Today we are talking about Drupal, AI, and learning to use it responsibly with guest Mike Anello. We'll also cover Entity Mesh as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/566

Topics

• Course overview
• Fast moving modules
• Inside vs outside AI
• No code approach
• Keeping curriculum current
• Essentials vs add ons
• Chat Claude Code setup
• Inside vs Outside AI
• Rules and Provider Calls
• Guardrails in Drupal UI
• Model QA and Testing
• Local Models and Costs
• Token Budgets and Logging
• Course Use Cases Overview
• RAG and Vector Basics
• Class Schedule and Pricing
• AI Predictions and Wrap

Resources

• New DrupalEasy class: Responsible Drupal AI Basics
• Training at orlando
• amazee ai
• Jrockowitz losing my skill
• AI module ecosystem
• AI browser provider (LLM in Google Chrome)
• amazee.ai Private AI Provider
• Derecho

Guests

Mike Anello - drupaleasy.com ultimike

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi JD Flynn - dorficus

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted a way to analyze and visualize the ways in which the content on your Drupal site is interlinked? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Entity Mesh
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Jan 2025 by Jorge Tutor (gedur) of Metadrop
  • Versions available: 2.1.0 and 2.0.3, both of which work with Drupal 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release last month, and a commit just yesterday
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation? Project page is pretty descriptive
  • Number of open issues: 13 open issues, 4 of which are bugs, but 2 of those were marked fixed in the past week
• Usage stats:
  • 437 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With Entity Mesh installed, the module will analyze the rendered output of your nodes using a chosen account, looking for links to other content
  • That means it will find not just links in entity relationship fields, but also links within formatted text, menus, and more
  • The results can be visualized in a D3.js 3D visualization, displayed as a table, or exported as a CSV
  • The report also exposes a set of Views-style filters, to help you narrow down to the specific set of information you want to understand
  • Entity Mesh analyzes the DOM of your rendered nodes, looking for links, iframes, and images. Internal paths are further analyzed and categorized, for example based on whether the specified path redirects, is broken, points to something that is access-denied, and so on
  • From a marketing perspective, that allows you to understand the paths available to navigate from a source page to a target page, the content linked to or from a specific page, and will also augment the content deletion confirmation form to advise the user of any existing links to the content being deleted
  • There are obvious SEO advantages to being able to find redirect chain, broken or access denied links, and there are GDPR compliance implications for being able to identify iframes that might load third-party cookies
  • The project page also mentions that this module could be very useful to run after a content migration, for QA
  • The actual analysis of your site content be triggered by drush, an admin form, or by cron, and you can set limits on the size of the batch to run, because of the weight it puts on your site by rendering every node it analyzes
  • The current versions Entity Mesh also depend on the Entity Registry and Entity Render Context modules, that have essentially the same maintainers, so if there's only part of Entity Mesh that you really need, you could also give those a look
  • Back in episode #321 we covered Entity Usage, and there are some definite similarities, but also some differences. While they both provide reporting on content relationships, Entity Usage does so by examining structured field values at save time. So, the information gathered is different, and collects data that can be displayed in views or custom code.

I’m Joining Acquia! mherchel Thu, 08/20/2026 - 11:10

A conversation in Cartagena Imagen I spent part of a trip talking with an architect and a facade specialist about how buildings behave, and then about when to service them. The systems hold the facts. A person holds the reasoning that turns those facts into a decision, and nobody writes that part down. Most of what follows is me wondering, and I say so where I'm guessing. Imagen Carlos Ospina · Technical Account Manager / Drupal Advisor Thu, 08/20/2026 - 09:59 what is next in the AI era Drupal Drupal Planet AI AI Agents context engineering operations knowledge management Latin America Add new comment

Running on DotNetNuke (DNN)? We highly recommend a CMS migration to the latest release of Drupal. It is packed with all the features you have been wishing for! Learn why you should make that move and how you can do it.

The International Splash Awards 2026 have reached a new milestone, with 40% more submissions compared to last year.

Image

 

A huge thank you to everyone who submitted a project and helped make this year’s edition even bigger.

The jury is now reviewing the submissions, with nominations set to be announced in early September.

We look forward to celebrating the projects and teams behind them during DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.

Stay tuned. The nominations are coming soon.

Thank you to everyone who submitted a design and shared their creativity with the community, and to everyone who took part in the voting. The five finalist designs showed the imagination and community spirit that make DrupalCon so special.

 

Meet the winning design Image The Drupal community has spoken! 

After an open public vote, Juliane Vöske’s design has been selected as the official DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 T-shirt.

Her winning design will be worn by attendees from across the global Drupal community. This is the T-shirt that will bring us together in Rotterdam. 

See you there!

 

The Drop Times is reducing routine summaries while putting more effort into original reporting, technical coverage, media partnerships, and community participation.

Drupal code query MCP Server

A few months ago I put an api online to search and query the whole Drupal code ecosystem. With the release of some more capable local AI models I thought it could be good to release a MCP server with that same data optimized for LLM use. Same data, different packaging. The address for the MCP server is:

https://mcp.tresbien.tech/mcp

Add the server to your setup of choice and you'll be able to ask things like: 

theodore August 20, 2026

We recently spent some quality time with Claude Code to (finally!) update academy.drupaleasy.com, the training home for DrupalEasy's workshops and courses. We had several goals for the update, all of which we have achieved: A consistent, modern look Improved accessibility Verified class completion pages Office hours attendance statistics Prepare for the Drupal 11 upgrade If you've never taken a DrupalEasy course, then (sadly) there won't be too much for you to see. But, for our hundreds of alumni, this upgrade hopefully provides a big improvement and some fun aspects as well. New look We admit it, design isn't our thing - it's always something that we contract out. In this case, we used Claude Design and Claude Code to update the site with a modern, flat design (really original, we know!) Accessibility While building out the new theme, we used the Drupal AI best practices' drupal-accessibility skill to continually ensure that changes we were making met the WCAG 2.2 AA standard

