Drupal now ships with HTMX, and there is currently a proposal to add a few of the building blocks into the HTML specification. The effort is nicknamed the triptych and the goal is to add three new HTML features:
theodore June 17, 2026Join us THURSDAY, June 18 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)
We don't have anything specific on the agenda this month, so we'll have plenty of time to discuss anything that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits. Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google document at https://nten.org/drupal/notes!
All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.
This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone.
Information on joining the meeting can be found in our collaborative Google document.
The question I get most these days is: did AI kill the CMS? Should we still invest in a CMS, switch to AI agents, or wait until the market becomes clearer?
At a friend's birthday party recently, I was talking with engineers and startup CEOs. They were all smart people, but none of them worked in the CMS industry. From where they sat, AI seemed to make the CMS obsolete.
I understand why. AI can now generate copy, design pages, write code, translate content, and assemble websites. If that is what you think a CMS is for, it does look like the CMS is in trouble.
They may be right about one part of the CMS market. But I think they are wrong about the larger picture.
To see why, it helps to separate what a content management system, or CMS, does into two planes: the control plane and the execution plane.
The control plane governs content: who can edit it, what gets approved, which version is canonical, how translations move through workflow, and where content can be used.
The execution plane creates, assembles, and delivers that content into websites, mobile apps, feeds, and other customer experiences.
AI is unbundling these two planes. It is commoditizing the execution plane while making the control plane more valuable. That is why I think AI is killing one corner of the CMS market, but making the CMS more critical everywhere else.
This post is a companion to AI and the great digital agency unbundling. That post looked at AI's impact on the digital agency market. This one looks at the same unbundling pattern in content management systems and digital experience platforms. AI lowers the cost of creation, not the cost of trustWe have seen this pattern before. The printing press made it cheap to produce and distribute content, but it did not make editors or publishers irrelevant. It made them more important, because more content created more need for judgment, trust, and standards.
AI is doing something similar to digital content. It makes production cheaper: drafting, generating, translating, designing, assembling pages, and adapting content for different channels.
But AI should not be the final authority on what is correct, approved, compliant, or safe to publish. It can help, but people and systems still need to own those decisions. The more content AI helps produce and distribute, the more that ownership matters.
As production gets cheaper, control becomes more important, not less.
That is the real test for a CMS. Not whether AI can generate content or build a page, but whether your organization needs a control layer: roles, review, approvals, publishing states, revision history, and more.
How shared is your work?Two simple questions can help decide how much you need a CMS:
Put those questions on a grid, and four use cases emerge.
The more people, agents, systems, and channels involved, the more a CMS matters as the control layer.When one person creates and publishes content, and no other systems depend on it, you may not need a CMS. A lightweight publishing tool or AI site builder may be enough.
When multiple people or agents touch content, you need a CMS for coordination: roles, review, approvals, publishing states, and revision history. AI inside the CMS can help teams create, review, and publish faster without losing control.
When many systems touch content, you need a CMS as the trusted source for content, permissions, workflows, and publishing controls. AI around the CMS can coordinate work across tools, but it still depends on the CMS to know what content is approved, who can use it, and where it can go.
In short, when many people and many systems are involved, the CMS becomes the critical control layer for people, agents, and systems working together. It gives people and agents a safe place to create and approve content, and gives other tools a trusted system they can read from, write to, and build on.
The decision, by quadrant 1. Assist: one person, one systemThis is the simplest case: one person, one system, and little coordination.
If you are creating a new website quickly, an AI site builder may be the right tool. It can turn a prompt into a working site in an afternoon. In that case, a CMS may slow you down more than it helps. This is 1a in the quadrant image: the job is to create, not to manage.
But one person does not always mean a CMS is unnecessary.
My website has been around for more than twenty years. It has more than 1,500 blog posts and 10,000 photos. That is not just a website to create; it is a body of content to manage. Drupal helps me manage that content as structured content: content types, fields, taxonomy, media, revisions, URLs, and search.
I would not move my site to a standalone AI site builder. But I do use an AI agent to work on it through Drupal: updating content, improving existing features, and building new ones. This is 1b on the chart. AI helps with the execution work, while Drupal remains the control plane. This is unbundling at the smallest scale.
So use an AI builder when speed to a new site matters most. Use a CMS when the work is about managing a large or growing body of content over time: keeping it structured, consistent, reusable, and reliable.
2. Relay: many people, one systemThis is a clear case for a CMS.
When many people collaborate on one website, the work becomes a "relay": a designer uploads an image, a developer builds a component, a marketer writes the copy, an editor reviews the page, legal approves it, and someone presses publish.
AI does not remove that relay; it makes it move faster. The developer may use an AI coding agent, the marketer may use an AI writing assistant, and the editor may use an AI policy checker. More work moves through the same website, with less time between handoffs.
But the moment several people and several agents are working on the same website, you need a control layer to manage roles, permissions, approvals, revision history, and one source of truth.
