This summary will cover three weeks instead of the bi-weekly progress report, and it will be a little bit different. Since we were very busy with the Driesnote for DrupalCon, the release of AI and AI Agents 1.2.0 (yay!), we were mostly focusing on stability fixes.
DrupalCon Vienna also happened and personally for me also PHP Longhorn in Austin. DrupalCon gave us an opportunity to meet in person, regroup and plan ahead for the 2.0 release. So we will cover that as well in the progress reports.
For me personally it was a crazy event compared to other DrupalCon’s I have been to. Many people to talk to, and many people I wanted to talk to, but never got the time to do it.
We did prepare the demo for the DriesNote and it's one of the demos that I personally actually have been the most comfortable with sharing. Some of the demos that get recorded are on the level of something we strive for, rather than what is there now., The actual output of the Canvas AI for the examples in the DriesNote was actually over 50% on the reliability where you could almost just use it, and most of the rest created a version that just needed minor tweaking. This is based on a fairly strict criteria on who components should be placed, images should be picked and copies should be written.
Aidan Foster from Foster Interactive, who was one of the main contributors to the demo, did a follow up LinkedIn Post that you should not miss.
And if you do not believe me - you can run the demo yourself.
AI Context is out in dev versionWell it has been out for some while, but we wanted to introduce it with the DriesNote. The idea is that the AI Context or Context Control Center (name TBD) is the central point for any context your Drupal site will need. Both for AI or via MCP.
Right now it's focusing heavily on agents, but in the future it would also be usable in Automators, translations or anything that needs to have a stricter control on how to generate via AI. This project has been driven by Salsa Digital in general and Ahmed Jabar in particular, who spent weekends to have it ready before the DriesNote. A huge thanks to them!
Try it out and help out in: https://www.drupal.org/project/ai_context
Prompt library used in AI TranslateIn 1.2.0 we have added a prompt library. The initial implementation was AI Content Suggestions, but right before the release we also added an implementation into the AI Translate submodule.
This means that the translation prompts are now being managed via the prompt library and can be reused in the future for other translation tasks that could be added into for instance AI CKEditor or AI Automators.
Webform Agent can be testedOne of the things I wanted to demo in Vienna included showing off some kind of new agent and how you could use that agent together with MCP and agent-to-agent communication. Webform was a clear candidate for it. The demo included being able to create webforms from free text or even ugly hand drawn sketches, and then via MCP connect to a VAPI agent and have that agent be able to call someone and have an AI agent survey the webform over voice and then save the submission.
We ended up deciding to put the agent in a module, even if it's still very rough around the edges. You can find it at https://www.drupal.org/project/ai_webform_agent. Nick Opris is putting a lot of effort in moving it into the Tool API and making it more stable.
Flag added for Tools and Structure combinationsAfter testing different providers, we came to the conclusion that there are providers that do not allow the combination of using Tools/Function Calling and asking for a structured output.
Because of that we have added a flag where the providers can update their status to tell that they are able to do this.
For AI Agents we will then be able to figure out if this is possible or not, and add a feature where we can run another call on the finished loop, to structure the output.
Planning 2.0A lot of the time was put into planning a way forward to the 2.0.0 release. Some things are already decided or were decided in Vienna.
This includes:
Be sure to keep an eye out here or on LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest developments. Visit the AI Initiative home page for ways to connect, events and webinars.
It’s well known that a seemingly overwhelming task often becomes easier if divided into smaller chunks or steps. This rule is equally applicable to Drupal admin workflows! Especially when working with content-rich websites, lengthy forms with numerous fields can often feel daunting.
October brought another batch of intriguing contrib releases and experiments. Some lean into authoring polish, others into security and ops, and a few are just plain fun. Here’s our quick take on the ones we’re spinning up in sandboxes next.
Belgrade 3.0.0 is the most significant update to our Drupal Commerce theme since its initial release. Modified based on the needs of clients and the functionality we have implemented for real-world eCommerce implementations again and again, it goes beyond just a normal theme.
Rather than being a rigid starter kit, Belgrade is now firmly centered around Drupal Commerce Kickstart, showcasing best practices and the full capabilities of the platform. You can use it as an example when designing and building your own Drupal Commerce themes.
Modernized login and user account pagesWe brought a more contemporary design to user authentication pages that matches patterns consistently used across client projects. The login, registration, and password reset forms now feature a centered, card-based layout with:
The whole experience can be toggled.
