Running with scissors: Using AI to explore, build, maintain, contribute, and secure Drupal" is the title of my DrupalCon Orlando session proposal. I've been using and writing about AI as a Drupal developer for the past year, and I look forward to sharing my experience with fellow Drupalers at the conference. There is so much discussion about AI and Drupal, and I'd like your help with my DrupalCon session proposal.

We should assume most session proposals will focus on AI inside and outside Drupal from the perspective of site owners and builders. Meanwhile, if we want to encourage people to try Drupal, we also need to sell it to developers. My goal is to sell "using AI to explore, build, maintain, contribute, and secure Drupal" to developers and vibe coders, while acknowledging the challenges and risks by comparing how fast we've had to adopt AI to "running with scissors."

Running with scissors

I first heard the expression "Running with scissors" in the title of Augusten Burroughs' memoir. I enjoyed reading that book, and now I am listening to the audiobook while working on this blog post. A subtle takeaway from the memoir is that sometimes you may find yourself "running with scissors' involuntarily (or voluntarily), and you have to decide how to handle that scenario.

Related to AI, "running with scissors" captures the extremely fast, collectively exceptional pace we're in: a remarkably massive societal shift, comparable to the Industrial Revolution, is unfolding. The Industrial Revolution took decades to unfold, whereas the AI Revolution is unfolding in a few years, especially among software developers.

The AI Revolution is probably the right term, and it could foreshadow AI winning the revolution, leading to humankind's demise. BTW, this won't be the focus of my session...Read More

With version 1.0.0-beta1, released on 12 October 2026, AI Disclosure, the module I created on drupal.org within the Drupal AI Initiative, labels images, video and audio as well as text. Here I start from the image, the most common case: what it carries when it comes out of a generator, what is left of it when a Drupal site publishes it, and how the beta1 follows it from upload all the way to the person looking at it. When a label is mandatory is explained in the article on Article 50(4) of the AI Act in Drupal. A synthetic image can carry up to four provenance signals, and whoever built the generator adds them at the moment the file is created. The first is an invisible watermark, hidden in the pixels: the eye misses it, the provider's detector recognises it.

Shared code creates shared security needs. European product rules raise a more specific question: who must act?

A Drupal Commerce experiment that reuses Tool API operations and Single Directory Components inside an MCP App, with OpenUI describing the composition and Drupal doing the rendering.

Importing content with the Default Content module is really useful when populating a site with content. There's an increasing number of recipes and modules that can be used to populate a site with content either for setup or demonstration purposes.

Default content is really useful when figuring out how a system works as it can show relationships between content types that are not always simple to discern through the site itself. It also has a place when deploying content between sites as you can package up some default content and include that in a deployment step.

Occasionally, you'll want to tweak the content that is imported for different situations; with the reasons why you would want to do this being numerous. It might just be that you have a demo site and you wanted to tweak the content imported to better tailor it for the user. You could have a single recipe that contains the content and want to alter that for a specific demo.

I needed to do this selected default content import on a recent site as I was installing. A contributed module was used to populate the site with content to create a collection of examples. Although the content was good, I didn't want to import it all as some of it didn't make sense for a couple of scenario that I was looking at. That lead me to seeing if I could alter the content automatically as it was imported into the site, rather than manually delete content after the fact.

In this article we will look at some of the actions I tried to prevent content from being imported, before moving onto what the actual solution was. If you are following along at home, it is assumed that you already have a default content process setup and are just looking for change what content is imported without altering the source files.

Read more

A customer submits a web enquiry. Someone reads it, copies the details into the CRM and asks for missing information. When that happens every day, enquiry preparation is a useful place to test whether AI can save time. Choose one task with a clear finish line AI business process automation becomes easier to evaluate when the task has a defined start and end. For a web enquiry, it starts with submission and ends when the responsible person has checked the information and knows the next action. Our recommendation is to begin with a summary, a suggested category and a draft response. A person approves prices, delivery dates and commitments. This gives the team a bounded task whose time savings can actually be measured. The approach may suit a manufacturer receiving descriptive quotation…

Drupal is changing how developers organize some of the code behind your website. Here’s what the transition means for custom functionality, theme maintenance, and planning your next upgrade.

