In December 2017, on Ægir's tenth birthday, Steven Jones of ComputerMinds joked that within ten years Ægir would be an AI, setting up cat gif websites for its own purposes. With fourteen months left on the clock we checked how the prophecy is doing. In BOA, our Ægir hosting stack, the agent which keeps a server current is called Skynet since a 2012 commit meant to replace boring welcome messages, the installer still pretends to charge your credit card as it did in 2010, and the family named after a Norse sea giant and his doorman, Ægir and Eldir, grew a Barracuda, an Octopus and this summer a Kraken. Since 2025 the Ægir 3 projects on drupal.org are maintained by us, after the prophet himself asked, fairly enough, whether they should be marked obsolete, and in 2026 the stack is built with AI tools: eleven stable releases against three last year, for Drupal, Drupal CMS and Backdrop sites. The AI stays on our desks and nothing on your server guesses, so only the cat gifs are late.

Not every Drupal AI update calls for the same response. Recent releases may require teams to rebuild search indexes, update agent configuration or keep experimental Views changes under close human review.

Author: Christoph Breidert, Product Lead, Drupal AI

Earlier this year, the Drupal AI Initiative set itself a clear goal: at DrupalCon Rotterdam, show one Drupal site where AI search, content review, chat-driven editing, and AI translation all work together on real content. Today we are delivering on that promise. The Drupal AI Demo is live, and Dries revealed it in the Driesnote.

You can open it, use it, and see for yourself what Drupal AI looks like when it is built as a complete product. The demo is the website of a fictional university, with the kind of content and structure a real organization's site would have.

The Drupal AI Demo: a realistic, multilingual university website where every AI feature runs on the same content

From a list of features to something you can try

Until now, Drupal AI has mostly been something we described. We had roadmaps, feature lists, module pages, and conference talks. All of that was accurate, but none of it was tangible. A list of features asks people to imagine how the pieces fit together. A demo lets them see it.

That difference matters to two groups of people in particular.

If you are evaluating Drupal, the demo lets you test the AI features instead of reading about them. I believe Drupal is the most powerful AI-powered CMS available today. Until now, that was a claim you had to take on trust. Now you can check it yourself, try the features on realistic content, and plan your own website around capabilities that are already implemented and working.

If you already build with Drupal AI, the demo shows how each feature is intended to be used. You can evaluate every feature, see how it is configured, and adapt that setup to your own use case. That is a much better starting point than piecing together a feature from documentation alone.

What you can try

The demo focuses on the features our Drupal AI Partners told us matter most. In May, we asked them which capabilities they most wanted to have ready to use in Drupal. They are at the heart of the demo.

AI content reviews. Check a page against criteria like brand voice, legal requirements, and reading level, and get concrete suggestions for improving it.

AI content review scores a page against brand, legal, and readability criteria and suggests concrete improvements

AI search. Ask a question and get an AI-generated answer, grounded in the site's own content and with the sources behind it.

AI search answers a question with a summary, the sources behind it, and ranked results from the site's own content

Chat-driven content editing. Describe what you want to change, and the AI edits the page for you, right inside the editing experience.

Chat-driven editing: an editor describes a change in the chat, and the AI updates the page directly

AI translation. Move content across languages, with results good enough to publish.

AI translation moves a page into another language, ready for review and publishing

Connect your own AI agents. Connect agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, and others to Drupal through MCP, and make changes to the website from the outside.

An external AI agent, connected through MCP, making a change on the demo website

What makes the demo different from trying these features one at a time is that they all run together on the same site and the same content. That is what building a real website involves, and it is where the hardest work was.

How we got here

The idea of a demo was always there. We knew from the start that Drupal AI would need one, but first we needed a foundation strong enough to build it on.

The official Drupal AI sprints started in January this year. We spent the first three months refining the core AI functionality. By the second quarter, we had a stable code base to build on. In May, we ran the partner survey, and that was the moment the demo became a shared goal. The partners bought into the idea, and together we agreed on the features it should show. June went into preparation. In July, we started building.

The last eight weeks were the most intense. Between 1 August and 26 September alone:

• More than 100 people contributed code, reviews, or merge requests
• 1,442 commits landed across 54 projects
• 616 merge requests were merged on drupal.org
• Roughly 596,000 lines were added. That figure covers module code as well as the demo's content, theme, and configuration, and leaves out build output and lock files.

Activity grew steadily over those weeks, from about 70 commits in the first week of August to more than 300 per week in September. And the part I am most proud of is not the size of those numbers. It is that the result simply works.

Weekly commits across the demo and the drupal.org projects it builds on, 1 August to 26 September 2026

The people who built it

The demo was built by contributors from across the Drupal AI Partners, the organizations that fund and staff this initiative, together with many contributors from the wider Drupal community. Working together, we could build a more advanced AI experience than any of us could have built alone, and everything we build for the demo makes Drupal AI better for everyone who uses it.

Most of the load of the demo itself was carried by four people: Marcus Johansson, Artem Dmitriiev, Aidan Foster, and myself. Marcus, Artem, and I also met in person for three days to do nothing but sprint on the demo. Some of the hardest problems got solved in that room.

[IMAGE 8: sprint photo]

Marcus Johansson, Artem Dmitriiev, and Christoph Breidert during their three-day, in-person demo sprint

Many others did substantial work on the demo itself. I want to thank Darren Oh, Kristen Pol, Abhisek Mazumdar, Dan Lemon, Eric Homanchuk, Akhil Babu, and Kiran Kadam.

