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We recently added PreviousNext's name to "A Manifesto for an Open Future," joining 15 other Drupal agency founders and leaders in a public declaration that open source, not closed platforms, is the foundation for the future. Since founding PreviousNext in 2009, we've built our business on that premise, so signing felt less like adopting a new position and more like putting our name to something we've already been doing for 17 years.

by Owen Lansbury / 8 August 2026

The manifesto's core conviction is: "we are here to help build a resilient civilisation, and to build it in the open." The nine statements that follow reinforce that open source code becomes a refuge as trust in proprietary technology erodes; that data sovereignty stops being optional; that structured content becomes the raw material machines reason best on; and that security earned through a quarter-century of public scrutiny counts for more than a security case a vendor simply asserts rather than proves.

We didn't need much convincing to sign. PreviousNext invests around 5% of our annual revenue by contributing to Drupal's codebase and community, we're Australia's only Top Tier Drupal Certified Partner, and we rank among the top five global contributors to the project despite our comparatively small team. From helping formalise the DrupalSouth Steering Committee through the 2010s and volunteering on the Drupal Association board from 2019 to 2025, the manifesto's language about supporting the wider community across competitive lines is the essence of the commitment we already have.

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Introducing Language Audit and Configuration Language Lock for Drupal and asking for your feedback I am neck deep in Drupal configuration language recently as I was diagnosing problems with how recipes are installed on foreign language Drupal CMS sites and how Drupal Canvas operates under that inconsistent configuration. I did a lot of research and while already fixed a few of the side-quest bugs fund, there are many old standing issues that this area connects. As a result I built two open source Drupal modules: one to diagnose and another to force language behavior. These two modules may be used today (although both are fresh and not yet widely proven so consider that a caveat). Gábor Hojtsy Fri, 08/07/2026 - 19:22

Display Builder Beta 6 carries the UX refresh previewed in July, adds Drupal 11.4 compatibility fixes, and replaces a Beta 5 affected by a fresh-install failure. Translation and accessibility work remain before a release candidate.

Today we are talking about Maintaining NodeJS, Patternlab, Writing Books, and Open Source with guest Brian Muenzenmeyer. We'll also cover AI Webform Generator as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/564

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How the Drupal Association raises money can shape who influences the project and which work gets sustained. James Abrahams makes that tension central to his board candidacy.

A backend engineer guide to Single Directory Components in Drupal bhavinhjoshi Thu, 08/06/2026 - 17:36

Bridging the gap between custom modules and strictly typed components

Single Directory Components completely changed how we handle the frontend. But if you spend most of your time engineering the backend, SDC can feel incredibly frustrating.

You build a massive render array, pass it to the template, and the strict schema rejects it instantly. The days of dumping raw entity objects into Twig are over.

When you work with SDC, the component dictates exactly what data it accepts. This guide details the cleanest way to format your data and bridge the gap between custom backend logic and strict frontend schemas.

Implementing the Component Workflow

If your backend architecture does not format data perfectly, the system throws a fatal error. Follow these steps to ensure your data matches the strict schema requirements.

1. Define your component schema

Every component needs a YAML file. This is the contract your backend must follow. Keep your properties simple and predictable.

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Open-source code may remain available while the services, organisations, licences, and support arrangements around it change. Drupal delivery teams need accurate dependency records and workable continuity plans throughout the software’s operational life.

The European Commission wants public bodies to become stronger users and contributors to open source, supported by fairer procurement, maintenance funding, security measures and long-term stewardship.

Explore the inner workings of the AI Chatbot module to customise the chat experience via hooks.

This post is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox each month.

A note from our interim CEO

Dear Drupal community,

Open source hums along on the work that just gets done. As I step into the interim CEO seat, I'm making a point to notice the sheer volume of work powering this ecosystem, from the DA and beyond. Here's some of what has come together in the past month:

• Our engineering team migrated hundreds of projects to GitLab, security issues included, and kicked off an RFP to make launching a Drupal site dead simple.
• DrupalCon Rotterdam is ready and in the homestretch.
• The DrupalCon Orlando call for speakers opened August 4. If the event converts even half the enthusiasm of the local team (or the cuteness of Bytes the Gator), it's going to be one to remember.
• We're building a new front door to introduce Drupal to new audiences and evaluators, and we're looking for help.
• The community has 14 global events dropping this August and partnership groundwork under way in Burkina Faso.
• Nominations are open for the Women in Drupal Award, an honor I was humbled to receive back in 2023.

My goal as interim CEO is straightforward: make sure the Association's foundation is resilient enough to support all this energy. The first step is helping all of us notice and appreciate the work that already "just happens."

I hope you enjoy this month's newsletter and everything everyone's been building. And one final note: board elections are open. Please vote.

Tiffany Farriss Interim CEO

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Take Away

Ajit Shinde, Sr. Drupal Developer and a longtime open source contributor, built the workspace tools in the Tool Belt module so AI agents in Drupal work under the same staging and review rules as human editors.

AI assistants can already generate content, update fields, and perform administrative tasks in Drupal. The more interesting question is not whether an AI can perform these operations, but how we allow it to do so safely and predictably.

Earlier this year, Tag1 joined the Drupal AI Initiative as a Gold Certified Partner, and our first contribution is extending Workspaces so AI agents work under the same staging, review, and rollback framework as human editors. The workspace tooling in this post is part of that governance work.

Tool API: The Foundation

To get Workspaces talking to AI agents, we built a new module called Tool Belt on top of Drupal's Tool API. The Tool API does the underlying work, so it's worth understanding first.

The Tool API provides the system that allows Drupal to expose structured, callable operations to AI agents. It defines how tools are described, how inputs are validated, and how results are returned.

In short, it turns Drupal functionality into well-defined actions that an AI can safely invoke.

