AI is changing how people find your content. Score your Drupal platform's AI readiness across five areas in five minutes.

How Drupal renders content for different contexts with a close examination of how this is implemented for content intended for consumption by the HTMX library.

Beta 4 release of Drupal AI Context Beta 4 of Drupal AI Context , also known as Context Control Center (CCC), is now available. CCC helps Drupal sites provide governed, reusable context for AI workflows and agents, from brand voice and editorial standards to organisational knowledge and governance rules. This gives AI systems access to more structured and relevant information while allowing teams to manage that information centrally. Following the beta 3 release , beta 4 has been shaped by extensive community testing and an expanded scope. The community testing revealed refinements for a more intuitive user experience, and several features earmarked for 1.1 have been brought forward into 1.0. The result is a more capable, usable and reliable context management system.

Last week’s AI releases put a familiar question back into view: who controls the technology that digital systems depend on? On 10 August 2026, Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter model optimised for local agent workflows, with its weights under the Apache 2.0 licence. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO, argued in an essay published the same day that superintelligence should be broadly distributed rather than concentrated in a small number of hands. On 14 August, Alibaba Group’s Qwen team released Qwen3.8-27B, another downloadable model with weights under Apache 2.0.

There is a catch in calling all of this “open AI.” Downloadable weights under an open-source licence do not by themselves establish that an entire AI system is open source. Under the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source AI Definition, the preferred form for modification also requires sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system, the complete source code used to train and run it, and the model parameters. Even so, downloadable weights can expand practical deployment choices by allowing organisations to run and adapt models on infrastructure they control rather than relying solely on a vendor-hosted service.

Drupal is relevant here not because a content management system and an AI model are equivalent, but because the project has spent 25 years working within open-source principles. Drupal marked its 25th anniversary on 15 January 2026, and the Drupal Association’s Open Web Manifesto describes the open web through principles including freedom, decentralisation, participation, choice, privacy and security. The comparison should remain limited: a content management system, model weights, training data, source code and computing infrastructure are different layers with different licensing and governance problems. The shared principle is practical: leave organisations room to choose infrastructure, modify systems, and avoid unnecessary dependence on a single provider.

The larger question is whether those principles are becoming easier to recognise beyond software-development communities. AI is forcing organisations to consider what happens when a technology provider changes terms, raises prices, closes a service or simply stops fitting their needs. Drupal cannot answer AI’s licensing, computing, data-governance or portability questions, and open source does not guarantee independence. What Drupal can offer is a 25-year example of why choice, modification and exit matter when digital infrastructure becomes important enough to depend on.

As AI becomes another dependency inside websites and digital services, that old open-web argument has a new place to land. The question is no longer only what an AI model can do, but how much control remains with the people and organisations that build on it.

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This issue of Editor’s Pick was written and curated by Kazima Abbas.

If AI can generate an application from a description, is software still worth anything?

I have lived with a version of that question longer than most.

I released Drupal for free more than twenty-five years ago, and later co-founded Acquia, which has grown into a large enterprise software company built around Drupal.

Granted, Drupal is free in a different way than AI-generated applications are free, but I'm not sure that changes the basic question of how to build a successful business around either one.

Open Source made code abundant by giving people broad rights to use, modify, and redistribute it. AI is lowering the cost of producing code. One lets you copy the software; the other makes it cheaper to recreate software.

Free code changes what customers pay for

Because anyone could use Drupal for free, Acquia could never build a durable business around access to the code. From the start, we had to make money another way.

We built that business around helping enterprises build, run, and manage Drupal applications throughout their lifecycle. That includes hosting, but goes well beyond it: the tools and services needed to develop, deploy, secure, scale, monitor, and improve applications in production.

Proprietary SaaS typically bundles access to the application with the hosting and operations required to run it. With Open Source, organizations can run the software themselves or choose who hosts and operates it.

As AI makes applications cheaper to recreate, the traditional SaaS bundle of software and operations comes under pressure. Customers may become less willing to pay for access to application functionality without becoming any less willing to pay to run and manage applications in production. For Open Source businesses those economics are not new.

Dependability becomes the product

Software can be free, or nearly free, without becoming cheap to depend on. The more people and organizations depend on a system, the more of its value comes from operating it securely, reliably, and at scale.

Once people depend on an application, the cost of its failure has little to do with how much it cost to build. An application that costs $1,000 to build can still cause a $10 million failure.

As AI makes enterprise applications easier to create, adapt, and integrate, they still have to be deployed, secured, scaled, monitored, and run reliably over time. As software cost comes down, dependability becomes a differentiator.

Linux is abundant; dependable cloud infrastructure is a service worth paying for. Drupal is abundant; dependable digital experience infrastructure is a service worth paying for.

Acquia has lived with those economics for nearly 20 years. Drupal made the code abundant, so we built our business around helping organizations build, run, and improve what they created with it. As AI makes code cheaper to generate, that business model may start to look a lot less unusual.