Of course, a demo is only as good as the modules underneath it, and many projects were heavily developed to be ready for Rotterdam. The main contributors there include Giorgio Alfredo Pagano on AI Disclosure, Michael Lander and Matt Glaman on the Tool API, MCP Server, and Canvas tools, Kristen Pol on AI Context, Rob Loach, Scott Euser on AI Search, Ahmad Khader on AI Content Review, and Sven Decabooter on AI Translate. Much of this work also depended on review: Artem and Marcus alone merged more than 100 merge requests from other contributors in these two months.

A personal note

Coordinating a distributed effort of this size, with contributors across many organizations, countries, and time zones, in such a short time is its own kind of challenge. My role was to set the direction, define the work packages, and align with key contributors and organizers to make sure we were building the right things. I also reviewed a great deal of work along the way. The day-to-day operations were led by our delivery managers, Arian Raeesi and Vidit Anjaria, who planned the work into sprints and kept it moving every day.

What I had never seen before is so many people building something together that actually works as one. Being part of that is amazing.

The demo was something I had in my head for a long time. Seeing so many people take that idea and make it real, and seeing it work, is one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in the Drupal community.

To everyone who contributed: thank you. This demo is yours.

Try it, and help us make it better

The demo is live at drupal.org/ai/demo. Try it, test it, and tell us what you think.

If you want to help shape what comes next, join us in the #ai-initiative channel on Drupal Slack, or explore becoming a Drupal AI Partner.

Everyone who contributed between August and September 2026

Abhinav Jha, Abhisek Mazumdar, Abhishek Dhariwal, Adam G-H, Adrian McKee, Ahmad Khader, Ahmad Khalil, Aidan Foster, Akhil Babu, Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, Andrei Mateescu, Andrii Sakhaniuk, Angela Saldaña, Anikó Viola, Ann Mary Sruthy, arne michiels, Artem Dmitriiev, Ashish Dalvi, attilatilman, Avinash jha, Bharat Kelotra, Brooke Mahoney, Bruna Emerich, Bruno Bruno, calmforce, Carlos Romero, Cesar Miquel, Chad Peppers, Christian Burk, Christoph Breidert, Craig Wood, Dan Goodwin, Dan Lemon, Daniel Rodriguez, Darren Oh, Dave Long, David Bravo, Denise Spangler, Dezső Biczó, Dimitris Spachos, Dries Buytaert, Emma Horrell, Eric Homanchuk, George Kastanis, Giorgio Alfredo Pagano, Ignacio Pérez Puertas, István Csáki, Jeff Warrington, Jeremy Cerda, Jibran Ijaz, Joonas Meriläinen, Jordan Graham, JoshHayter, Joshua Fernandes, Juan Correa, Jurriaan Roelofs, Jérôme Tchania, Jürgen Haas, Kenneth Bolívar Castro, Kieran Cott, Kiran Kadam, KJ Monahan, Konstantine Kirkitadze, Kristen Pol, Lee Rowlands, Levente Besenyei, Manuel Garcia, Marcus Johansson, Markus Kalkbrenner, Mateu Aguiló Bosch, Matt Glaman, Matthew Tift, Michael Lander, Miguel Guerreiro, Narendra Singh Rathore, Nick Opris, Nick Pasiuk, Nik LePage, Norman Kämper-Leymann, Pieter Frenssen, Prabhavathi Vanipenta, Pravesh Poonia, Punam Aseem Beedkar, Reinhold Schachner, Ricardo Castañeda, Richard Porter, Rob Loach, Rodel Duterte, scontzen, Scott Euser, Scott Falconer, Sergiu Nagailic, Shashank Rai, Shibin Das, Shivam Sen, Simon Morvan, Sven Decabooter, szato, Tamas Balog, Tekla Aivazashvili, Tormi Tabor, tribekk, Valery Lourie, Will Huggins, Wolfgang Ziegler.

The official Drupal AI Demo is live. Explore how Drupal AI features work together in one real-world demo!

The DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam made one argument above all: Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The strongest evidence was on screen. These six demos show a platform that speaks more languages, welcomes JavaScript developers as first-class citizens, and treats AI assistants as another interface to Drupal, with governance built in.

Everything here is open source and available today. Here are the demos, with the story behind each one.

1. Multilingual sites, easier to build

80% of the world doesn't speak English as a first or second language, so multilingual is how Drupal reaches billions more people. Two things used to hold teams back: setup was hard, and Drupal Canvas didn't yet support multilingual content. Drupal CMS 2.2 changes both, with a language selector right in the installer, a guided Multilingual add-on, three levels of translation configurability, and full translation support in Canvas, including review workflows and optional AI translation. Watch for Dashi, a multilingual food magazine template made entirely by Drupalers.

2. JavaScript as a first-class citizen

JavaScript front ends are where many developers start their careers, and Canvas is built for them: a standalone front-end project scaffolded in one command, with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, previews via Canvas Workbench with zero configuration, and AI coding agents in the workflow. One push with the Canvas CLI and everything is ready for content teams to use visually. No Drupalisms, no trade-offs.

3. Canvas Headless: your choice of front end

Organisations often compose experiences from multiple backends, and that calls for a headless front end. Canvas Headless connects yours by configuring a URL, with Canvas visual editing built in: editors see a live preview of the real application while developers build in the framework they prefer. Starter templates cover Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and Angular support arrived the very week of the keynote, five frameworks in all.

4. Try Drupal AI for yourself

There's been so much Drupal AI work that demoing it all would fill the keynote. Instead, there's now a demo experience anyone can try: a fictional university site where AI reviews every page against your standards, visitors get answers drawn from your own content with sources shown, and guardrails, a central knowledge hub, and full logging keep it accountable. It's working today, open source, built by leading Drupal AI companies, and pre-configured so you can also use it to show customers. Try it at drupal.org/ai/demo.