This is a cross-post of a blog by Nathaniel Catchpole, Senior Performance Engineer and Technical Lead at Tag1

At DrupalCon Vienna, Tim Lehnen presented on the main costs for running Drupal.org. Around 50% of the total cost of running drupal.org, or approximately $1.5m, is infrastructure costs. A significant slice of infrastructure costs comes from drupal.org's self-hosted GitLab, and in turn much of that cost is due to GitLab CI for Drupal core and contributed modules.

Figure 1: Drupal Engineering activities compared to the various funding sources

Drupal core is the single biggest project in terms of CI minutes, both due to the sheer number of tests as well as the level of activity in Drupal core issues, with hundreds of commits per month and activity on thousands of issues and Merge Requests ("MRs").

Figure 2: Drupal CI minutes by project, July 2026, core issue forks are treated as separate projects

Since Drupal originally moved to Gitlab CI from our previous Jenkins-based CI infrastructure in 2023, we've been working on reducing the time taken for Drupal core test runs.

The primary end goal of this work was to reduce the wall time for pipelines on MRs. These started at around 55 minutes when we originally moved to Gitlab CI (approximately the same as they were on Drupal CI), and now generally finish in 5-7 minutes. The 55 minute runtimes already relied on previous known optimizations like using a ramdisk for both the database and filesystem, applied to GitLab runners. GitLab does not support this out of the box.

Five minute turnaround times on pipelines have made a huge difference to Drupal core velocity. Whereas core contributors used to push to a branch, then go and eat lunch or dinner while waiting for the pipeline to finish, there's now barely enough time to make a cup of coffee, let alone drink it.

Figure 3: Contributors recognizing and commenting on the time improvement of waiting for the pipeline to finish

However, the bulk of the initial gains we made to core CI pipeline performance was in wall time, with much less impact on CPU minutes. This is now starting to change, as we're finding ways to reduce the CPU minutes while also keeping wall times as short as possible.

Reducing Pipeline Wall Times

We reduced pipeline wall times via the following approaches.

Concurrent Test Running and Parallel CI Jobs

Drupal's run-tests.sh has supported running tests concurrently for a long time. We added support for Gitlab's parallel test runs, splitting test groups with thousands of tests into smaller groups so that they can be run on multiple test runners at once. For example Drupal's functional test group is executed in 8 parallel jobs, at 15 concurrency, with a CPU request of 10 per job. This runs 150 test classes at a time on 100 CPUs. By running smaller sized individual jobs, there is also a higher chance of them fitting into test runners that become available rather than requiring a new AWS instance to be spun up.

Slowest Tests Run First

Tests are always run slowest first. Drupal's test runner has supported a #slow group for a long time, so that very slow tests can be run first. We now also order tests by the number of methods, so that tests with more methods, which overall tend to be slower, run first too. This is critical for other optimizations to be effective. If a single class takes three minutes to run, starting it at the beginning when the rest of the tests can also be completed in three minutes means the entire test run can be finished in three minutes. But if that job started last, the job could take six minutes, with just that one test being run for half the time, leading to slower wall times and idle CPUs.

Optimize or Split Up the Very Slowest Tests

In some cases we have had individual test classes that took more than 10 minutes to run. For these very slow running tests, we've split them into smaller test classes so that they can be run in parallel, and/or optimized the test set-up requirements so that no individual test takes longer than a full run.

Reducing CPU Time for Test Pipelines

With these techniques, we've been able to balance CPU requests and concurrency across the various core test types, so that every job finishes within approximately 3-4 minutes. This has given us a solid framework for keeping pipeline wall times to a minimum while allowing us to adjust CPU requests and concurrency for individual test types to match the scope of core's overall test coverage. As far as we know there are no longer obvious optimizations to make via tweaking concurrency and test running order.

While we've been working on optimizing the tests themselves, in recent months focus is increasingly shifting in that direction as the best way to further optimize test runtimes, but more importantly, reduce CI minutes and the resulting infrastructure cost for the Drupal Association overall.

Test Types

Drupal core started with only one type of test: SimpleTest 'functional tests' that require a full Drupal install into a separate site that the tests are then run against. Over time with the adoption of PHPUnit, we've added unit tests, 'kernel tests' which include a full dependency injection container but don't do a full install, functional JavaScript tests which use a real browser, and build tests which allow creation of a completely separate code base in its own directory. There is an ongoing effort to convert functional tests to kernel and unit tests where this can be done without losing test coverage, with the recent addition of http request testing to kernel tests making many more tests eligible. Converting a functional test to a kernel test can reduce the time it takes by 3/4, so for the tests where this is possible it's one of the most effective ways to make gains, although the conversions have to happen test by test across dozens or hundreds of test classes.

