencies, design, or development shops.

They represented a variety of industries, with the strongest presence from:

• Services: 31%
• Government: 16%
• Education: 11%

Powered by People

Behind the scenes, the heart of DrupalCon beats thanks to its volunteers.

A huge thank-you goes to the committees, track teams, and on-site volunteers who made the event possible.

This year, 56 on-site volunteers contributed their time and expertise, supporting session reviews, contribution mentoring, information desks, and photography. Their dedication ensured that every attendee could learn, contribute, and feel part of something bigger.

Made Possible by Our Sponsors

None of this would have been possible without the generous support of our sponsors.

• Diamond: 3
• Platinum: 4
• Gold: 8
• Silver: 6
• Module: 10
• Media: 5

Their continued investment in Drupal helps us deliver high-quality, inclusive, and impactful events that keep the open-source spirit alive.

Looking Ahead

DrupalCon Vienna 2025 reminded us that open source is more than code. It is community, creativity, and collaboration in action.

Thank you to everyone who joined and contributed to making DrupalCon Vienna 2025 a success.

Since 2019, DevBranch hasn’t attended DrupalCon in person due to war and pandemic disruptions. Yet from their Lutsk office, the Ukrainian team continues to gather for every Driesnote—sharing insights, staying connected, and embodying the Drupal community spirit through challenging times.

Email testing isn’t broken — the method often is. Katherine Pay outlines the five most common mistakes marketers make with A/B testing and introduces the Holistic Testing Methodology to fix them. From missing hypotheses to shallow metrics and isolated tests, this guide explains how to run smarter experiments that drive real insight and long-term results.

How the Irish Government's “Build to Share” Vision Comes to Life: A New Public Consultations Module for All

Local spark, national impact: an open-source public consultations module built to share, built to scale.

markconroy 25th Nov 2025