5. Fixing content with an AI assistant

A content editor spots Dutch translations showing prices that shouldn't be live yet. From ChatGPT, connected with her own account, she asks for the previous Dutch versions back, English untouched. It happens, with every change recorded as a new revision under her name. She didn't need to know where to click or how revisions, moderation, and permissions work; Drupal handled the governance behind the scenes. You can do this today with a recipe combining Simple OAuth, MCP Server, and the Tool module, built by Michael Lander, Matt Glaman, and others: drupal.org/project/agent_access

6. One module, many interfaces

The most surprising demo wasn't about AI at all. Dries's personal site holds more than 10,000 photos in a custom album module he tool-enabled himself, the work behind his "describe once, use everywhere" idea. The creator of FlowDrop, a visual workflow tool for Drupal, showed that module's MCP server powering a plain form, searching photos and albums with no AI anywhere, and then an agent that chooses its own tools to answer questions. When capabilities are described once and answers come back structured, AI becomes a choice, not a requirement. That idea is what the upcoming Rosetta Sprint will take forward.

Watch the DriesNote in full, or read the full recap of everything Dries announced, from digital sovereignty to the Drupal Advocacy Program.

In a major shake-up, your advocacy work now earns Drupal contribution credit.

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. It's time we changed that.

The Drupal Advocacy Program is a new Drupal Association pilot that awards contribution credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal.

Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The platform has changed dramatically in recent years, but the market's picture of Drupal runs years behind. If you have ever heard "oh, is Drupal still around?", you have felt that gap first-hand — and research by major Drupal agencies confirms it. The fix is not a bigger ad budget. It is education at community scale: authentic stories from the people who build with Drupal, told in their own voices to the audiences they know best.

Our community can be uneasy with the word "marketing". But you are already advocates for Drupal, day in and day out — and that is exactly what this moment needs. If you have ever written a tutorial, recorded a demo, translated an article, or shared someone else's talk with a new audience, you have been doing advocacy. Starting today, that work earns recognition.

How it works

Tell the story. Create, share, and boost content about modern Drupal. A blog post for your market. A video for your audience. A talk at a non-Drupal conference. A customer story in your language. And amplification counts: share someone else's DrupalCon talk or case study, tell us about it, and you earn credit too.

Themes multiply your impact. Four to six times a year, we will roll out a theme — a consistent message with messaging and proof points ready to build on. Take it and make it your own: translate it for your language, reframe it for your industry, make it relevant to your network. Advocacy content on the current theme earns 2x–3x credits, because 126 certified partners and a huge global community telling one story at the same moment is what moves the market. 

Credits flow back. Advocacy runs through the same contribution credit system that recognises code. It counts toward your standing in the ecosystem, including Drupal Certified Partner visibility. Credits will be awarded in bulk each month, guided by a published scale (to come), weighted by quality and reach, because we want content that travels beyond the Drupal world. Each month we will also spotlight the best advocacy content and award it extra credit.

The ground rules are simple. This is about promoting Drupal and what Drupal can do. You can mention where you work, and you can absolutely draw on case studies from your own business — as a way of showing what Drupal makes possible.

Ways to take part

• Post. A thoughtful LinkedIn article or thread in your own words
• Write. A blog post specific to your audience, region, or industry
• Record. An explainer, tutorial, reaction, or customer-story video
• Boost. Share and amplify someone else's talk, case study, or post
• Adapt. Translate or localise the story for your language and market
• Speak. A talk or lightning talk, especially at non-Drupal events and meetups
• Pod. Appear on or host a podcast episode
• Show your work. A customer or project story that highlights what Drupal can do
• Teach. A tutorial, demo, or code walkthrough that shows modern Drupal in action

Choose something that fits you. You do not need to become a salesperson. As Dries put it in his DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote: Drupal doesn't need hype. It needs a better public record.

Submitting is simple

For now, it is a short form at drupal.org/advocacy. In the coming days you will also find a submission form across many Drupal Slack channels. Either way, telling us about your content should take a minute — because for this to work, submitting needs to be exceedingly easy.

This is very much a pilot. We will start by reviewing and crediting submissions by hand, look for ways to automate over time, and let what we learn from your submissions shape how the program grows. And we want to celebrate the people who lead the way: at next year's DrupalCons, we will present awards to Drupal's biggest advocates.

Start today

Every story you tell adds to Drupal's public record — the record that search engines, AI assistants, and agentic search increasingly draw on when people ask what to build with. More authentic voices means Drupal showing up where decisions are actually made.

Submit your advocacy work at drupal.org/advocacy. You will find the current theme, its messaging and proof points, and guidelines on attribution and what qualifies for credit.

You have done the work. Now start talking.

File attachments:  06-advocacy-hero.png

The winning projects span AI, public services, publishing, education, healthcare, commerce and other areas of Drupal implementation.

Key takeaways from the DrupalCon Rotterdam Driesnote: MCP support through PHP attributes, Canvas updates, and a new Drupal advocacy program.

What Migrate Plus adds to core, when a custom source plugin is the right answer, and the anatomy of one that survives real data, with working PHP and YAML.

How Tag1 Reviews Code with AI covered the tools Tag1 built to put AI into the PR review process. This post shows the pattern: AI drafts your whole review into GitHub pending reviews or GitLab draft notes, and you decide, line by line, what gets published under your name.

Where AI Fits in Code Review

AI is good at the unglamorous parts of review: actually reading every line of a large diff, knowing the obscure API pitfalls no single reviewer carries in their head, checking the change against the rest of the codebase for consistency, and asking every "what if this input is empty" question without getting bored. What it can't tell you is which of its twenty comments actually matter.