Over the past couple of years there has been a concerted effort to improve Drupal core performance. Many runtime performance improvements don't necessarily make a lot of difference to test runtimes as a whole. But because functional and functional JavaScript tests install a full Drupal site and request real pages, anything which improves installer or cold cache performance tends to have an outsized effect on test runs. Installer performance generally doesn't affect production sites (because they're already installed!) and cold cache performance is often not a priority for production sites because it tends to affect a low percentage of overall requests, however as well as CI times, it can also make huge differences to the user experience for new users as well as improving responsiveness after deployments and cache clears.

Installer Improvements for Functional Tests

In 11.2.0, we changed module install to support installing multiple modules at once without a separate dependency injection container rebuild between each module. Instead of doing 50 or 60 container rebuilds during an install, we do more like 11 or 12. This took tens of seconds off Drupal installs, whether via the UI, Drush, or during test runs.

Figure 4: Installing multiple modules in Drupal 11.2

Source: Figure 4: Installing multiple modules in Drupal 11.2.

In Drupal 11.4, we made container rebuilds during the installer more conditional, reducing container rebuilds during a functional test from 11 to 8.

Recently, I've been looking at whether it would be possible to reduce the 8 remaining container rebuilds further, without necessarily an expectation that there would be much room for improvement, and found some. With all of those changes, some of which are not committed yet, we should be able to get down to an absolute minimum of 2 container rebuilds in tests. While some of the optimizations are test-specific, a real-life Drupal install of the minimal profile takes less than 2 seconds.

This investigation also uncovered further possible performance improvements in the installer.

While the combination of these changes probably saves only around 5 seconds at most from an install during a test run, this saving is multiplied by every install that occurs, with thousands of Drupal installs on every test run, this adds up to several minutes of CI time.

This has already allowed us to reduce the total CPU request for functional tests from 128 to 80 with no increase in wall time. We expect to be able to reduce the CPU request for both functional and functional JavaScript tests further once more optimizations land.

Kernel Test Performance Improvements

Kernel tests in general run much faster than functional tests, however there is still a per-method overhead which is a lot higher than unit tests. We are looking at adding an option to kernel tests to share the database state between test methods which will remove a lot of that overhead. This in turn will allow us to re-use the dependency injection container between methods. As we move functional tests to kernel tests, this should increase the impact of that change on resource usage even more.

Re-Evaluating On-Commit Pipelines

Drupal core has daily, weekly, and on-commit jobs on its branches, as well as those that run on individual MRs. In looking at the information we get from those jobs, we realised that the on-commit jobs, which on average run several times per day, and run the full test suite against multiple different database types (Mysql, MariaDB, SQlite, PostgreSQL) don't necessarily give us information that we can't otherwise get from MR, daily and weekly runs. For release branches, we need immediate post-commit feedback in case something is unexpectedly broken, which sometimes happens when two independent commits are fine individually, don't have merge conflicts, but break when combined anyway. However, we're in the process of trialling running our development branches without on-commit pipelines whatsoever. This should reduce CI minutes for core purely via running pipelines less often, on top of the in-pipeline optimizations above.

Reducing Wall Time for Contrib CI Runs

While individual contrib projects are not the biggest user of CI minutes, there are thousands of contributed projects. Several of the performance optimizations for the installer, functional tests, and kernel tests will apply to contributed module tests too, since those have to install core the same way as core tests do.

Additionally, there has been recent work to switch contrib's gitlab_templates shared pipeline definitions to running concurrent tests by default. Contrib tests previously used raw phpunit which runs each test sequentially with an option to switch to concurrent test running via run-tests.sh; the default flipped to run-tests.sh by default in September 2026. Because contrib tests should also benefit from core's 'slowest test first' strategy, this should compress pipeline times in contrib and it may have a positive impact in reducing CI minutes overall if runners are able to complete jobs in a shorter time with the same CPU request.

