The Women in Drupal Awards returned this year to celebrate the outstanding achievements of women making remarkable contributions to the global Drupal community. Presented during DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the awards recognize women whose talent, leadership, creativity, and commitment are helping strengthen the Drupal community and shape the future of open source.
This is the first post in a three-part series about the impact of the AWS Open Source Credits program on the Drupal community. Part one covers our testing infrastructure. Part two will cover the community programs we host beyond code. Part three will cover what the AI era is doing to open source infrastructure, and what we're building next.
The fourth feature release of Drupal 11 is another performance breakthrough. Using only a third of the database and cache lookups compared to Drupal 11.0 and 10.6 for the same requests. It also comes with 15-25% better compression of JS and CSS, much faster translation file handling, a new native command line interface, improved password hashing and a lot more.
We're excited to announce updates to the Drupal CMS leadership team, with the addition of Bálint Kléri as our new Frontend Lead.
Bálint Kléri named Drupal CMS Frontend Lead
Bálint Kléri has been named Frontend Lead, a new leadership role created to oversee the frontend architecture for Drupal CMS, Mercury and Mercury-based themes. Bálint is a full-time contributor to Drupal Canvas, leading the development of Code Components for Acquia and a key contributor to Mercury, the Drupal CMS design system.
Drupal powers websites for governments, universities, major media organisations, and global brands - but historically it's demanded specialist knowledge just to get started. Last year's release of Drupal CMS changed that, putting Drupal's power within reach of the marketers, content teams, and site builders who actually run websites day to day.
Drupal, the open source content management platform that runs some of the most demanding websites on the planet, turned 25 in January. But while the community is celebrating what is a remarkable milestone for any open source project, it is actively strengthening its foundations to lead in the AI era and looking ahead to a future it intends to shape.
For the past months, the AI Initiative Leadership Team has been working with our contributing partners to define what the Drupal AI initiative should focus on in 2026. That plan is now ready, and I want to share it with the community.