There are two ways to put that to work, and they're not in competition. The first is the one most people have seen: a bot that reads the pull request and posts its review straight to it. That's a good fit for CI and merge gating. Tag1's own ai-pr-review runs on every push, combining deterministic scanners with AI reviewers, and can gate merges on what it finds: a leaked credential, a known CVE, a phpstan error, or a logic bug an agent caught.

The second way is quieter, and easy to overlook. Both GitHub and GitLab have a staging layer for reviews: comments you write that nobody else can see until you press submit. GitHub calls it a pending review; GitLab calls them draft notes ("Start a review"). Point your AI at that layer instead of at the publish button and you get the machine's thoroughness with a person still accountable for every published word. That's what this post is about, and it's what you want when the review goes out under your name, especially when you're the gate a client is paying to stand between their code and their production site. There, the reviewer of record should be someone who read the change and chose to sign it.

The Workflow

The workflow has four steps:

1. AI reads the PR and writes review comments into a pending review, under your account, visible only to you.
2. You open the PR in the normal web UI, and edit, delete, or add comments like you always do.
3. Optionally, ask the AI to look at your edited pending review and flag anything you missed or got wrong. Repeat.
4. You press submit. Every published word is one you chose to publish, under your name. You can wire this up yourself, which is what the rest of this post covers. If you'd rather start from something prebuilt, Greg Chaix's comprehensive-review already packages the pattern: it runs the review locally and can stage its findings as a draft review for you to edit and submit.

GitHub: Pending Reviews

When you comment via "Start a review" in the Files changed tab, GitHub holds the comments in a pending review — they're "pending and only visible to you," per GitHub's docs, until you submit as Comment, Approve, or Request changes. The same states exist in the REST API: create a review without an event and it lands in PENDING; a second call to .../reviews/{review_id}/events submits it; DELETE abandons it. Each user gets one pending review per PR. GitHub doesn't seem to document this anywhere, but the API enforces it with a 422 error: "User can only have one pending review per pull request."

The detail that matters is that if the AI authenticates with your token, the pending review it creates is yours. It shows up in your browser as your own draft, fully editable.

One approach for integrating AI into human-owned reviews is the official GitHub MCP server, which wraps everything in purpose-built tools. One command connects it to Claude Code (create a Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo scope first):

claude mcp add --transport http github https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp \ -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_GITHUB_PAT"

This exposes the purpose-built tools: pull_request_review_write to create, submit, or delete a review, and add_comment_to_pending_review to add inline comments to your latest pending review. Then, prompt with something like:

Review PR #123 in tag1/example. Read the full diff. Start a pending review and add inline comments only for real problems: correctness, security, performance. Prefix each with Critical/Minor/Nit. Do NOT submit the review; I'll edit and submit it myself.

Because the agent runs as you, a second round works too: "I've edited the pending review. Read it back, tell me what I misjudged, and add pending comments for anything I missed."

The gh CLI is the more dependable approach. There's currently no native pending-review command for gh pr (no gh pr review --draft), but gh api can do it in a single call with nothing extra to install, and when Claude Code prompts you to approve the call it shows the full comment text in a readable form which the MCP doesn't.

# Create a pending review with inline comments (no "event" = stays pending) gh api repos/tag1/example/pulls/123/reviews --input - <<'EOF' { "body": "First pass by Claude; edited by Jeremy.", "comments": [ { "path": "src/Form/SettingsForm.php", "line": 87, "side": "RIGHT", "body": "Critical: user input is concatenated into the query; use a placeholder." } ] } EOF

You then edit and submit in the web UI. The one thing gh api can't do is append comments to a review you've already started: the REST endpoint only accepts comments at creation time, and the append path needs GraphQL, as discussed in the GitHub community. That's the case where the MCP server has an advantage, since it does the GraphQL for you.

GitLab and Drupal: Draft Notes

For those of us in the Drupal ecosystem, most contribution happens through GitLab merge requests on git.drupalcode.org. Fortunately this uses the same pattern, but with different names.

In the UI, Start a review / Add to review keeps comments unpublished and visible only to you until you submit (with Approve, Comment, or Request changes). This is a Free-tier feature, so it works on any GitLab deployment.

The GitLap API calls them draft notes. To use them, you first need to point glab at the right instance (create a personal access token with api scope in your GitLab profile settings). Swap git.drupalcode.org for your own GitLab host (gitlab.com or your self-managed instance).

glab auth login --hostname git.drupalcode.org

Inline comments need diff SHAs, which come from the merge request itself. Run these inside your clone of the project:

# Get the SHAs the position object needs glab api projects/:id/merge_requests/42 | jq .diff_refs # AI (or you) stages an inline comment; nobody else sees it glab api projects/:id/merge_requests/42/draft_notes --input - <<'EOF' { "note": "Minor: this hook is missing a cache tag for the config entity.", "position": { "position_type": "text", "new_path": "src/EventSubscriber/CacheSubscriber.php", "new_line": 54, "base_sha": "<diff_refs.base_sha>", "head_sha": "<diff_refs.head_sha>", "start_sha": "<diff_refs.start_sha>" } } EOF # Later, YOU publish, or just click "Submit review" in the UI glab api -X POST projects/:id/merge_requests/42/draft_notes/bulk_publish

GitLab's official MCP server (beta, Premium/Ultimate) can read MR diffs and pipelines but doesn't expose draft notes yet, per its tool list, so on GitLab the dependable recipe is to let the agent read the MR however it likes, but have it stage comments through glab api .../draft_notes. Drop the commands above into your project's CLAUDE.md and Claude Code handles the SHAs and line positions itself.

Two Rules

Two simple rules guide the workflow. First, tell the AI explicitly, every time, that it must never submit, approve, or publish anything; staging comments is its entire job. Second, run it with your own credentials, because draft comments are only editable by their author, and the author should be you.