For 30 years we write all our code by hand in BBEdit, the BOA Drupal hosting stack included, and until recently the smartest chatbot money could buy couldn't produce three bash scripts aware of each other, so our verdict was simple: a modern Stack Overflow, and not much else. Then 2026 arrived, and the documentation BOA was owed for 16 years finally got done – after one model fabricated most of it behind our backs, and a better one caught it red-handed and fixed it all, section by section, in four voices for four different audiences. Add a security review of the codebase, end-to-end test suites our old Jenkins could never run, and hosted Drupal and Backdrop sites defended against machine-made attacks, and you will see why we finally stopped joking about Artificial Stupidity.

Drupal teams can govern the context supplied to AI agents, but they cannot make model behaviour deterministic. Kristen Pol explains why that distinction matters when evaluating CCC for policy-sensitive and production-facing workflows.

AI-powered internal linking in Drupal uses vector search and LLMs to surface relevant links as you write. Read this blog to learn how it works and which modules to use.

A portable SKILL.md file does not guarantee portable installation. Drupal now has Composer-aware skill aggregation, while its maintainers are debating how much distribution logic belongs in Drupal rather than the wider Agent Skills ecosystem.

Single Directory Components (SDC) are the biggest change to Drupal theming in a decade, and one of the quietest. There was no page-builder launch, no new screen to learn, just a simple answer to a question Drupal front-end developers had been asking for years: why are all the pieces that make up one part of a page scattered across five different folders?

Making Entity Pager module API-first

It's funny how big ideas start.

I am doing some maintenance work on the Entity Pager module, which has been fixing bugs, improving the tests, and so on. And because Computed Field is also a module I maintain, and because I have at the back of my mind the idea of finding more use cases for it, I had the thought that I could add support for Computed Fields to Entity Pager.

Specifically, this would mean that Entity Pager would allow you to add computed fields to your entity type, which would be computed entity reference fields to the previous and next entities in the pager. As well as allowing you to output the previous and next links with more flexibility, and within the rendered entity rather than in a block, it would open up having these links in JSON:API (though there's a bug to fix still).

So, then, quite a good use case!

It does, however, require a bit of re-plumbing inside the EntityPager class. Currently, EntityPager, expects to be instantiated within the theming for an executed view. Our computed field needs a new API which it would call with the basic data (the view ID, display ID, and current entity), and that would take care of executing the view, extracting the data from the result, and returning it.

I suppose I could make a whole new pathway, but a lot of the code that would need is in EntityPager so it makes more sense to me to change that to allow both cases. This means adding a new way of constructing it from the factory service, and then executing the view if necessary.

So then we'd have an API for getting the previous and next entities. And that's where the big idea suggests itself: what if we used this API for everything?

Currently, the rendered entity pager is a specially-themed view. We define a custom Views style plugin, and that uses our theme template 'entity_pager' for its theming. We use the Views block system to show the pager. By the time our code is involved, the view has already been executed, and all of our code is taking place within the Views theming. This makes it tricky to do things like hiding the pager completely.

But... once we have an API, we could totally invert this. We could define a custom render element which outputs the pager. This would take the view ID and display ID as properties, and the current entity if you have it (and continue to detect it from the current route if you don't). Like this:

$build['pager] = [ '#type' => 'entity_pager', '#view_id' => 'my_pager_view', '#view_display_id' => 'my_display', ];

This render element would then be in charge of executing the view, and getting the data it needs from the view's result. You'd still store settings for the pager on the view's style plugin, but we'd no longer rely on the theming of that — the view would just be used as a data source. The render element would have similar theming to the Views style — it could pretty much use the same Twig template. The block we provide would change to being a completely custom block plugin, which would output the pager element.

To me, this seems like a cleaner structure. Our pager is a separate render element, and our code no longer runs inside Views rendering, which feels a little bit convoluted and fragile.

If you use Entity Pager, what do you think? Would this make your use of Entity Pager simpler, more complex, or not affect you at all? It would be a big change to the module, so I'd love to hear opinions on the issue for this, as I'm still undecided about it.

Do you need help with updating a contrib module, refactoring it, or expanding its capabilities? I'm available for hire - contact me!

joachim Mon, 17/08/2026 - 16:45 Tags

• contrib module
• Entity Pager

If you’re on Drupal Commerce, you don’t have to limp along with subpar product pages and landing pages. You don’t need a separate platform for your marketing websites. And you certainly don’t have to decouple your eCommerce website to get dynamic, flexible layouts.

Drupal has everything you need to present your products in the best light and to build marketing pages that guide your customers along their buying journey. You already have access to premium page builder and layout tools.

In this webinar, Ryan Szrama and Ivan Buisic will walk you through the modules and features you may have missed, demonstrate their Commerce Bootstrap framework for bringing any layout to life, and help you unlock your site’s full potential.

Date: Sept. 15th
Time: 10:30 AM ET

You’ll learn:

Read more

The answers we already tried Imagen This industry has already produced two answers to what developers and agencies sell now. I believed both of them at the time, and neither one held. What's left is finding something that stayed difficult, and I don't think we've done that yet. Imagen Carlos Ospina · Technical Account Manager / Drupal Advisor Mon, 08/17/2026 - 08:37 what is next in the AI era Drupal Drupal Planet AI agentic workflows AI governance agency business pricing Drupal Pivot Add new comment

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.