Effect on the Drupal Association's Hosting Costs

Taken together, these changes lower the cost of running core's CI run by run, through shorter wall times, fewer CPU minutes, and fewer pipelines overall. As Figure 2 shows, core is the single biggest consumer of CI minutes on drupal.org, so that work is aimed at the largest single driver of the GitLab CI costs behind the Drupal Association's infrastructure bill.

What that adds up to on the bill itself is a separate measurement, and will take longer to validate. Total cost depends not only on the cost per run but on how many runs happen, and core activity (commits, issues, and merge requests) is holding steady or rising. So the effect on the DA's hosting costs has to be read from same-month comparisons year over year, or averages across several months, rather than any single snapshot. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this as the latest round of changes are committed.

Henadzi Koltun argues that Drupal’s value lies in durable engineering rather than short-term gains. He discusses when headless architecture is justified, why AI still needs human oversight and how accessibility becomes an organisational responsibility.

During the lifecycle of a Drupal site, content changes and the site evolves, requiring content maintenance. One of the issues that can happen is redirect chains. Why Drupal sites accumulate hundreds of redirect chains

A Drupal site with many years of life, one or more migrations, or frequent content changes accumulates redirects automatically. Every alias change and every moved page leaves one behind, until there are hundreds or even thousands of them. A new project gets there too once content starts to be created, redirects added, and URLs moved.

The problem is silent. Nobody decides to create a redirect chain; chains appear when redirects pile up on top of each other over time. Reviewing them manually is unfeasible because of the time it would take, so they stay. These situations usually surface in audits run with different tools: until that moment they go unnoticed.

Redirect chains and loops cost performance, SEO, and dead pages

A redirect chain is several hops in a row: a → b → c → d. Each additional hop increases navigation latency for users and makes crawling harder for search engines. Keeping every redirect at a single hop contributes to better SEO.

Googlebot follows up to 10 hops in a chain before giving up, but …

Pierre Rudloff, Joseph Zhao, Bram Driesen and Swan Kalata have moved from provisional to full membership of the Drupal Security Team. Their public records show experience in vulnerability reporting, fixes, advisory coordination, core contribution and community leadership.

Today we are talking about Drupalcon Rotterdam, Canvas and evaluating modules. We'll also cover Revision Graph as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/573

Topics

• DrupalCon Rotterdam recap
• AI summits and training
• FrankenPHP app servers
• Driesnote highlights
• Advocacy and WordPress
• Rosetta Sprint and MCP
• Canvas multilingual and headless
• 3Frameworks And Voiceover
• Canvas And SDCs
• Headless And Signage
• Drupal 12 Beta Testing
• Rector And Deprecations
• PHP 8.5 Requirements
• Rethinking Module Evaluation
• AI And Commit Scale
• Module Discoverability
• 0Distributions Versus Recipes

Resources

• Wordpal
• Core metrics

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu Tim Sharp - tea-sharp

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to see a node's revision history drawn like a Git graph, with each translation as its own branch? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Revision Graph
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2019 by Shibin Das (D34dMan) of Factorial
  • Versions available: 4.0.0, which works with Drupal 11 and 12, and 3.1.1 for Drupal 10 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, 4.0.0 landed in mid-August after two alphas the same week
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation: a solid README plus in-depth technical and revision-model docs in the repo
  • Number of open issues: zero open issues
• Usage stats:
  • 242 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, every node gets a Revision Graph tab, right next to the core Revisions tab
  • One row per revision, one lane per language, so you can see when a translation branched off and how it's evolved since
  • Each dot tells you two things: a solid ring means that revision was live at some point, a dashed ring means it's a draft that never was, and a filled center means it's what that language is serving right now
  • It works with Content Moderation if you have it, showing your workflow states as text badges with whatever names your site uses, and adapts cleanly when you don't
  • Reverts, and edits made from the published version while a draft is pending, show up as forks instead of a straight line
  • Under the hood: Drupal doesn't actually store which revision a new one was derived from, so the module adds a small base field that records it at presave
  • Older revisions don't get backfilled, on purpose, since reconstructing that would mean guessing. Those edges are inferred, and the graph draws inferred edges differently from recorded ones, so it never implies more precision than it has
  • So on an existing site, make sure you run drush updb after enabling it
  • Ships a distinct color for all 95 language codes Drupal knows, so it looks good out of the box, but you can override a lane's color or the fallback palette in config
  • The graph loads in pages as you scroll, so long histories render quickly, and it's keyboard navigable, ARIA-labelled, and works in forced-colors mode
  • Great for editorial teams on multilingual sites, and handy for compliance or auditing when you need to answer "what was live, and when?"
  • Caveats: it's nodes only, and for obvious reasons a user will need the "view all revisions" permission to see the graph

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.