A CMS lets teams move at AI speed without losing track of who changed what, which version is approved, and what is safe to publish.
3. Delegate: one person, many systemsHere the logic changes. You are still one person, so there is little coordination with other people. But the work now spans many systems: a CMS, an email marketing platform, a commerce system, a CRM, and a planning tool.
When one person spans many systems, no single product sees the whole job. The center of gravity moves to the coordinator: an automation tool that connects your systems, or an AI agent that works across their APIs.
That is why this quadrant is debatable. For a short-lived campaign, you may not need a traditional CMS. You might use an AI builder for the site and an automation tool or agent to coordinate the rest.
But that only works while the content is small, short-lived, and easy to manage by hand. Once the content has to be structured, reused, updated, approved, or kept consistent across systems, you need a trusted source for it.
4. Orchestrate: many people, many systemsThis is the most complex environment, and the clearest case for a CMS.
A company campaign can involve many people and many systems at once: a marketer plans the campaign, a designer reviews the creative, legal approves the content, an editor publishes the page, marketing operations builds the email, and a commerce manager checks the discount. Every person has a role, and every system has a workflow.
AI can remove much of the coordination work: reminders, status updates, handoffs, and manual routing. But coordination is not control. Someone still has to approve the content, approve the promotion, and answer for the campaign's effectiveness.
In this quadrant, the CMS has two jobs. First, it has to govern and accelerate the work that happens inside the CMS. Second, it has to make that work usable by the broader digital ecosystem.
The CMS is not necessarily the orchestrator of that ecosystem. It is the governed workspace where people and agents can work safely, and the trusted source that other systems and agents can read from, write to, and build on.
At this scale, and at AI speed, a weak content foundation becomes expensive fast. A strong CMS is not optional.
From unbundling to rebundlingOne thing the grid does not show is where the market is moving the fastest. Right now, most of the visible energy is on the bottom row of Assist and Delegate, sections 1a and 3a, where no control plane is needed: one person using AI to create and coordinate faster.
In Assist, that means AI site builders that turn an idea into a working website. In Delegate, it means agents and automation for single-person workflows across different systems.
Lovable reportedly reached roughly $400 million in annual recurring revenue less than two years after launch. n8n raised $180 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in 2025.
But once many people are involved, individual productivity is no longer enough. Organizations need productivity, coordination, and control.
The current wave of AI site builders is mostly making one person faster. The next wave has to make organizations faster without losing trust.
AI is unbundling creation from the CMS and driving its cost toward zero. But once creation becomes cheap and abundant, the value shifts to control.
That is where rebundling starts. The next generation of products will combine AI-powered creation with a trusted control plane.
So, is the CMS dead? No. Its role is changing.
The more AI you use to create, translate, update, and publish content, the more you need a system that keeps that work structured, approved, reusable, and safe.
That means that a CMS is not a competing line item to your AI budget. It is what makes that budget pay off.
And the real risk is not that AI replaces your CMS. It is running AI without one.
AI gives you speed. A CMS gives you control at speed.
Working with larger organizations, it’s common to want to split off a section of content into its own smaller site.
A city may want a separate site for a particular construction project, or a university may want one for a capital campaign. Marketing teams often need smaller, dedicated sites for communication and promotion.
They’re usually not complex. Often it’s a matter of a different navigation, some different branding, and a unique URL. But they still need to be designed, built, hosted, and managed — somewhere. And they’re usually needed quickly (like, now).
Whether you’re launching your first or looking for a better way to manage the ones you have, let’s explore these “mini-websites” and the best options for your organization.
Today we are talking about Test Driven Development, ebooks, and Drupal with guest Oliver Davies. We'll also cover Juicer Social Feed as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/557
TopicsOliver Davies - oliverdavies.uk opdavies
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Scott Falconer - managing-ai.com scott-falconer
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Europe’s open source conversation has shifted from principle to infrastructure. The EU Open Source Strategy situates open technologies within a wider digital sovereignty agenda, with a practical question at its centre: whether Europe can reduce its dependence on closed systems while building software that public institutions can reuse, maintain, and trust.
The useful part is also the uncomfortable part. The European Commission identifies familiar weaknesses in the open source ecosystem, including limited long-term funding, difficulty scaling projects, fragmented visibility, limited access to public procurement, and the risk that value created by European contributors is captured elsewhere. That diagnosis moves the discussion beyond code availability and into maintenance, governance, procurement, and business models.
The editorial test is practical rather than rhetorical. Open source becomes strategic only when institutions fund maintainers, accept open-source bids fairly, publish reusable public assets, map dependency risk, and contribute back to the projects they rely on. Without that, sovereignty remains a policy label attached to the same dependency patterns.
Euro-Office shows why the test is hard. The project has reached a first stable release as a web-based office suite, with integrations planned through platforms such as Nextcloud, IONOS Managed Nextcloud, and XWiki. Its practical weight will depend on partner rollouts, production use, format compatibility, governance, and the unresolved licensing dispute with ONLYOFFICE.