Either way, more software companies will have to answer the same question: if the code is abundant, what are customers really paying you for?

Drupal 11: Migrating From Jadu Into LocalGov Drupal: Part 2

This is the second article in a series of articles looking at migrating from Jadu into a LocalGov Drupal (LGD) site for Central Bedfordshire. In the first article we looked at the Jadu API and setting things up so that we could make calls to the API and parse the XML data using the migration systems available.

In the last article I mentioned something about the Jadu API that caused me a lot of headaches. The API contains most of the information for a page, but critically, the Jadu API contains no information about the path of a page. There is basically no way to get the URL of a page in Jadu from the XML API.

I'm quire sure that this makes creating anything useful in the API a real pain since referring back to the site needs to be done with manually placed links, but it's clearly like this by design. I couldn't find any documentation on why it is like this, but it almost feels like vendor lock-in. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.

If you migrate a page from one system to another then it is highly important that you maintain the URL structure of the site. If you change the URL of a page then you need to add in a step that adds a redirect from the old system to the new so that all of your search engine results, the existing links from other sites, and any user bookmarks that have been created work correctly. This is critical to get right for a public facing council site like this.

Since I was migrating into a LGD site, it made sense to use the Drupal path auto system and LGD path management plugins to manage the paths on the Drupal site. We therefore needed to know the existing Jadu URLs so that we could create these redirects.

To get the URLs during the migration caused quite a bit of experimentation, but I did solve the issue with a solution that had a high success rate.

philipnorton42 Sun, 08/16/2026 - 19:06

Webform is the most popular module for building forms in Drupal. You can use it for a simple contact form or for a long form with conditional logic, file uploads, and email alerts. Either way, you build the whole thing from the admin interface without writing code.

In the video above, you will learn how to build a form with Webform in Drupal CMS. You will create a Customer form, add conditional logic, send a confirmation email, split the form into pages, view submissions, and embed the form on a Drupal Canvas page.

Watching someone not need a developer Imagen A man who runs an insurance agency showed me software he built himself, after paying a development company for months and getting nothing. I sat there listing everything that could go wrong with it, and then realized nobody had asked me to. If building is no longer the hard part, I don't know what the rest of us still bring, and I'd rather work that out in the open than pretend I already have. Imagen Carlos Ospina · Technical Account Manager / Drupal Advisor Sat, 08/15/2026 - 19:48 what is next in the AI era Drupal Drupal Planet AI vibe coding no-code agencies freelancing developer career Add new comment

Drupal can be the best SEO platform on the market or an invisibility cloak — the difference is configuration. The module stack, the architecture decisions, Core Web Vitals, and the crawl traps, from a team that does Drupal engineering and SEO under one roof.

Drupal on $5 shared hosting is how good sites die slowly. Here's what Drupal actually requires, what each hosting tier really costs per month, and the caching stack that makes the same site feel five times faster.

Acquia is excellent and expensive — and it's not the only way to run serious Drupal. Here's a working comparison of Acquia, Pantheon, Platform.sh, and the managed-hosting-plus-agency model, with real prices and an honest account of who should pick what.

Drupal's enterprise security reputation is earned — but it only protects sites whose teams actually patch. Here's how the advisory process works, what Drupalgeddon taught everyone, and the hardening checklist we apply to every site we support.

Higher education is Drupal's biggest fan base — and its biggest source of cautionary tales. Multisite sprawl, departmental politics, and 400 unmaintained microsites: here's how universities make Drupal work, and what it costs.

Government teams don't pick Drupal because it's trendy — they pick it because of the security process, accessibility tooling, and data ownership. Here's the honest case for it, the procurement traps, and what a government Drupal build really costs.

Thirty Years of Palantir demet Fri, 08/14/2026 - 11:42

What three decades has taught us about what lasts

Thirty years ago last month, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I started a company called Palantir Internet Services, later known as Palantir.net. I had been building personal websites for nearly two years at that point and was captivated by this revolutionary new medium that allowed anyone, anywhere, to publish something that anyone else in the world could read.

While the internet touches nearly every part of our lives today, in the summer of 1996 it was still seen by many as a novelty. There were only about 250,000 websites on the web, and while Amazon and eBay had already launched, Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia were still years away.

That fall, I met Tiffany Farriss, and together we built Palantir into a company that developed websites for clients of all shapes and sizes. As college students, we were featured in a news story on CNN and profiled in a front-page Chicago Sun-Times article. Our first paying clients were colleges and universities, and then for several years we partnered with Chicago design firms who were making the transition from print to the web.

During that time, we built and deployed several versions of our own in-house content management platform, eventually deprecating it in 2007 in favor of the newly released Drupal 5. Putting our energy into contributing to an open source project not only brought us new business opportunities but also introduced us to a community we are proud to still be part of today.