Just over two years ago, I launched Drupal Starshot. I did it because I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can.

Starshot became Drupal CMS, which brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI, Drupal Canvas and more to make building websites easier.

Alongside that work, Drupal Core has become a faster and better framework for developers. A stronger Drupal Core helps us build a better Drupal CMS, while building Drupal CMS has driven further improvements in Drupal Core.

Unfortunately, many people outside the Drupal community haven't seen what Drupal can do today. In Rotterdam, I showed how far we have come and where we're going next, and we launched an advocacy program to help more people see how great Drupal has become.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (86 MB).

More ways to reach more people

The first part of my keynote showed improvements for multilingual sites, JavaScript front-ends, headless Canvas, and Drupal AI.

Drupal has long had strong multilingual capabilities, but Drupal Canvas, our powerful new page builder, didn't yet support multilingual sites. Not only did we add multilingual support to Canvas, but we made all multilingual sites easier to set up.

React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

At DrupalCon, we extended that same model with Drupal Canvas Headless. Developers can now use Drupal to manage content while building the front-end separately with frameworks like Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular, or Nuxt. Editors still get the visual experience of Drupal Canvas: they can build pages in Drupal and preview exactly how those pages will appear on the front-end.

This changes an important trade-off. Teams no longer have to choose between a modern JavaScript front-end and Drupal Canvas' visual authoring experience. They can have both. That opens Drupal to more developers, more front-end architectures, and more types of projects.

Drupal AI is moving so fast that I could have filled a whole keynote with it. Instead, we launched a new Drupal AI demo where people can experience Drupal AI for themselves. It comes preconfigured, making it easy to explore what Drupal AI can do or even show it to customers.

With the latest Drupal AI, you can ask questions and get answers grounded in your site's content. You can audit your content against brand guidelines, translate content, classify content, build pages and React components with AI, and more. Through MCP, AI assistants can work with Drupal content from outside Drupal.

What excites me most is the foundation underneath all of this. Drupal AI turns Drupal into an AI harness: organizations can connect AI models to structured content, tools, and workflows, while keeping control through permissions, guardrails, observability, metering, and a choice of AI models.

Opening Drupal's capabilities to other software

The second part of my keynote looked at another important shift: AI assistants can give people a new way to work with Drupal.

In one demo, an editor simply asked an AI assistant to unpublish a page. They didn't need to know where to click or understand Drupal's revisions, moderation workflows, or permissions. The assistant translated their intent into action, but Drupal remained in control: it checked whether the editor was allowed to unpublish the page and applied the site's publishing rules, just as it would if they had done it by hand.

If you want to see the demo in more detail, Scott Falconer, who worked on it, recorded a behind-the-scenes walkthrough showing how to set it up yourself, what happens under the hood, and how to get involved.

That demo was built on the Tool module, which I believe is one of the most important modules for Drupal developers to watch. Drupal modules already contain thousands of useful capabilities: publishing content, managing users, processing media, changing configuration, and much more. The Tool module gives developers a standard way to expose those capabilities so AI assistants and other software can discover and use them.

Today, exposing existing capabilities as tools can still require too much code. My own album module didn't expose tools, and making its existing capabilities available to an AI assistant took about 1,000 additional lines of code.

But once those tools were available, the value became obvious. Adding MCP support has already changed how I manage the more than 10,000 photos on my site. Tasks that used to take a lot of time can now be done much faster and more accurately with an AI assistant, while Drupal still manages the content, permissions, and workflows underneath.

That experience reinforced something I wrote about in AI and the great CMS unbundling: AI can take on more of the execution work while Drupal remains the control layer. I expect more organizations will want to manage parts of their sites through AI assistants. AI can make complex tasks much faster and easier without giving up the structure, governance, and safeguards that Drupal provides.

I believe thousands of module developers will eventually want to expose their capabilities in the same way, so I've been working with Matt Glaman to make it much easier. Matt has been developing a change to the Tool API that lets developers expose existing PHP methods as tools using attributes.

