Apex AI 2.0 introduces a provider orchestration layer for Drupal’s AI ecosystem, adding routing, observability, audit logging, and governance controls to deployments built on the Drupal AI module. The release supports nine AI providers and more than 24 models, and introduces middleware pipelines, GDPR-related tooling, MCP integration, and operational monitoring features for organisations managing AI-assisted workflows in Drupal.

Today Acquia announced something I'm really proud of. We're calling it the Acquia Fair Trade Initiative.

When an Acquia partner closes a deal, 2% of that deal flows directly to the Drupal Association, credited in the partner's name, to fund Drupal's infrastructure and long-term growth.

Imagine an Acquia partner closes a $100,000 Drupal deal with Acquia. $2,000 goes to the Drupal Association, attributed to that partner. The 2% comes from Acquia, not from partner margins, so the partner keeps their full revenue and incentives.

The donation is publicly attributed in the Acquia Partner Portal and counts toward the partner's standing in the Drupal Association's Certified Partner Program. It is recognized as financial support for the Drupal Association, separate from non-financial contributions like code, case studies, or community participation.

Most of all, I like that this program is structural. It is not a one-time gift or sponsorship campaign. It is built into the economics of Acquia's partner program, so Drupal's funding grows automatically as Acquia and its partners grow.

Too often, funding for Open Source projects depends on periodic fundraising or individual goodwill. That can work, but it rarely scales in a predictable way.

Open Source sustainability works best when incentives align. With the Fair Trade Initiative, the Drupal Association receives more predictable funding, partners receive recognition through the Drupal Association's Certified Partner Program, and Acquia invests in the long-term health of the Drupal ecosystem its business depends on. And yes, this also creates more incentive for partners to work with Acquia on Drupal projects. Drupal wins, Acquia's partners win, and Acquia wins too. That is what incentive alignment looks like.

I set a reminder for myself to report back in a year, maybe sooner. I'm curious to see what this model can become.

The DropTimes invites wider participation from across the Drupal ecosystem through an upcoming Townhall focused on project updates, community initiatives and ecosystem discussions. The session will create space for contributors, agencies, developers and community members to present ongoing work, exchange feedback and discuss outreach and collaboration efforts across Drupal.

Drupal AI Summit NYC will take place on 14 May 2026 at Convene on Madison Avenue in New York City, bringing together Drupal contributors, enterprise platform teams, digital strategists and AI practitioners for a day centred on the operational use of artificial intelligence inside Drupal ecosystems. Sessions throughout the event will examine governance, migrations, workflow integration, structured content systems and digital sovereignty, with speakers focusing on implementation challenges already emerging in production environments rather than speculative AI adoption.

Dominique De Cooman @ Drupal Iberia: How the Drupal AI Initiative transforms Drupal into an advanced infrastructure layer for an AI-powered high-value open web.

The Drupal and open-source communities are mourning the passing of Alanna Burke, a longtime advocate, writer, and community leader known for her work in documentation, diversity initiatives, and developer advocacy. Burke contributed to organisations and community efforts including amazee.io, Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, DrupalCon North America, and Meta’s open-source AI documentation initiatives.

Discover how the Drupal AI Initiative is revolutionizing open-source marketing. Learn how 31 companies and a global team of specialists are scaling Drupal’s AI roadmap and driving enterprise adoption through radical collaboration.

13,980 active installs, 30+ Partner organizations, 25+ FTE committed. A look at what the Drupal AI Initiative is shipping right now and what comes next.

Nick Opris has developed a daily digest system that tracks issue activity, comments, and merge requests across selected Drupal AI Initiative projects. The system is designed to reduce the overhead of monitoring fragmented issue queues and review workflows by generating separate summaries for developers and non-technical stakeholders from the same contribution data. The project reflects growing experimentation within the Drupal ecosystem around AI-assisted coordination and reporting tools.

AI ate my work

I've been experimenting with using AI to build Drupal modules for the past few months. Two weeks ago, I released a module called the AI Schema.org JSON-LD module and wrote a blog post about it. The module essentially replaces the primary outcome of my Schema.org Blueprints module, which is to enhance SEO by providing high-quality Schema.org JSON-LD markup. The AI Schema.org JSON-LD module generates Schema.org JSON-LD by having contrib modules work together to call an AI provider with a simple prompt.