Implementing cleaner login forms is a normal step for more Drupal Commerce sites to help them look fresh and modern. Belgrade 3.0.0 makes this step much easier.
Read moreArtificial intelligence continues to reshape content management systems, and Drupal is embracing this transformation through the Drupal AI initiative.
The video above demonstrates how to use AI Automators in Drupal CMS to automate content generation, transcribe audio files, and streamline editorial workflows.
This guide covers AI Automators within the Drupal AI module suite. Learn to set up basic and chained automators, transcribe audio, integrate AI into CKEditor, and auto-generate social media posts.
At DrupalCon Vienna, we opened the opt-in period for module maintainers to volunteer their modules to be migrated to GitLab issues. You can opt yours in at #3409678: Opt-in GitLab issues.
That means that we will have some projects with issues on Drupal.org and some other projects with their issues on GitLab during this transition period. Due to this, some things will change in our current systems.
Changes to Drupal.orgThe issue cockpit on each project's page will go away. The current issue cockpit that will see in projects reads data from our internal issues, but as projects transition to GitLab issues this block no longer makes sense. We will replace this for a simple "Issues" link that will take you to the right issue queue, whether it is GitLab or Drupal.org.
Parent and related issues will now be connected via a full URL. It used to be connected via entity reference fields, pointing at internal issues. Now that we have two systems for this, these will be links, that once rendered will bring the metadata information, like title and issue status, as we did with internal issues. We will be able to link both Drupal.org and GitLab issues into these new fields, and the old entity reference fields will go away.
What's next?We ask project maintainers to help us at the Drupal Association iterate and improve on this process as we migrate more and more projects. We know that change can take time to be adopted, and we are really excited to help project maintainers move their issues into GitLab.
There are almost 200 projects with more than 1000 issues, and around 2000 projects with more than 100.
Drupal "core" has more than 115K issues.
The roadmap will be (in each iteration, we will address feedback, fix bugs...):
We are very excited about this transition, and we truly think it will be an improvement to the contribution experience. We are also thankful to the community for helping us with this.
The Drupal Association has received €201,000 from the Sovereign Tech Fund to enhance Drupal's GitLab infrastructure, with a focus on security, testing efficiency, and design tools. This funding will enable critical improvements including completing the migration of Drupal's security issue management system to GitLab, optimizing CI/CD testing across thousands of repositories, and implementing new tools for UX and design contributors.
This continues the Sovereign Tech Fund’s support of Drupal. In 2023, the Sovereign Tech Fund funded major work to support the move from Drupal.org's homebuilt contribution tools to the GitLab platform.
The self-hosted GitLab instance at git.drupalcode.org is maintained by the Drupal Association and used by contributors all over the globe. In 2024, there were 7,276 unique individuals using git.drupalcode.org to contribute to 69,204 issues. These contributors represent an international community of users who support critical Drupal installations serving the public.
The additional funding will enable the Drupal Association to further enhance our use of GitLab in the following key areas:
The work commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Fund will not only enable us to advance strategically, driving meaningful progress and making a positive impact within the Drupal community but also strengthen the open source platform for users everywhere.
We are grateful to the Sovereign Tech Fund for this collaboration. This funding reflects their continued dedication to open source and their confidence in the Drupal Association and the community's ability to innovate and ensure the future of web development.
“Whenever I look at these demo videos,
I often completely forget we’re looking at Drupal.
You know, it looks so different and so much better.”
Catch up on all the excitement from DrupalCon Europe 2025 in Vienna! Annertech shares highlights from the global gathering, including cutting-edge tech talks, community networking, and the fun of the Drupal event.
Last summer, I was building a small automation in n8n when I came across Activepieces. Both tools promise the same thing: connect your applications, automate your workflows, and host it yourself. But when I clicked through to Activepieces' GitHub repo, I noticed it's released under the MIT license. Truly Open Source, not just source-available like n8n.
As I dug deeper into these tools, I kept noticing something else: they're powerful and mature, yet almost non-existent in enterprise environments. Developers love them. Small teams rely on them. But large organizations are paying hefty premiums for proprietary integration platforms (iPaaS) or wiring integrations manually.
That gap crystallized something I'd been seeing across different contexts: business logic is moving out of individual applications and into the orchestration layer.
Today, most organizations run on dozens of disconnected tools. A product launch means logging into Mailchimp for email campaigns, Salesforce for lead tracking, Google Analytics for performance monitoring, Drupal for content publishing, Slack for team coordination, and a spreadsheet to keep everything synchronized. We copy data between systems, paste it into different formats, and manually trigger each step. In other words, most organizations are still doing orchestration by hand.