The AI delivers the efficiency: it reads every line of the diff in minutes and never gets bored or distracted. You deliver the quality: your judgment decides what's real, what matters, and how to say it to a colleague, and the AI's optional second pass over your edits catches what you missed. Because nobody else sees the pull request until you've read it, shaped it, and chosen to sign it, you stay in control of the review from first comment to submit button. You're not choosing between doing reviews faster and doing them well. Done this way, AI helps you achieve both.

A recent post on Bluesky asked a common question: with dozens of DDEV projects, what is the fastest way to get to one? The current routine was to open Finder, dig three folders deep, drag the folder into an editor, and then run ddev start. Another post mentioned 52 projects and no idea which ones are running. Here are the techniques we use and that came up in the replies.

See What Is Running: ddev list

ddev list shows every project DDEV knows about, with its status, location, URL, and type. The underlined locations and URLs are terminal hyperlinks you can click.

To see only the projects that are running, use ddev list --active-only (or ddev list -A). ddev poweroff stops every running project at once.

Clickable Links

Hold Cmd (macOS) or Ctrl (Linux and Windows) and click a link. A location opens in your file manager, and a URL opens in your browser.

DDEV adds links only in terminals it recognizes, including iTerm2, Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty, Windows Terminal, VS Code's integrated terminal, GNOME Terminal, and Konsole. The macOS Terminal app doesn't support them, so on a Mac, iTerm2 is a good choice if you want clickable links or even if you just want to live a long and happy life.

If nothing is underlined:

• Upgrade DDEV. Links need v1.25.3 or later.
• Check that links are turned on in your terminal. Konsole has them off by default. To turn them on, enable "Allow escape sequences for links" under Settings > Edit Current Profile > Mouse > Miscellaneous.
• If you use tmux or screen, DDEV can't detect your terminal. Add export FORCE_HYPERLINK=1 to your shell startup file to turn links on anyway.

The DDEV Dashboard: Just Type ddev

Running ddev or ddev tui with no arguments opens an interactive terminal dashboard that lists all of your projects and their status. You can start, stop, and restart projects, open a project's URL or Mailpit in the browser, and press Enter for a project's details. For someone with 52 projects, this may be the quickest way to see what is running.

With many projects, the most useful key is /, which filters the list as you type. The filter matches part of a project's name, type, status, or directory, ignoring case, so dr finds every Drupal project, running shows only running projects, and client finds every project under a client directory. Move to the project you want, and start it with s or open it with l. See the interactive dashboard documentation for the full list of keys.

ddevcd: Built-In Project Jump

DDEV ships a shell function that changes to a project's root directory by name:

ddevcd some-project

It needs a one-time addition to your shell startup file. ddev utility cd prints the exact line for Bash, Zsh, or fish. See the utility cd documentation.

ddevcd works from any directory, and it has tab completion for project names like the rest of DDEV. Typing ddevcd pr<tab> completes to something like ddevcd pr8859-test.

autojump: Jump by Partial Name

autojump learns the directories you visit and lets you jump to them with j and part of the name. It works for any directory, not only DDEV projects.

brew install autojump # Or `sudo apt install autojump`, etc # Follow the post-install instructions to source it from your shell rc file j myproject ddev start

If you only need to start a project, you don't have to change directories at all: ddev start <projectname> works from anywhere.

Note that autojump only knows directories you have already visited (unlike ddevcd, which knows every project DDEV has seen).

code . or phpstorm .: Open the Editor From the Project Directory

Once you are in the project directory, open it in your editor from the terminal.

For VS Code:

code .

For PhpStorm:

phpstorm .

Each command opens the current directory as the project, and reuses the window if that project is already open.

The commands have to be installed first:

• VS Code: Run "Shell Command: Install 'code' command in PATH" from the Command Palette.
• PhpStorm: Use Tools > Create Command-line Launcher in PhpStorm, or the shell scripts setting in JetBrains Toolbox. On macOS, open -a PhpStorm . also works without a launcher script.

Other editors follow the same pattern, for example cursor . for Cursor.

Put it all together to get from anywhere to a running project in your editor:

ddevcd myproject && ddev start && code . ddevcd myproject && ddev start && phpstorm . Click the Link in ddev describe

ddev describe has a short alias, ddev st, which is easy to type and worth adopting. It prints the project's details, including the project's location on disk.

The project location (~/workspace/ddev.com in the header above) is a clickable link that opens your file manager at the project root.

Advanced: Answer Fancy Questions With ddev list -j and jq

ddev list -j prints the project list as JSON, and jq can answer more specific questions. The project data is under .raw. Each entry has fields including name, approot, status, type, and primary_url.

Running projects and their directories:

ddev list -j | jq -r '.raw[] | select(.status=="running") | "\(.name)\t\(.approot)"'

Names of all Drupal 11 projects:

ddev list -j | jq -r '.raw[] | select(.type=="drupal11") | .name'

The directory of one project, which you can use with cd or code:

code "$(ddev list -j | jq -r '.raw[] | select(.name=="myproject") | .approot')" Community! Third-Party DDEV GUIs

If you would rather click than type, the community has built several graphical front ends for DDEV. They sit on top of the DDEV command line, so your projects and .ddev configuration stay the same. The DDEV project doesn't maintain or endorse any of these, and this list comes from our newsletters and from reports by their authors. Try them and judge for yourself.