For Drupal, the impact is indirect but important. Public-sector and institutional buyers are likely to ask sharper questions about openness, dependency risk, security baselines, procurement fit, and long-term stewardship. Drupal’s opportunity is not to claim automatic alignment with European sovereignty goals, but to show evidence through maintained modules, transparent roadmaps, security practices, reusable distributions, open standards support, and credible service ecosystems.
The curated story list for this edition follows the editor’s note. Readers can also follow The Drop Times on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook, or join the publication’s Drupal Slack channel at #thedroptimes.
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The Drop Times
Both WordPress and Drupal, with Canvas, let you build pages from blocks and components instead of using just a text area. But the way they go about it is very different.
The two editors look similar, but they work in opposite ways. The easiest way to see the difference is to build the same thing in both. In the video, we build a hero component twice: first as a custom Gutenberg block, then as a Drupal Single Directory Component (SDC).
First we look at the main difference between the two editors. Then we build the hero as a Gutenberg block. Then we build the same hero as a Drupal SDC.
Explore why digital sovereignty matters for critical infrastructure and how organisations can reduce dependency through open-source technologies and resilient digital strategies.
Building workflows blind - configure, deploy, hope, check logs - was the reality for years. ECA's integrated test, replay, and debug features close the feedback loop. Put the modeler in listening mode, trigger events, see execution results immediately with token values at each step. A small widget appears on any page where ECA processed events - click it, modeler opens in overlay with recorded execution data, replay what just happened right there in context. Recording is expensive (despite 70% CPU and 85% storage optimizations), so use temporarily when debugging. Production event replay lets you step through failures with actual data from when they occurred. Conditional recording triggers and JSON export across environments are coming. No other workflow tool in any CMS - not WordPress, Joomla, n8n, or Zapier - offers step-through replay with production recordings at this level. This is what existing ECA users requested most: visibility into workflow execution. Infrastructure-level work that required sustained investment but compounds over years. Workflow Modeler exclusive feature, not available in BPMN.iO.
CKEditor5 Markdown is a new Drupal contrib module that adds CKEditor5 toolbar plugin into the toolbar for converting Markdown to HTML on demand.
What the CKEditor5 Markdown module doesThe module adds a new toolbar button to Drupal's CKEditor5 editor. Click it, paste or type Markdown into the dialog that appears, confirm, and the content is inserted as formatted HTML at the cursor position.
The conversion uses the marked library (version 9, MIT licence) with GitHub-Flavored Markdown support enabled. The library is bundled into the compiled asset via Webpack, so no additional frontend build step is required.
The module requires Drupal 10.3 or higher, or Drupal 11, with the core ckeditor5 module enabled.
CKEditor5 markdown example
Why explicit conversion instead of the official Paste Markdown featureCKEditor5 includes a built-in Paste Markdown feature that detects…
When working on contributed Drupal modules, you sometimes need to make changes to schema or data structures.
This will generally need an update hook to make necessary changes to existing stored data on sites that installed the module before the change.
The update hook itself is generally simple enough. Here’s an example from the Smart Trim module, to update “read more” link settings on each display type:
/** * Update Smart Trim more settings. * * Iterate through entity view displays and for any with Smart Trim as formatter * type, move top level more link settings into...Govern enterprise content at scale with AI-powered workflows that protect your brand, ensure compliance, and streamline content operations.
Implications
This post has broader implications for software development beyond the Drupal community, but I feel fortunate to be part of an open source community that can lead the way in addressing the widening productivity gap among its contributors and maintainers.
The title of this post is meant to draw you in by highlighting a problem, but my goal is to get us thinking about a solution. I realize the term "not-so-great" may sound negative when describing a developer, but this comparison bluntly highlights a major problem developers and communities face when working with AI. The truth is, I have never met a "not-so-great" developer in the Drupal community because people are engaged and curious about the software we build.
Realization
My realization is that "AI is making great programmers even greater and not-so-great programmers, well, not-so-great."
For me, a "not-so-great" programmer is someone who writes code like a factory worker. The difference between a "not-so-great" programmer and a beginner is curiosity. Curiosity is the secret to being successful with AI. A curious beginner can easily accelerate their learning experience with AI. Anyone with curiosity can move from beginner to novice in a matter of hours with AI.
Everyone agrees that AI can be a force/capability multiplier, ranging from 2x to more than 10x. The reality is that some people are simply unable to leverage AI and have a 1x multiplier. Very experienced developers report they can now accomplish tasks that would have taken months in days or even hours. Observations suggest that the more capable someone is, the more effectively they can leverage AI.
Let's say we were rating programmers on a scale of 1 to 10, using a system similar to a chess rating system, with 1 being a beginner, 10 being a legendary programmer (aka a super grandmaster in chess), and 5 being an...Read More