Planet Drupal

A DAM decision changes more than where images are stored. Drupal teams also have to decide which system owns metadata, approvals, transformations, rights, and the published asset lifecycle.

For most of the web’s history, we have designed digital experiences around a simple assumption: a person will visit our website. That person might arrive through a search engine, follow a campaign link, scan a QR code, or maybe even type the URL into their browser.

AI is changing that... dramatically and rapidly!

People are now asking AI assistants to research products, compare services, explain policies, recommend suppliers and complete tasks on their behalf. Sometimes, they might not even consciously choose AI and are simply guided by seemingly familiar tools like Google 'AI Overviews'. Either way, instead of visiting ten websites, a customer may ask one assistant to gather the relevant information and present a recommendation. 

In the near future, that AI assistant could be doing more than reading a web page: checking product availability, requesting information, preparing an application, arranging an appointment or even completing a transaction.

Your next website visitor may not be a person at all, but an AI agent acting on their behalf, which raises a serious question:

Can AI systems understand our organisation, trust our information and interact with our services safely?

Getting to know your new audience

To be useful, AI assistants need to find the right information, understand its meaning and decide whether it is current and trustworthy.

A prospective student asking an assistant to compare courses across several universities, a buyer requesting a shortlist of products that meet detailed technical, ethical and budget requirements - both are now part of your website’s audience.

While human visitors use navigation, page layouts, graphic cues and calls to action, AI systems depend more heavily on structured information, descriptive metadata, clear relationships and reliable access to data.

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The closest thing I have to an answer Imagen Connecting systems isn't hard anymore, so what matters is what you put in the middle. I think that separates into knowledge, decisions, and the terrain those decisions run on, and the thing you'd actually be building is whatever keeps all three true.

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Article by:  Martin Anderson-Clutz. Originally posted on the Acquia blog.

Drupal turns decoupled architecture into a governed AI harness, combining live visual editing with agent-ready content schemas.

Back in March, at EvolveDigital in Toronto, I ran into Preston So. He mentioned that the team behind Decoupled Days was looking for speakers, and that this year the event would be in Montréal. I was interested right away. Drupal Canvas is the most compelling answer I have seen to a problem that has followed decoupled architectures for years, and I wanted that message to reach beyond the Drupal faithful — out to the practitioners who live and breathe headless every day.

The talk I ended up giving was not really about a content management system at all. It was about how Drupal has quietly become something else: a governed harness for artificial intelligence. Here is the argument I made, the demo that seemed to land hardest with the room, and why I think 2026 is the year the trade-offs of going headless finally stop being trade-offs.

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The latest three projects have limited reported use, but the pattern extends beyond their reach. For affected site teams, the recurring security response is to uninstall the project rather than install an update.

This week's release of Drupal AI Context Beta 4 added taxonomy-based context selection, priority controls, workflow states, and token-budget visibility. Kristen Pol, primary maintainer of Context Control Center, said the project is moving towards its first release candidate, while Drupal.org release notes list 70 credited issues in the beta. The additions put more structure around deciding what information reaches an AI agent before it acts.

The release arrived as Drupal founder Dries Buytaert was asking a broader question about what happens when AI makes code cheaper to produce. In a 17 August 2026 blog post, Dries argued that as application functionality becomes easier to recreate, commercial value may shift towards dependable operation: deployment, security, scaling, monitoring, and reliable service over time. His argument is about software economics rather than AI context, but it points to the same larger change: implementation is no longer the only scarce input.

The DropTimes' 18 August interview with Kristen showed where that shift meets Drupal AI. Context Control Center can use moderation, revisions, permissions, scheduling, and scopes to govern the knowledge supplied to a model, but those controls cannot guarantee how the model will respond. Requirements that cannot tolerate probabilistic behaviour still need deterministic rules, validation, access controls, or human approval.

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DDEV's generic project type will run anything that brings its own web server, and people already use it for Node and other stacks. Umbraco is a less-travelled case: .NET, Kestrel, and SQL Server. I wanted to know how much of the DDEV experience still holds up there. Clone a repository, run one command, have a working site and database a few minutes later.

Most of it holds up. The result is umbraco-clean-ddev, which runs Umbraco on .NET 10 with SQL Server and Adminer, and gets a new developer going with a single ddev start. What took the time was a handful of places where DDEV expected something I had not worked out yet.

What I wanted out of it

I wanted four things out of this, and nothing more ambitious than that.

1. One command for someone joining the project
2. Nothing installed on my own machine: no SQL Server, no .NET SDK, none of the project's other dependencies.
3. Projects that stay out of each other's way.
4. A way to take a backup from Umbraco Cloud and debug against it locally.

DDEV already does all of this elsewhere. The Umbraco Cloud backup turned out to be the least transferable: ddev import-db and ddev export-db work on the database container DDEV manages, and this project omits that container entirely. Anything equivalent I would have to write myself.

Keeping the dependencies off my machine also makes the project easier to hand to someone who has never worked with .NET. The SDK and SQL Server both live in containers, so trying Umbraco does not start with installing either of them locally. Clone the repository, run one command, and the CMS is there to look at.

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Nineteen months after Drupal 7's final end of life, 29.7% of all Drupal websites still run it — and half the Drupal web runs a version with no security support. The numbers, the methodology, and the four ways out. Updated quarterly.

The definitive configuration guide to Drupal's SEO module stack: Pathauto, Redirect, Metatag, Simple XML Sitemap vs XML Sitemap, Schema.org Metatag, and five more — with the exact settings I use on every build and the mistakes I keep finding in audits.

When you move a Drupal site to a headless CMS, the thing most likely to break silently is not your content. It is the invisible wiring between pieces of it. Drupal stores relationships as numeric IDs (node 4127, term 88, media 903), and almost every headless platform mints brand-new IDs the moment you import. So every taxonomy tag, every embedded image, every "related articles" block that pointed at an old number now points at nothing, or worse, at whatever content happened to inherit that number. The pages still render. The links inside them just quietly go nowhere. Here is the scene that keeps happening. The migration "succeeds." Every article is present, the word counts match, everyone high-fives. Then two weeks later someone notices the related-content sidebar is empty on 8,000 pages, half the article hero images resolve to a 404, and the tag pages that used to rank now list either…

Read the rest at Replatform Radar

Drupal turns decoupled architecture into a governed AI harness, combining live visual editing with agent-ready content schemas.

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

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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.

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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