In Your IDE

• DDEV Integration plugin for PhpStorm and IntelliJ, maintained by AkibaAT.
• DDEV Manager extension for VS Code, by Biati Digital.

macOS

• DDrovr is a new native macOS app from Bison Digital that shows all your projects on one dashboard. It offers one-click access to URLs, terminal shells, and logs, detects the project's CMS, highlights startup failures, and searches projects with Cmd-K. It needs macOS 14 or later and DDEV v1.24 or later, and works with OrbStack, Docker Desktop, and Colima. It is a download from the site, and the site lists no pricing or source repository.
• ddevbar is a menu bar app by Klemens Arro for starting, stopping, and restarting projects with a click.
• DDEVUI is a native app written in Swift and SwiftUI.

Cross-Platform

• ddev-ui is an Electron and React app for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It covers project management, database import and export, snapshots, add-ons, and log streaming.
• DDEV Manager GUI by VonLoxx is another desktop wrapper.
• DDEV GUI by ChaosKing has been tested only on Linux.

Commercial and Agency Tools

• DevWorkspacePro by damms005 is a commercial wrapper GUI. When we last looked it had no free trial.

Didn't find yours? The June 2026 newsletter covers some of these tools as well. If you built a DDEV GUI, send a PR adding it here.

Tell Us What We Can Do To Make DDEV Better For You!

We know this is awkward territory, and we're always listening to you, and want to know what we can do to make it better.

Contributions welcome!

Your suggestions to improve this blog are welcome. If you have a technique for getting around your projects that isn't here, you can do a PR to this blog adding it. Info and a training session on how to do a PR to anything in ddev.com is at DDEV Website For Contributors.

Follow the DDEV Newsletter for information about upcoming user and contributor training sessions.

The Cost of Waiting: Why CMS Maintenance Belongs in Every Website Budget Joel Steidl Tue, 09/29/2026 - 15:34 Process Drupal WordPress Backdrop CMS

Launching a website is a major milestone, but it does not mark the end of the investment.

Drupal, WordPress, and Backdrop are actively maintained software platforms. Core software changes. Modules and plugins release updates. Security vulnerabilities are discovered. PHP and other underlying technologies move through their own support cycles.

During a long website build, teams should be paying attention to those changes and applying updates when they make sense within the project cadence. That does not necessarily require a dedicated line item for updates. It does require recognizing that the software will continue to change while the site is being built.

The more important planning conversation is what happens after launch. Post-launch budgets often focus on new features, enhancements, and fixes specific to the site. Routine platform maintenance has to be planned alongside that work, or it is easy to defer indefinitely.

Updates are part of operating a CMS

Different content management systems handle releases differently.

Drupal has a well-defined release cycle, including regular windows for bug fixes and security releases. Backdrop similarly publishes scheduled minor releases and security release windows.

WordPress is less predictable. Core releases do not follow the same kind of monthly schedule, while plugins and themes are updated independently by their maintainers. For WordPress sites, that makes proactive monitoring particularly important. Checking for updates weekly or bi-weekly can help teams identify changes before they accumulate.

The operational lesson is more important than the differences between platforms: someone needs to be responsible for keeping track of change.

For WordPress, the Site Health screen provides a useful view into outdated software and configuration issues. Drupal and Backdrop have their own tools and processes for monitoring available updates and security advisories. But knowing an update exists is only the beginning.

Updates still need to be evaluated, tested, and deployed.

Small updates are easier to manage than large ones

Consider a site that receives routine maintenance every month.

There might be a core update and several module or plugin updates to review. The team applies them in a development or staging environment, tests critical functionality, resolves any issues, and deploys the changes.

Now consider the same site after maintenance has been deferred for two years.

There may be dozens of pending updates spanning multiple versions. Some dependencies may no longer be maintained. A newer module or plugin may require a newer version of the CMS. That version may require a newer version of PHP. Custom code written several years earlier may no longer behave as expected.

What could have been a series of small maintenance tasks has become a project.

The difficulty is not simply the number of updates. It is the number of things changing at once. When something breaks, there are more possible causes. Testing takes longer. Troubleshooting becomes less predictable.

Regular maintenance keeps those changes smaller and makes risk easier to manage.

Maintenance has to compete with improvement work

After launch, most organizations still have a list of things they want to change. Editors need improvements to a workflow. A department wants a new feature. An integration needs adjustment. Bugs emerge once more people start using the site.

That work is visible, and its value is usually easy to understand. Routine maintenance is less visible. Updating a dozen modules and ending up with a site that looks and behaves exactly as it did before can be difficult to prioritize against a feature someone has been waiting for.

But those two kinds of work need to coexist.

For many sites, a recurring monthly maintenance allocation is a sensible baseline alongside a budget for improvements and feature development. It creates room to review available updates, apply appropriate changes in a non-production environment, test important workflows, and deploy deliberately without forcing that work to compete every month with the next feature request.

The exact cadence can vary. WordPress sites may warrant weekly or bi-weekly checks because plugins and themes release independently. Security updates on any platform may require attention outside the normal maintenance cycle.

Testing matters too. A plugin update that looks routine can conflict with WordPress core or another plugin. A Drupal module update can affect custom functionality or configuration. Updates should generally move through development or staging before reaching production.

Backups are another part of the equation, particularly for WordPress sites where application state and content are closely connected to the database. Reliable, automated backups, preferably managed at the hosting level, provide an important recovery path when an update does not behave as expected.

The goal is not simply to install updates. It is to make maintenance a normal part of operating the site rather than something that only gets attention when there is a problem.

Maintenance starts before launch

Planning for maintenance does not mean every build needs a separate maintenance workstream.

During an active build, teams can often incorporate core, module, plugin, and dependency updates into the normal development process. What matters is that the team is paying attention. On a project that lasts six months, a year, or longer, building against a frozen snapshot of the software and waiting until launch to address updates creates unnecessary risk.

Decisions made during the build also affect how difficult future maintenance will be.