This simple module, which I built in four days, supersedes my work on the Schema.org Blueprints module, which I've been working on for four years. I could resent the fact that this new AI-powered module, created using AI, was replacing me and my work, but instead, it's just changing how I view the work I'm doing.

With AI, it's easier for me to explore new ideas and take on more ambitious tasks, while knowing that the code and modules I'm creating remain flexible and extendable by humans and machines. There's a fine line between feeling like AI is eating our work, replacing it, consuming it, or improving it. We should talk about it.

What does AI mean for me?

The most immediate thing I have to think about is how I took something I had previously built, saw how AI could replace it, and had to be open to recognizing the opportunity that AI could do things differently, better, and faster. Everyone needs to lean into that reality with AI: things can get done faster and with more possibilities.

It took me a while to realize that things had changed. I built a few very simple modules to understand how AI coding agents plan, document, build, test, and maintain code. After a few weeks, I began to see the...Read More

Ten Months That Changed Everything: An ECA Journey Jürgen Haas Tue 12 May 2026 - 15:00

This post tells the story of the ten months that took ECA from Dries Buytaert' private "1% of what it could be" feedback in June/July 2025 to a keynote at Drupal DevDays Athens in April 2026, by way of DriesNote moments in Vienna and Chicago. It opens a 9-post series exploring how UX research with Emma Horrell, Mark Dodgson and Lauri Timmanee, close collaboration with Shibin Das, and a focused build sprint produced in-context customization, a new React-based Workflow Modeler, integrated testing and replay, AI-powered documentation, and a vision for Drupal as an orchestration hub.

Managing metadata manually across hundreds of Drupal pages? Read this blog to learn about how the Bulk Metatag AI Generator module uses AI to automate SEO metadata creation at scale in Drupal.

Today we are talking about The Midwest Open Source Alliance, What they do, and How they support Drupal with guests April Sides & Tearyne Almendariz. We'll also cover Canvas Field Component as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/552

Topics

• Congratulations to April as the 2026 Aaron Winborn award!
• What is MOSA, and what gap in the Drupal ecosystem was it created to fill?
• How did MOSA get started, and who were the key people behind its formation?
• MOSA acts as a fiscal sponsor—what does that actually mean in practice for Drupal events and initiatives?
• What are some of the projects or camps MOSA currently supports?
• How does MOSA help sustain and grow regional Drupal communities over time?
• What does membership in MOSA look like, and who should consider getting involved?
• How does MOSA balance local community focus with broader, national or global Drupal efforts?
• What are the biggest challenges MOSA faces as a nonprofit supporting open source communities?
• How has MOSA evolved in recent years, and what's different today compared to when it launched?
• Looking ahead, what's the long-term vision for MOSA and its role in the Drupal ecosystem?

Resources

• MOSA Website
• MOSA Drupal Project
• Aaron Winborn
• Handbook
• Moline, Illinois

Guests

Tearyne Almendariz - nlbcworks.com NineLivesBlackCat April Sides - weekbeforenext

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to place Drupal-rendered fields into your Drupal Canvas templates? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Canvas Field Component
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2026 by me! With some help from a couple of AI models
  • Versions available: 1.0.0, which works with Drupal 11.2 or newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - a README, but is designed to be narrow in scope
  • Number of open issues: technically 5 open issues, but all marked as fixed
• Usage stats:
  • 41 sites
• Module features and usage
  • By design, when using Drupal Canvas to create templates for content types, the idea is to map field values to properties in the template's components
  • That is a new system, however, so site builders may find there are gaps in terms of available mappings for field types they need to use, or may want to draw on mature formatting options such the responsive image definitions that come with Drupal CMS
  • With the Canvas Field Component module installed, you'll find a new "Field display" option available in your Canvas component library. When you drag that into a Canvas template layout, you can choose which field from the content type you want to display, and the formatter to use
  • That, in turn, will expose all settings for the chosen formatter, as well as any third-party settings available, for example if using Date Augmenters with Smart Date fields
  • Those settings will be reflected in real-time inside the Canvas UI preview, and then on rendered content once the template changes are published
  • This module started as a simple idea, based on my own experience using other UI-based Drupal solutions for laying out content type templates, like Layout Builder or Acquia Site Studio. Over the years, I've come to appreciate the flexibility of being able to place Drupal-rendered fields into templates, so you can mix-and-match existing, robust formatting options with flexible ways of pulling field values into layouts that also include more bespoke elements. Or, just use this as a way to add more layout flexibility to Drupal's default, linear display controls. That's what I do on my own blog, where I use Layout Builder but don't have a single custom layout on the site. It's only used for enhancing the layout of structured content.
  • Full disclosure: I also used the idea for Canvas Field Component as the impetus to venture into vibe coding, inspired by the conversations happening in the AI Learners Club, which listeners will hear more about in an upcoming episode.