The idea is simple: add PHP attributes to an existing method to describe its name, purpose, inputs and outputs. In my album module, roughly 1,000 lines of integration code became about 20 attributes. My site already uses the experimental branch, and we're working to get it merged into the Tool module proper.

And this isn't only about AI. The same tools can be called by AI assistants over MCP, by other applications over HTTP, or used to generate schemas for JavaScript components and connect Drupal modules to workflow systems like ECA, FlowDrop, and Maestro. The video below shows FlowDrop using capabilities exposed by my album module:

Talk louder about Drupal

In the last part of my keynote, I came back to Drupal's reputation gap. We can make enormous progress with Drupal, but that doesn't automatically change what people or AI agents think of it. For example, an AI coding agent I tested in June didn't even mention Drupal CMS or Site Templates when it evaluated Drupal.

Over the past few years, much of my personal focus has been on accelerating innovation in Drupal. That work is paying off, and we have real product momentum. I'm now shifting more of my attention to the other side of the equation: making sure people see what we've built, understand what has changed, and know why it matters.

So I announced the Drupal Advocacy Program, led by the Drupal Association.

Drupal already has a contribution credit system. It recognizes the people who contribute to Drupal and the organizations that support their work. For businesses, those credits also help determine visibility in the Drupal marketplace. Until now, we've been much better at recognizing technical contributions and financial support than advocacy work.

The new Drupal Advocacy Program will change that. Advocacy work can now earn contribution credit, and work that reaches people outside the existing Drupal community can earn more weight.

If we want to close Drupal's reputation gap, we can't only talk to people who already know Drupal well. We need more talks at external events, articles in broader publications, customer stories, demos, tutorials, and other work that helps people see what Drupal can do today.

Blue Drop Labs is a good example of what I mean. The day after the DriesNote, they published a post on building a website with Drupal CMS and Canvas Headless. The project itself was already live, but they quickly turned that work into a story others could learn from, with demos showing how editors and developers work with Drupal today.

That is exactly what I mean by "talking louder". There is already a lot of impressive Drupal work happening. We need to do a better job of showing it to the world.

I was a little nervous about announcing the Advocacy Program. We've wrestled with Drupal's reputation gap for a long time, and I felt we needed to do more than acknowledge it. Using contribution credit to reward advocacy was a concrete way to change the incentives, but I wasn't sure how the community would react.

It turned out to be one of the best-received announcements of the keynote. That response gave me confidence that people were ready to act on the reputation gap, not just recognize it.

You can learn how to earn Drupal advocacy credit and submit your advocacy work.

My ask is simple: talk louder about Drupal, especially to people outside our community. Drupal doesn't need hype, but we do need a better public record. We need more people showing, with real examples, what Drupal can do today.

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who contributed to making my presentation and demos a success. A special thank you to Bálint Kléri, Christoph Breidert, Gábor Hojtsy, Lauri Timmanee, Matt Glaman, Michael Lander, Pamela Barone, Shibin Das, and the Drupal AI partners. Many others contributed indirectly to make this possible. If I've inadvertently omitted anyone, please reach out.

Yet another amazing DrupalCon Europe has come to an end, leaving us with unforgettable memories. This time, we gathered in a city where futuristic architecture meets historic streets, home to Europe’s largest port and an absolutely unique food market. Rotterdam is a city that has embraced the future and innovation and is sailing towards it with all sails set.

Sponsorship for Mountain Camp 2027 Is Now Open sinduri Thu, 08.10.2026 - 16:46 Text

Sponsorship for Drupal Mountain Camp 2027 is now open. On March 2-4, 2027, the camp returns to Davos Congress for its sixth edition, ten years after the first gathering in 2017.

This year's theme is Humans with AI in the loop. Over three days of talks, hands-on workshops and contribution sprints, we look at how AI is changing the way we build software, why digital sovereignty matters, and where open source fits in.

The camp brings together people who care about the open web: developers, designers, AI practitioners, public-sector teams and open source communities from Switzerland and beyond.

Why Sponsor Mountain Camp

As a sponsor, you have a visible place at the camp and time to talk with the people who attend. Sponsoring lets you:

• Share your tools, services and expertise with people who build with open source and AI.
• Meet developers and technical leads in person, over three days.
• Connect with attendees between sessions and at the social events.
• Support an independent, community-run event that has brought people together since 2017.