With orchestration tools maturing, this won't stay manual forever. That led me to an investment thesis that I call the Orchestration Shift: the tools we use to connect systems are becoming as important as the systems themselves.
This shift could change how we think about enterprise software architecture. For the last decade, we've talked about the "marketing technology stack" or "martech stack": collections of tools connected through rigid, point-to-point integrations. Orchestration changes this fundamentally. Instead of each tool integrating directly with others, an orchestration layer coordinates how they work together: the "martech stack" becomes a "martech network".
Why I invested in ActivepiecesI believe that in the next five to ten years, orchestration platforms like Activepieces are likely to become critical infrastructure in many organizations. If that happens, this shift needs Open Source infrastructure. Not only proprietary SaaS platforms or source-available licenses with commercial restrictions, but truly open infrastructure.
The world benefits when critical infrastructure has strong Open Source alternatives. Linux gave us an alternative to proprietary operating systems. MySQL and PostgreSQL gave us alternatives to Oracle. And of course, Drupal and WordPress gave us alternatives to dozens of proprietary CMSes. When a layer becomes this foundational, Open Source options keep the entire ecosystem healthy and innovative.
That is why Activepieces stood out: it is Open Source and positioned for an important market shift.
So I reached out to Ash Samhouri, their co-founder and CEO, to learn more about their vision. After a Zoom call, I came away impressed by both the mission and the momentum. When I got the opportunity to invest, I took it.
A couple months later, n8n raised over $240 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, validation that the orchestration market was maturing rapidly.
I invested not just money, but also time and effort. Over the summer, I worked with Jürgen Haas to create a Drupal integration for Activepieces and the orchestration module for Drupal. Both shipped the week before DrupalCon Vienna, where I demonstrated them in my opening keynote.
How orchestration changes platformsConsider what this means for platforms like Drupal, which I have led for more than two decades. Drupal has thousands of contributed modules that integrate with external services. But if orchestration tools begin offering those same integrations in a way that is easier and more powerful to use, we have to ask how Drupal's role should evolve.
Drupal could move from being the central hub that manages integrations to becoming a key node within this larger orchestration network. As I mentioned earlier, this represents the shift from "marketing stack" to "marketing network".
In this model, Drupal continues managing and publishing content while also acting as a connected participant in such a network. Events in Drupal can trigger workflows across other systems, and orchestration tools can trigger actions back in Drupal. This bidirectional connection makes both more powerful. Drupal gains capabilities without adding complexity to its core, while orchestration platforms gain access to rich content, structured data, publishing workflows, and more.
Drupal can also learn architecturally from these orchestration platforms. Tools like n8n and Activepieces use a simple but powerful pattern: every operation has defined inputs and outputs that can be chained together to build workflows. Drupal could adopt this same approach, making it easier to build internal automations and positioning Drupal as an even more natural participant in orchestration networks.
We have seen similar shifts before. TCP/IP did not make telephones irrelevant; it changed where the intelligence lived. Phones became endpoints in a network defined by the protocol connecting them. Orchestration may follow a similar path, becoming the layer that coordinates how business systems work together.
Where orchestration is headingToday, orchestration platforms handle workflow automation: when X happens, do Y. Form submissions create CRM entries, send email notifications, post Slack updates. I demonstrated this pattern in my DrupalCon Vienna keynote, showing how predefined workflows eliminate manual work and custom integration code.
But orchestration is evolving toward something more powerful: digital workers. These AI-driven agents will understand context, make decisions, and execute complex tasks across platforms. A digital worker could interpret a goal like "Launch the European campaign for our product launch", analyze what needs to happen, build the workflows, coordinate across your martech network, execute them, and report results.
Tools like Activepieces and protocols like the Model Context Protocol are laying the groundwork for this future. We're moving from automation (executing predefined steps) to autonomy (understanding intent and figuring out how to achieve it). The future will likely require both: deterministic workflows for reliability and consistency, combined with AI-driven decision-making for flexibility and intelligence.
This shift makes the orchestration layer even more critical. It's not just connecting systems anymore; it's where business intelligence and decision-making will live.
ConclusionWhen I first clicked through to Activepieces' GitHub repo last summer, I was looking for a tool to automate a workflow. What I found was something bigger: a glimpse of how business software architecture is fundamentally changing. I've been thinking about it since.