Tool Belt builds on that.

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Last week, PreviousNext joined forces with fellow Drupal Certified Partners Annex, Morpht and Salsa Digital for a shared booth at the Public Sector Network's Government Innovation Showcase in NSW. We came together to show government agencies what Drupal has to offer, including Drupal CMS, AI, security, and content governance.

by griffyn.heels / 6 August 2026A joint effort, not a competition

Drupal Certified Partners don't usually share a stand, so this was something special. PreviousNext, Annex, Morpht and Salsa Digital came together to present a single message about what Drupal delivers for the public sector.

Several attendees commented on this directly, with consistent feedback on how collaborative the presence felt.

This mattered because most people in the room already knew Drupal. Thanks to OneCX's presence across the NSW government, there was no need to explain what Drupal is or how PreviousNext support it. That freed up conversations to go deeper, into real problems agencies are trying to solve and how recent innovations in Drupal can help address them.

What stood out from the sessions

The day's sessions reinforced a theme that's top of mind for many of our government clients: how to use AI responsibly without losing sight of the people doing the work.

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I have been counting Drupal sites for a fortnight and I cannot stop thinking about Clark Griswold standing in his driveway, holding an envelope. You remember the scene. He has done the maths. The Christmas bonus is coming, he has already put a deposit on the swimming pool, he has the brochure. Then he opens the envelope and it is a one year membership to the Jelly of the Month Club. And Cousin Eddie, who has been living in an RV on the drive since November and has an opinion about everything, delivers the only line in the film that anybody can quote from memory: it is the gift that keeps on giving the whole year, Clark. That is Drupal 10, and the envelope opens on the ninth of December. What is actually in the envelope Here are the facts, which are duller than the film and considerably more expensive. Drupal 10 stops receiving security coverage on 9 December 2026. Not "gets a bit old."…

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Why I Use OpenCode as My AI Harness Jürgen Haas Wed 5 Aug 2026 - 18:30

This article explains why I use OpenCode as the stable local harness around replaceable remote AI models. The core distinction is simple: my agents, permissions, skills, and workflow should remain mine, while model providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Z.ai stay external and swappable. I also describe why one-time configuration matters in practice: the same setup can be reused in the OpenCode terminal, CodeNomad, IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm, Zed, and Buzz through ACP. The point is not novelty. It is privacy, sovereignty, provider independence, and not rebuilding the same harness every time a new interface shows up.

Drupal’s openness is tested not only by software choices, but by who carries the maintenance burden and whether institutions support the commons they use.

An exploration of how to set up Drupal AI automators to improve the editor experience when maintaining content.

A/B Testing in Drupal Without the Enterprise Price Tag: A Practical Guide Using the A/B Test JS Module Joel Steidl Tue, 08/04/2026 - 16:56 Drupal

Many organizations want to run A/B tests but either don’t know where to start or are discouraged by the high cost of enterprise-grade experimentation platforms like Optimizely or VWO. The good news: if your website runs on Drupal, there’s an approachable, flexible, and cost-effective alternative that can be built right into your existing Drupal instance.

But first—what is an A/B test?

A/B testing is a method for comparing two or more versions of a webpage or user experience to determine which performs better. Visitors are randomly assigned to different versions (variants), and their behavior is tracked to measure effectiveness against a goal; such as conversions, engagement, or navigation success.

In this post, I’ll share how we implemented A/B testing for Oberlin College & Conservatory to test two versions of a homepage design using the community-contributed A/B Test JS module and why it’s a powerful approach for teams that want accurate testing without engaging with another vendor or purchasing software.

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Cost anxiety

Last month, on a client project, I ran out of my monthly 10,000 Copilot Credits allotment (which costs approximately $100 USD). Limiting developers to 10,000 Copilot Credits per month is probably not enough for enterprise development, yet these limitations forced me to think about how best to use my tokens, specifically which models to use them with.

Token anxiety

Watching these credits being consumed was anxiety-provoking, especially as the context window filled up quickly while I desperately tried to get the AI to fix the creation of the Drupal model that had skidded off the rails. In just 2 hours, I consumed 2,000 credits, which forced me to research how best to get the most out of my credits/tokens. The most immediate mistake I made was spending 2 hours in one session, which created a huge context window that was being compacted as more and more tokens were consumed with each request and response. The biggest mistake I made was choosing the wrong model to begin with and, more specifically, using only one model and only one tier.

Choosing a model

The big three LLMs that I use are: Claude from Anthropic, GPT from OpenAI, and Gemini from Google.

Since Claude Code was the first coding harness to produce acceptable code, it is the default for many developers, but damn, Claude is expensive.

Gemini is said to be the cheapest model, but frankly, my one-off experiment didn't generate acceptable code. Simply put, I can live with an LLM getting a method's parameter order or data typing wrong, but when they start inventing nonexistent methods, I am out.

GPT has become my go-to model because the code is decent, readable, and refactorable.

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Data can remain in one jurisdiction while account ownership, administrator access, software dependencies, and exit control sit elsewhere.

In a Drupal-to-headless migration, the content bodies almost always survive the trip. What breaks is everything that pointed at something else: taxonomy terms, media entities, and entity references. Drupal holds those together with internal integer IDs (term ID 42, media ID 918, node ID 3007), and the moment you export to a headless API those numbers stop meaning anything. If you don't rebuild the relationships explicitly, you land with all your boxes and no labels telling you which shelf they came off. Let me tell you how I learned this the hard way. The number that came back as a number Picture the QA pass on a migration that everybody swore was done. The articles were in the new system, the images rendered, the client was already drafting the launch email. Then someone opened a random article and its category read 127 . Not "Compliance." Not "Product News." Just 127. A bare integer,…

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