We welcome sponsors of any size and from any field who want to support an open, independent web.

Sponsorship Packages

There are four packages: Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. Places are limited, with 3 Platinum, 5 Gold and 8 Silver packages available.

Depending on the package, benefits include:

• Introducing a keynote speaker on stage
• A promotional video at the opening and closing ceremony
• An exhibition stand
• Job listings on the website and at the venue

Every package includes conference tickets and a logo on our sponsor page.

If you would like to support a specific part of the camp, you can also sponsor the opening reception, a social event, the session recordings, the coffee breaks or a diversity scholarship.

Become a Sponsor

You can find all packages and what they include on our sponsorship page.

To become a sponsor or ask a question, write to us at info@drupalmountaincamp.ch.

To stay up to date, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Mastodon, Instagram, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

We look forward to hearing from you.

My DrupalCon Rotterdam talk moved from MCP to the CLI. How Canvas Tools and agent skills let a coding agent build Canvas pages through Drush, and what's still rough.

Google has updated its guidance to emphasize human review of AI-generated content. Here’s what changed, what it means for SEO, and what website owners should check before publishing.

Vibe coding or AI rejection? Learn the pragmatic middle path for Drupal teams: what to delegate to AI, when, and how to verify it.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.

Just over two years ago, I launched Drupal Starshot. I did it because I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can.

Starshot became Drupal CMS, which brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI, Drupal Canvas and more to make building websites easier.

Alongside that work, Drupal Core has become a faster and better framework for developers. A stronger Drupal Core helps us build a better Drupal CMS, while building Drupal CMS has driven further improvements in Drupal Core.

Unfortunately, many people outside the Drupal community haven't seen what Drupal can do today. In Rotterdam, I showed how far we have come and where we're going next, and we launched an advocacy program to help more people see how great Drupal has become.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (86 MB).

More ways to reach more people

The first part of my keynote showed improvements for multilingual sites, JavaScript front-ends, headless Canvas, and Drupal AI.

Drupal has long had strong multilingual capabilities, but Drupal Canvas, our powerful new page builder, didn't yet support multilingual sites. Not only did we add multilingual support to Canvas, but we made all multilingual sites easier to set up.

React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

At DrupalCon, we extended that same model with Drupal Canvas Headless. Developers can now use Drupal to manage content while building the front-end separately with frameworks like Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular, or Nuxt. Editors still get the visual experience of Drupal Canvas: they can build pages in Drupal and preview exactly how those pages will appear on the front-end.

This changes an important trade-off. Teams no longer have to choose between a modern JavaScript front-end and Drupal Canvas' visual authoring experience. They can have both. That opens Drupal to more developers, more front-end architectures, and more types of projects.

Drupal AI is moving so fast that I could have filled a whole keynote with it. Instead, we launched a new Drupal AI demo where people can experience Drupal AI for themselves. It comes preconfigured, making it easy to explore what Drupal AI can do or even show it to customers.

With the latest Drupal AI, you can ask questions and get answers grounded in your site's content. You can audit your content against brand guidelines, translate content, classify content, build pages and React components with AI, and more. Through MCP, AI assistants can work with Drupal content from outside Drupal.

What excites me most is the foundation underneath all of this. Drupal AI turns Drupal into an AI harness: organizations can connect AI models to structured content, tools, and workflows, while keeping control through permissions, guardrails, observability, metering, and a choice of AI models.

Opening Drupal's capabilities to other software

The second part of my keynote looked at another important shift: AI assistants can give people a new way to work with Drupal.

In one demo, an editor simply asked an AI assistant to unpublish a page. They didn't need to know where to click or understand Drupal's revisions, moderation workflows, or permissions. The assistant translated their intent into action, but Drupal remained in control: it checked whether the editor was allowed to unpublish the page and applied the site's publishing rules, just as it would if they had done it by hand.

If you want to see the demo in more detail, Scott Falconer, who worked on it, recorded a behind-the-scenes walkthrough showing how to set it up yourself, what happens under the hood, and how to get involved.

That demo was built on the Tool module, which I believe is one of the most important modules for Drupal developers to watch. Drupal modules already contain thousands of useful capabilities: publishing content, managing users, processing media, changing configuration, and much more. The Tool module gives developers a standard way to expose those capabilities so AI assistants and other software can discover and use them.