Every module, plugin, theme, integration, and piece of custom code becomes part of the site's long-term maintenance surface. Before adding a dependency, teams should consider whether it is actively maintained, how important it will be to the site, and what replacing it would involve if support ends.

Architecture matters as well. Clear separation between custom code, contributed software, configuration, and content makes future changes easier to understand and test. Automated tests around critical functionality can make routine updates considerably safer.

The same thinking applies beyond code. Structured content, consistent components, and well-defined editorial workflows reduce the number of exceptions teams have to account for when the platform changes.

Maintainability is not a separate phase of the build. It is one of the considerations that should inform how the platform is built.

The cost of waiting

Skipping maintenance can look like a savings because nothing happens immediately. It can also create more room in the budget for improvements that stakeholders can see and use right away.

But the maintenance work has not disappeared.

Updates continue to accumulate, dependencies continue to change, and older versions eventually stop receiving support. When the organization finally has to act, the work is usually larger and the options are more constrained.

A recurring maintenance budget helps turn that unpredictable future project into routine digital operations. It gives teams a chance to make smaller changes, test them carefully, and identify larger lifecycle issues before they become urgent.

That does not mean maintenance should consume the entire post-launch budget. Websites need to improve as organizational needs change. The goal is to make room for both: maintaining the platform you have while continuing to make it better.

The cost of waiting is not just more updates later. It is giving up control over when and how those updates happen.

James Nettik

The Women in Drupal Awards returned this year to celebrate the outstanding achievements of women making remarkable contributions to the global Drupal community. Presented during DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the awards recognize women whose talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment are helping strengthen the Drupal community and shape the future of open source.

Now in its fifth year, the Women in Drupal Awards continue their mission of amplifying women’s voices and recognizing the many different ways they contribute to technology and the Drupal ecosystem. From technical expertise and project leadership to community building, mentoring, advocacy, and innovation, the awards celebrate women whose work creates meaningful impact across projects, organizations, and communities.

Three awards celebrating three different forms of contribution

This year, the Women in Drupal Awards recognize three outstanding nominees across three distinct categories:

• Women in Drupal Award - Define
  Antonella Severo, Project Manager at Nestlé, has been an active contributor to the Drupal community and has been involved in the Success Stories track at DrupalCon, helping highlight the impact and achievements of Drupal projects and organizations.
• Women in Drupal Award - Build
  Nikita Aswani, Senior Front-end Developer on Open Social, combines technical expertise with a strong commitment to the Drupal community. She is also a member of the Drupal Asia steering committee, contributing to the growth and development of the regional Drupal ecosystem.
• Women in Drupal Award - Scale
  Rachel Lawson, who works at the University of Cambridge, has made a lasting contribution to the Drupal community through mentoring and community engagement. She is also a former Community Liaison at the Drupal Association, where she played an important role in supporting and connecting members of the community.

Together, the three nominees represent the breadth of contributions that make the Drupal ecosystem stronger: from leading projects and showcasing success stories, to developing technology, supporting regional communities, mentoring others, and fostering collaboration.

The Women in Drupal Awards were created to ensure that women’s stories and successes in technology are visible and celebrated. The awards recognize contributions in many forms, whether through building Drupal projects, leading teams and organizations, designing digital experiences, driving innovation and strategy, mentoring others, strengthening the community, advocating for inclusion, or championing open source and collaboration.

A key contributor to this year’s awards is JAKALA, the official sponsor of the Women in Drupal Awards. JAKALA created the award and has supported the initiative since its inception, helping ensure that the achievements and contributions of women across the global Drupal community are recognized and celebrated. As the awards enter their fifth year, JAKALA continues to support their mission of highlighting diverse talent, leadership, and impact within the Drupal ecosystem.

The ceremony has become a highlight of DrupalCon. Beyond the awards themselves, the wider Women in Drupal initiative fosters mentorship, networking, recognition, and greater visibility for women working in Drupal and open source. This year, the initiative also includes a dedicated Women in Drupal networking lunch, organized in collaboration with JAKALA, providing an opportunity for women and gender-diverse members of the community to connect, share experiences, and build relationships.

The Women in Drupal Awards are supported by the Drupal Association and organizations across the industry. The 2026 jury brings together members of the Drupal Association, previous award winners, and JAKALA, combining perspectives from across the Drupal community to recognize this year's outstanding contributors.

About Women in Drupal

Women in Drupal is a community-driven initiative dedicated to celebrating, supporting, and empowering women in the Drupal ecosystem. Through recognition, networking, mentorship, and community events, the initiative fosters inclusion and encourages greater participation and leadership in open source.

The Women in Drupal Awards recognize women from across the Drupal community, regardless of role or area of expertise, celebrating the talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment that help strengthen Drupal and shape its future.

Today at DrupalCon Rotterdam, Dries Buytaert presented the future of Drupal CMS and Drupal AI. The key message: Working with content is becoming dramatically easier, more flexible, and more intelligent for editors, marketing teams, and organizations.

Technical progress only solves part of Drupal's problem if outside perceptions remain fixed on older versions. Rotterdam shifts attention to who can reach today's capabilities and who hears about them.

Most Drupal 7 sites keep the crossing to modern Drupal parked for some day, and some day has a habit of never arriving, because the crossing as we all learned it wants a second machine, a dump shipped across, credentials pasted into one more form and a rehearsal budget which runs out after the first try. On a BOA server the two ends sit on one account: the Drupal 7 site keeps serving while a fresh Drupal CMS site goes up beside it, one Ægir task lends the new site read-only eyes on the old database (enforced by the database server itself), and Drupal's own migration engine pulls content, files and users across in place. Rehearsals are throwaway site tasks, the wizard says what will cross before it starts, and the cutover is a move onto your own build and two renames, the old site kept intact. The front end is still a rebuild, your theme, custom code and views; only the logistics go away. Capabilities rather than an enforced workflow, and nothing here picks your exit for you.

Rotterdam, Netherlands, 28 September 2026. The International Splash Awards 2026 concluded today during DrupalCon Europe in Rotterdam, celebrating the world’s most outstanding Drupal projects, agencies, and developers. The annual awards recognize excellence in design, innovation, technical achievement, and community impact across a range of categories.

The range of entries shows how powerful Drupal as an Open Source system truly is. From municipal websites to apps that connect parents in developing nations to expert childcare advice, the competition this year was fierce.

— Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson, head of jurors, International Splash Awards

Image

Photo Credits: Joris Vercammen

Following the successful return of the International Splash Awards in 2025, this year’s competition saw an even greater participation from across the global Drupal community, receiving 40% more submissions than the previous year. A distinguished jury of independent experts in web design, user experience, open source development, and digital strategy evaluated entries across criteria including concept, execution, emotional appeal, accessibility, performance, innovation, and social relevance.

Winners & Highlights AI-Enhanced Experiences

• Winner: blökkli — the open-source in-page editing experience for Drupal by Liip
• Runner-up: Atelier by AIncient Labs — the AI-first Website Studio built on Drupal by Factorial.io

Commerce

• Winner: Finstral Compendium by Factorial.io
• Runner-up: Building the Digital Museum: How Drupal Powers the Belvedere's Entire Ecosystem by acolono

Corporate

• Winner: Drupal as a foundation for continuous improvement: The digital ecosystem of The Hague University of Applied Sciences by Netvlies
• Runner-up: Volkswagen AG InfoPortal by drunomics GmbH

Design / UX

• Winner: Transforming Three Global Travel Brands with One Drupal Platform by Zoocha
• Runner-up: pharmaSuisse “Fakten & Zahlen” — interactive data visualisation by Liip

Education

• Winner: Luiss Corporate website, Design system and AI search by SparkFabrik
• Runner-up: Wageningen University & Research - How WUR replaced a fragmented web landscape with one central, AI-powered Drupal platform by iO

Government & Public Services

• Winner: The AI the EU could actually trust: EPSO's source-grounded answer engine by Dropsolid AI
• Runner-up: From Scripts to Sovereignty. How Pidpa replaced contact centre overhead with auditable, citizen-facing AI by Dropsolid AI

Healthcare

• Winner: Health First: Multiple Audiences. One Drupal Platform by Vardot
• Runner-up: Turning 350 Healthcare Career Options into One Clear Journey by Reading Room

Non-profit

• Winner: Empowering healthier lives: a platform for awareness, prevention and action for diabetes by SWIS
• Runner-up: UPD Foundation Advisory Cockpit by Factorial.io

Publishing / Media

• Winner: pharmaSuisse “Fakten & Zahlen” — interactive data visualisation by Liip
• Runner-up: From Print to Digital Storytelling: How STAN Magazine Reimagined Publishing with Drupal by ImageX

Tools / Apps

• Winner: blökkli — the open-source in-page editing experience for Drupal by Liip
• Runner-up: Dutch Safety Region South Limburg: Empowering citizens through digital crisis communication by 1xinternet

Impact & Community Image

Photo Credits: Joris Vercammen

The International Splash Awards serve not only to honor outstanding work but also to inspire collaboration, share best practices, and elevate the broader Drupal ecosystem. The projects recognized this year demonstrate the diversity of ways Drupal can be used to create meaningful, accessible, innovative, and high-performing digital experiences.

From ambitious public platforms and global corporate ecosystems to innovative applications and community-focused initiatives, the 2026 winners showcase the scale and maturity of Drupal as an open source digital experience platform.

Beyond the projects themselves, the Awards celebrate the people and organizations behind them. Many participants contribute to the Drupal community through open source development, modules and distributions, conference talks, training, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.

Thank you to eSepia for sponsoring the International Splash Awards this year. And also thank you to Acquia for doing the interviews. 

Looking Ahead: 2027 & Beyond

With the 2026 edition now behind us, the International Splash Awards will continue to evolve alongside Drupal and the wider digital landscape. As organizations face increasingly complex challenges around AI, accessibility, privacy, sustainability, digital sovereignty, and user experience, the Awards will continue to recognize projects that demonstrate how open source technology can meet these challenges with creativity and purpose.

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Photo Credits: Joris Vercammen

The International Splash Awards will return in 2027, continuing its mission to bring the global Drupal community together and celebrate the people, ideas, and projects shaping the future of the open web.

About International Splash Awards

The International Splash Awards is an independent, global awards program that highlights exceptional Drupal-powered websites, applications, and digital solutions. Its mission is to recognize creativity, technical excellence, and social impact within the Drupal and open-source communities.

The Splash Awards have been organized as regional competitions in Drupal communities around the world for many years. In 2018, the Splash Awards went international, giving outstanding projects from across the globe the opportunity to compete on a global stage. Following a break, the International Splash Awards returned in 2025 and are now an annual fixture at DrupalCon Europe.

For more information about categories, submission guidelines, jury members, and past winners, visit https://splashawards.org/.

Acquia deliberately spent less on its Rotterdam booth and made that decision visible. Shawn Perritt then used the DrupalCon stage to challenge sponsors, agencies and competitors to find their own way to give back.

Tired of adding Webform fields one by one? AI Webform Generator builds Drupal forms from a single sentence and checks every AI output first.

Stop writing prompts that sound like YAML. The Drupal Views AI agent now speaks plain English, and it brought a chatbot.