To me, the question isn't whether orchestration will become critical infrastructure. It's whether that infrastructure will be open and built collaboratively. That is a future worth investing in, both with capital and with code.
A client of mine requested the feature in their existing webform (on a Drupal10 website) to be able to generate an PDF print-out of the user’s input upon their every submission, and attach the generated PDF to the with the e-mail trigger by the webform’s handler.
This will ensure they have a copy of the user’s input as the ground truth to be referenced in the future, and the signature in the webform can be shared via the email as a part of the PDF, because by default the webform only allows you to attach the link of signature’s PNG image, which means (if you want any user who receive the email to be able to download the signature without a Drupal authenticated account) you will have to expose via a public link.
TLDR: Watch it build a page from a prompt → Online Demo → Download on drupal.org
So, we've been working on Drupal's content UX for over 10 years now, trying to make page building accessible to non-technical users. We've made a lot of progress, but honestly, something always felt like it was missing. The tools were getting more powerful, but making Drupal "easy" was still kind of a stretch. Your clients and their users will agree.
Then we started experimenting with AI.
I've been testing a bunch of other site builders: Webflow, Elementor, Divi, and about 10 others to see what they're doing with AI. Here's what I discovered: they're all bolting AI features on existing tools like an afterthought. They're treating AI as a feature, not a foundation. We took the opposite approach with DXPR. Instead of adding AI to a traditional editor, we built the entire experience around AI-first principles. The difference is striking, and I'd love to show you exactly how this fundamentally changes the way you build pages in Drupal.
Real-time unedited video
What We've Implemented So FarRather than just adding AI as a feature checkbox, we tried to think about how it could actually change the workflow. Here are the main things we've built:
Content RewritingWe've added controls for AI-rewriting content precision and control. Our users actually spend more time editing existing website content than making new pages. Single-Prompt Page GenerationYou can describe a page in plain text and get a working layout. It's not perfect every time, but it's a pretty good starting point and saves a lot of manual setup. It's better than other AI writing tools.
Image GenerationInstead of switching to another tool, you can generate images right in the builder. It's integrated into the workflow, which seems to help with iteration speed.
Clone Competitor PagesYou can point the AI at a competitor page and have it screen-scrape the page and reproduce it with DXPR elements matching your theme. It sounds naughty but we know humans copy too, and AI does it better. For inspiration of course.
The goal was to create a workflow where these features actually work together rather than feeling like separate tools. We're trying to let the AI handle repetitive stuff so users can focus on the creative decisions.
Demo VideosI've put together some demo videos that walk through how this actually works in practice. There are two versions: one with my narration and one with AI voiceover and edit.
These are pretty unfiltered demos. You'll see what works well and where we're still working out the kinks. I think it's important to show the real experience, especially since this is still in beta.
What This Might Mean for DrupalI know Drupal isn't usually the first platform people think of when they want visual page building. We've always been strong on the backend, but the UI complexity has been a challenge.
What's interesting about this AI integration is that it might actually leverage Drupal's strengths in a new way. We've got this solid, flexible backend that other platforms can't match. And now we're able to put a much more accessible interface on top of it.
Obsessive optimizationOur AI performance is surprisingly fast too: page generation takes seconds, content rewrites happen in real-time. After years of building the foundation, it feels like things are finally clicking.
We even shipped a Rust / WASM HTML optimizer in DXPR Builder that runs in your browser and shaves a whopping 15% off of the token count of HTML we put into the AI, resulting in lower AI latency and better use of AI context capacity.
I Need Your FeedbackWe're calling this a beta because we really want to hear from the community before we lock in the final release. What works for you? What feels off? Where do you see gaps or opportunities?
The team has put in a ton of work to get here, and I'm pretty excited about where we are. Your real-world testing is going to help us figure out what we got right and what still needs work.
If you can download DXPR Builder 2.8.0 from Drupal.org and test it out, that would be incredibly helpful. It's completely free including 10,000 words AI gen + 10 images per month in free AI credits. We've set up a FAQ and feedback page for questions and suggestions. Seriously, any input, positive or negative, helps us make this better.
And if you know anyone who might be interested in this kind of thing, feel free to share. We're trying to get this in front of people who might actually use it.
After working on this for so long, it's pretty cool to finally see how AI and Drupal can work together for content editors. Thanks for letting me share this with you all!
Want to Try It Out?Download the DXPR Builder AI Beta and let us know what you think.
Download DXPR Builder on Drupal.org
DXPR AI FAQ & Submit Feedback