Today, exposing existing capabilities as tools can still require too much code. My own album module didn't expose tools, and making its existing capabilities available to an AI assistant took about 1,000 additional lines of code.

But once those tools were available, the value became obvious. Adding MCP support has already changed how I manage the more than 10,000 photos on my site. Tasks that used to take a lot of time can now be done much faster and more accurately with an AI assistant, while Drupal still manages the content, permissions, and workflows underneath.

That experience reinforced something I wrote about in AI and the great CMS unbundling: AI can take on more of the execution work while Drupal remains the control layer. I expect more organizations will want to manage parts of their sites through AI assistants. AI can make complex tasks much faster and easier without giving up the structure, governance, and safeguards that Drupal provides.

I believe thousands of module developers will eventually want to expose their capabilities in the same way, so I've been working with Matt Glaman to make it much easier. Matt has been developing a change to the Tool API that lets developers expose existing PHP methods as tools using attributes.

The idea is simple: add PHP attributes to an existing method to describe its name, purpose, inputs and outputs. In my album module, roughly 1,000 lines of integration code became about 20 attributes. My site already uses the experimental branch, and we're working to get it merged into the Tool module proper.

And this isn't only about AI. The same tools can be called by AI assistants over MCP, by other applications over HTTP, or used to generate schemas for JavaScript components and connect Drupal modules to workflow systems like ECA, FlowDrop, and Maestro. The video below shows FlowDrop using capabilities exposed by my album module:

Talk louder about Drupal

In the last part of my keynote, I came back to Drupal's reputation gap. We can make enormous progress with Drupal, but that doesn't automatically change what people or AI agents think of it. For example, an AI coding agent I tested in June didn't even mention Drupal CMS or Site Templates when it evaluated Drupal.

Over the past few years, much of my personal focus has been on accelerating innovation in Drupal. That work is paying off, and we have real product momentum. I'm now shifting more of my attention to the other side of the equation: making sure people see what we've built, understand what has changed, and know why it matters.

So I announced the Drupal Advocacy Program, led by the Drupal Association.

Drupal already has a contribution credit system. It recognizes the people who contribute to Drupal and the organizations that support their work. For businesses, those credits also help determine visibility in the Drupal marketplace. Until now, we've been much better at recognizing technical contributions and financial support than advocacy work.

The new Drupal Advocacy Program will change that. Advocacy work can now earn contribution credit, and work that reaches people outside the existing Drupal community can earn more weight.

If we want to close Drupal's reputation gap, we can't only talk to people who already know Drupal well. We need more talks at external events, articles in broader publications, customer stories, demos, tutorials, and other work that helps people see what Drupal can do today.

Blue Drop Labs is a good example of what I mean. The day after the DriesNote, they published a post on building a website with Drupal CMS and Canvas Headless. The project itself was already live, but they quickly turned that work into a story others could learn from, with demos showing how editors and developers work with Drupal today.

That is exactly what I mean by "talking louder". There is already a lot of impressive Drupal work happening. We need to do a better job of showing it to the world.

I was a little nervous about announcing the Advocacy Program. We've wrestled with Drupal's reputation gap for a long time, and I felt we needed to do more than acknowledge it. Using contribution credit to reward advocacy was a concrete way to change the incentives, but I wasn't sure how the community would react.

It turned out to be one of the best-received announcements of the keynote. That response gave me confidence that people were ready to act on the reputation gap, not just recognize it.

You can learn how to earn Drupal advocacy credit and submit your advocacy work.

My ask is simple: talk louder about Drupal, especially to people outside our community. Drupal doesn't need hype, but we do need a better public record. We need more people showing, with real examples, what Drupal can do today.

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who contributed to making my presentation and demos a success. A special thank you to Bálint Kléri, Christoph Breidert, Gábor Hojtsy, Lauri Timmanee, Matt Glaman, Michael Lander, Pamela Barone, Shibin Das, and the Drupal AI partners. Many others contributed indirectly to make this possible. If I've inadvertently omitted anyone, please reach out.

Drupal AI can keep control of providers and model settings while Neuron handles agents and workflows. The new bridge also brings Neuron objects into Drupal's plugin system.