Along the way we grew into a full-service digital consultancy, bringing our strategy, design, build, and support services to public sector agencies, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations whose needs are genuinely complex and whose work has a profound impact on others.

Only a handful of companies in our industry have been around as long as we have. Over the years, we've watched it go through several transformations: the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the rise of "Web 2.0" and social media in the mid-2000s, and the emergence of smartphones and the mobile web in the late 2000s.

Today, we are in the middle of one of the web's biggest transformations yet, as generative AI has fundamentally disrupted the traditional ways that online content is both created and consumed. The business models that built the web are no longer sufficient for an environment increasingly dominated by bot traffic and bot-created content. As more money has flowed into generative AI, we've seen less of it invested in other forms of online infrastructure, and that shift has affected us and many others in our industry.

At the same time, these tools have already demonstrated their usefulness for automating manual and labor-intensive work, from code review to content audits. We believe that when used thoughtfully, generative AI can improve the online experience and make vital information more accessible to more people.

And that's why, in an era of slop and enshittification, we feel it's more important than ever to recommit to our mission and vision. Palantir exists to help others discover, create, and share knowledge, and to strengthen humanity through the work that we do and the way that we do it.

We may not be able to predict the future, but 30 years of experience gives us a lot of perspective on where things have been and where they might go next. Technology keeps changing, but it's people who decide where to put their time and attention. That's the choice we've made so far, and it's the one we will continue to make.

I know this blog post's title implies losing my (programming) skills, and I will gladly address my feelings about how agentic coding has caused my problem-solving and coding to atrophy from lack of use. The main focus of this post is about losing, specifically deleting, my overly verbose and complicated skills and AGENTS.md files.

I was inspired to write this post after recently switching to the latest OpenAI GPT 5.6 models with Codex and OpenCode as my harnesses for Drupal development. In a previous post, I discussed that one approach to working with AI is to accept that every beginning and end of a session is like onboarding and offboarding a new team member. To help onboard an AI, we need to provide documentation, guidance, and workflows, typically implemented as AGENTS.md and agent skills.

AGENTS.md and agent skills are instructions added to your context to nudge the AI in the right direction. After switching to a more intelligent frontier model, I began to suspect I needed to rethink my assumptions about what the AI was capable of and how much initial context was required for the AI to succeed at a task. So I removed all my assumptions, deleted my AGENTS.md and skills directory, and started fresh.

Losing my agent skills

I had a hunch that some of my installed agent skills were costing me extra tokens and not adding enough value when I read a Reddit thread about "are you guys still using the superpowers skill?" Superpowers nudges coding agents to adopt a pragmatic workflow that includes brainstorming, specs, plans, tests, and review....Read More

Questions, story leads, and feedback on future Drupal coverage are on the agenda for contributors and community members joining the monthly meeting.

Members still weighing their choice can read The DropTimes' interviews with seven candidates to compare their priorities before casting a ballot.

Today we are talking about Open Source sustainability, becoming your own content creation machine, and how drupal influenced some of that with guest Jeff Geerling. We'll also cover AI Metering as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/565

Topics

• Jeff's Timekeeping Icebreaker
• Jeff's Drupal Origin Story
• From Drupal to Hardware Tinkering
• Staying Motivated on YouTube
• What Conferences Are Really About
• DrupalCon Memories and Community
• Why Jeff Moved to Hugo
• PSA Tornado Warning Detour
• Keeping Up with Drupal CMS
• PHP Perception Shift
• Fast Drupal Setup
• COVID Streaming Boom
• Picking Video Projects
• Decommissioning Builds
• YouTube Algorithm Risk
• Vintage Time Server
• Creator Starter Tips
• Supporting Maintainers
• Books and Crohns
• Local Control Trends
• AI Workflow Boundaries
• Timing Obsession
• Kind Drupal Culture

Guests

Jeff Geerling - jeffgeerling.com geerlingguy

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Mike Anello - drupaleasy.com ultimike JD Flynn - dorficus

MOTW Correspondent

Mike Anello - drupaleasy.com ultimike

• Brief description:
  • AI Metering module - helps keep track of your users' AI token usage on the site. Includes cost estimation, token limits, and local LLM fallback options.
• Module name/project name:
  • AI Metering
• Brief history
  • How old: created in June 1 2026 by Jérôme Tchania (codeitwisely)
  • Versions available: 1.0.1
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained - yes
  • Co-maintained by Carlos Ospina (camoa)
  • Security coverage - yes
  • Test coverage - yes
  • Documentation - yes
  • Number of open issues: 9 open issues, 4 of which are bugs against the current branch
• Usage stats:
  • Sites: 78
• Module features and usage
  • Obtains token costs for all modules from LiteLLM
  • Can be configured to send email when the token limit is being approached.
  • Per user and per role reports.
  • LLM fallback to Ollama

Open-source software still depends on infrastructure and human maintenance that carry real costs. Farriss argues that institutions should plan for those costs before contracts are awarded.