Learn more about the implementation that helped automatically verify transactions for AML.

Overall SummaryOur 35th UI Suite Monthly was one of the most packed sessions yet — a full hour of demos, strategy updates, and an urgent call to action for the community. We covered major progress on the Display Builder (now mid-beta with half its scope completed), a breakthrough demo of symmetric and asymmetric translation support, a roadmap for cleaning up and refocusing UI Patterns this summer, the exciting new ability to use SDC components as form elements, and two critical core proposals — the Design Token API and the Style API — that need community support before the May 15th freeze. We also gave a first look at our AI strategy for display building, with a live demo coming next month. In short: our ecosystem is maturing fast, and the next week is decisive.

The AI industry spent years presenting automation as a cheaper alternative to human labour. In 2026, organisations are discovering that the economics are more complicated. According to Boston Consulting Group, enterprises are expected to increase AI spending significantly this year, even as pressure grows to demonstrate measurable returns. At the same time, infrastructure costs tied to inference workloads, data centres, and continuously running AI systems continue to rise across the industry.

That shift helps explain why Drupal’s AI direction has increasingly focused on operational flexibility rather than “AI-first” positioning. The Drupal AI Initiative’s provider-agnostic architecture allows organisations to move between commercial and open-source models without rebuilding workflows, while Drupal’s structured content model reduces unnecessary token usage by providing cleaner contextual data to language models. Recent work around AI observability, governance, and usage tracking reflects a broader industry movement toward cost predictability, monitoring, and infrastructure control as AI systems transition from experimentation into production environments.

The conversation around AI adoption is therefore beginning to move away from novelty and toward sustainability. Questions around inference costs, infrastructure ownership, governance, auditability, and long-term operational flexibility are increasingly shaping enterprise decision-making. Across the broader ecosystem, the organisations likely to benefit most from AI adoption may not be those deploying the largest models, but those building systems capable of managing automation reliably, transparently, and economically over time.

Editorial note: Editor’s Pick | Vol. 4 | Issue 18 referenced reporting and analysis from a blog post by Michael Anello on beginner Drupal training programmes without sufficient attribution. The newsletter has since been updated with proper credit and source links. The Drop Times regrets the oversight and thanks Michael Anello for bringing the matter to our attention.

Now, let’s move on to the story highlights from the past week.

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Mautic Content Provider Module Standardises Drupal–Mautic Content Workflows
• Dries Buytaert Introduces AI-Generated Rector Rules for Drupal Upgrades
• AI-Assisted Workflows Increase Demand for Creativity, Strategy, and Communication Skills
• Drupal Entity Webhook Module Enables Config-Driven Integrations
• AI Schema.org JSON-LD Module Introduces Prompt-Based Structured Data in Drupal
• Drupal 11 Expands Attribute-Based Hooks and Moves Away From .module Files
• Drupal Content Packages Module Introduces Git-Based Editorial Workflow

EVENT

• DrupalCamp Poland 2026 Rescheduled to 12 September in Wrocław
• Drupal AI Initiative Announces Webinar on Southwark Council’s AI PDF Workflow
• Drupal Meetup Frankfurt Set for 20 May at OpenSense Labs
• Minsait Hosts Drupal AI Event on Productivity, Automation, and Web Development
• Drupal Spotlight Meetup to Explore AI, Drupal CMS, ECA, and Media Workflows

DRUPAL COMMUNITY

• Drupal Community Health Team Urges Early Collaboration Before Conflict Reports

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• Acquia Expands Acquia Source and Introduces Acquia AI for Content Operations
• Mautic 7.1.0 “Canis Major” Focuses on Stability and Platform Improvements

Additional developments from across the Drupal ecosystem were published during the week. Readers can follow The Drop Times on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for ongoing updates. The publication is also active on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.

Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The Drop Times

This is part five of a series of articles looking at HTMX in Drupal. If you are interested in reading more then there will be a list of related articles at the end of this article.

When I was thinking about ideas on demonstrating HTMX in Drupal I implemented things like infinite scroll, a tabbed interface, and a cascading select form. I basically recreating some things that I had done in non-Drupal HTMX inside a Drupal module.

I then had an idea to create something that I might actually find useful in my day to day work as a Drupal developer. This was some way of displaying nodes in different view modes.

In this article we will look at creating a simple form that allows users to enter a node ID and a view mode and see the node rendered in that view mode.

All of the code contained in this article can be found in the Drupal HTMX examples project on GitHub, but here we will go through what the code does and what actions it performs to generate content.   

Just like the other articles on HTMX, I'm going to start with the basics and define the route.

The Route

The route we need here just needs to point the path /htmx-examples/display-mode-preview at our form class.

drupal_htmx_examples_display_mode_preview_form: path: "/htmx-examples/display-mode-preview" defaults: _form: '\Drupal\drupal_htmx_examples\Form\DisplayModePreviewForm' _title: "HTMX Display Mode Preview Form" requirements: _permission: "access content"

There isn't anything unusual about this route, it's just a regular form route.

Let's create the form for this route.

The Form

The form class has a couple of injected dependencies, which are as follows:

Read more

Read moreSome places do not merely offer a view. They give you direction. Athens did that to me. During Drupal Dev Days, I found myself looking at the Acropolis from a distance. The Parthenon was there, standing above the city, glowing with a presence that is difficult to describe if you have not seen it in person.From Athens to Rotterdam: Why Drupal AI Needs an "Athena" ReleaseAISaturday, May 9, 2026 - 16:16

A new open-source Drupal module aims to reduce the repeated custom development often required to connect Drupal-managed content with Mautic campaigns. By exposing Drupal nodes and Views directly inside Mautic workflows, the module provides a more standardised approach to content delivery and segment-based personalisation.

Nic Laflin and Matt Glaman sit down to discuss Drupal caching and Matt's new Leanpub book, Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe016

Topics

• New Book on Caching
• Why Drupal Caching Shines
• Cache Tags Explained
• Cache Context Variations
• What Caching Really Is
• Invalidation Across the Stack
• NGINX Layer Pitfalls
• What Drupal Can Cache
• Writing Cacheable Render Arrays
• Debugging Metadata Issues
• Testing Caching Strategies
• Researching the Book
• Variation Cache Deep Dive
• Access Policy and Performance
• Permissions Caching and Disk IO
• Extension Discovery Tangent
• File Cache Explained
• Clearing File Cache in Tests
• Updating the Book Over Time
• Leanpub Pricing and Royalties
• Publishing Workflow and Tools
• Writing Process and Editing

Matt Glaman

Matt Glaman is an experienced software engineer and a prominent member of the Drupal community. With over a decade of experience in web development, he has developed a wealth of knowledge and expertise. He is the author of several books, including "Drupal 8 Development Cookbook" and "Drupal 10 Development Cookbook," which provide a comprehensive guide to building and customizing Drupal sites. And recently, the book Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers.

Nic Laflin

Nic Laflin is an accomplished Drupal architect and the founder of nLightened Development LLC, a web development and design firm established in 2008 that leverages highly extensible CMS frameworks to solve complex business challenges. They've been working with Drupal since late 2008, delivering creative solutions for a diverse roster of clients—from government agencies and e-commerce platforms to higher-education institutions and HIPAA-compliant medical services. Recently, Nic has focused on Native Web Components for platform-agnostic design, and has deep experience integrating AWS and building mobile application back ends. A recognized Drupal guru, Nic speaks regularly at regional Drupal camps and co-hosts the Talking Drupal podcast, where they share best practices and innovations with the community. Outside of technology, Nic enjoys building with LEGO, experimenting in the kitchen, and designing home automation projects. You can learn more at www.nlightened.net.

Resources

Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers https://mglaman.dev/blog/leveraging-list-cache-tag-entity-types If you're using a reverse proxy then disable the internal page cache https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3414825

Guests

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan

Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman