Planet Drupal

Over half of all web traffic in 2024 was automated. That is the headline number from the Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report, and it is the first time bots have outnumbered humans in more than a decade. Drupal sites sit squarely in that traffic mix, and the old defensive playbook — block an IP, ban a user agent, drop a robots.txt entry, lean on Fail2ban — does not hold up anymore.

This is the companion post to my DrupalSouth Wellington 2026 talk, Bots, scrapers, and proxies: defending Drupal sites in an automated internet. The talk walked through the defences I actually use at amazee.io and recommend on client sites. The post covers the same ground, with a bit more room to show config and link out to the projects.

What actually changed

The technical context underneath bot defence has shifted in three ways that matter:

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Mark your calendars. MidCamp is returning April 27-29, 2027! 

We are excited to officially announce the dates for the next MidCamp, the Midwest's community-driven event for designers, developers, strategists, content creators, marketers, project managers, and open source enthusiasts.

After another incredible year of learning, collaboration, and community, we are already looking ahead to what comes next. And yes, as announced during closing remarks, MidCamp will be returning to DePaul next year just in time for Norah Schrum's birthday, which feels like the perfect excuse to gather this community again. MidCamp 2027 will once again bring together people from across Chicago, the Midwest, and beyond for several days of connection, practical learning, hallway conversations, contribution, and the kind of idea-sharing that keeps open source communities thriving.

Whether you are a longtime MidCamp regular or considering your first trip, MidCamp is built to be welcoming, approachable, and full of opportunities to learn from one another.

What to expect as planning gets underway:

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Apex AI 2.0 introduces a provider orchestration layer for Drupal’s AI ecosystem, adding routing, observability, audit logging, and governance controls to deployments built on the Drupal AI module. The release supports nine AI providers and more than 24 models, and introduces middleware pipelines, GDPR-related tooling, MCP integration, and operational monitoring features for organisations managing AI-assisted workflows in Drupal.

Today Acquia announced something I'm really proud of. We're calling it the Acquia Fair Trade Initiative.

When an Acquia partner closes a deal, 2% of that deal flows directly to the Drupal Association, credited in the partner's name, to fund Drupal's infrastructure and long-term growth.

Imagine an Acquia partner closes a $100,000 Drupal deal with Acquia. $2,000 goes to the Drupal Association, attributed to that partner. The 2% comes from Acquia, not from partner margins, so the partner keeps their full revenue and incentives.

The donation is publicly attributed in the Acquia Partner Portal and counts toward the partner's standing in the Drupal Association's Certified Partner Program. It is recognized as financial support for the Drupal Association, separate from non-financial contributions like code, case studies, or community participation.

Most of all, I like that this program is structural. It is not a one-time gift or sponsorship campaign. It is built into the economics of Acquia's partner program, so Drupal's funding grows automatically as Acquia and its partners grow.

Too often, funding for Open Source projects depends on periodic fundraising or individual goodwill. That can work, but it rarely scales in a predictable way.

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The DropTimes invites wider participation from across the Drupal ecosystem through an upcoming Townhall focused on project updates, community initiatives and ecosystem discussions. The session will create space for contributors, agencies, developers and community members to present ongoing work, exchange feedback and discuss outreach and collaboration efforts across Drupal.

Drupal AI Summit NYC will take place on 14 May 2026 at Convene on Madison Avenue in New York City, bringing together Drupal contributors, enterprise platform teams, digital strategists and AI practitioners for a day centred on the operational use of artificial intelligence inside Drupal ecosystems. Sessions throughout the event will examine governance, migrations, workflow integration, structured content systems and digital sovereignty, with speakers focusing on implementation challenges already emerging in production environments rather than speculative AI adoption.

Dominique De Cooman @ Drupal Iberia: How the Drupal AI Initiative transforms Drupal into an advanced infrastructure layer for an AI-powered high-value open web.

The Drupal and open-source communities are mourning the passing of Alanna Burke, a longtime advocate, writer, and community leader known for her work in documentation, diversity initiatives, and developer advocacy. Burke contributed to organisations and community efforts including amazee.io, Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, DrupalCon North America, and Meta’s open-source AI documentation initiatives.

Discover how the Drupal AI Initiative is revolutionizing open-source marketing. Learn how 31 companies and a global team of specialists are scaling Drupal’s AI roadmap and driving enterprise adoption through radical collaboration.

13,980 active installs, 30+ Partner organizations, 25+ FTE committed. A look at what the Drupal AI Initiative is shipping right now and what comes next.

Nick Opris has developed a daily digest system that tracks issue activity, comments, and merge requests across selected Drupal AI Initiative projects. The system is designed to reduce the overhead of monitoring fragmented issue queues and review workflows by generating separate summaries for developers and non-technical stakeholders from the same contribution data. The project reflects growing experimentation within the Drupal ecosystem around AI-assisted coordination and reporting tools.

AI ate my work

I've been experimenting with using AI to build Drupal modules for the past few months. Two weeks ago, I released a module called the AI Schema.org JSON-LD module and wrote a blog post about it. The module essentially replaces the primary outcome of my Schema.org Blueprints module, which is to enhance SEO by providing high-quality Schema.org JSON-LD markup. The AI Schema.org JSON-LD module generates Schema.org JSON-LD by having contrib modules work together to call an AI provider with a simple prompt.

This simple module, which I built in four days, supersedes my work on the Schema.org Blueprints module, which I've been working on for four years. I could resent the fact that this new AI-powered module, created using AI, was replacing me and my work, but instead, it's just changing how I view the work I'm doing.

With AI, it's easier for me to explore new ideas and take on more ambitious tasks, while knowing that the code and modules I'm creating remain flexible and extendable by humans and machines. There's a fine line between feeling like AI is eating our work, replacing it, consuming it, or improving it. We should talk about it.

What does AI mean for me?

The most immediate thing I have to think about is how I took something I had previously built, saw how AI could replace it, and had to be open to recognizing the opportunity that AI could do things differently, better, and faster. Everyone needs to lean into that reality with AI: things can get done faster and with more possibilities.

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Ten Months That Changed Everything: An ECA Journey Jürgen Haas Tue 12 May 2026 - 15:00

This post tells the story of the ten months that took ECA from Dries Buytaert' private "1% of what it could be" feedback in June/July 2025 to a keynote at Drupal DevDays Athens in April 2026, by way of DriesNote moments in Vienna and Chicago. It opens a 9-post series exploring how UX research with Emma Horrell, Mark Dodgson and Lauri Timmanee, close collaboration with Shibin Das, and a focused build sprint produced in-context customization, a new React-based Workflow Modeler, integrated testing and replay, AI-powered documentation, and a vision for Drupal as an orchestration hub.

Managing metadata manually across hundreds of Drupal pages? Read this blog to learn about how the Bulk Metatag AI Generator module uses AI to automate SEO metadata creation at scale in Drupal.

Today we are talking about The Midwest Open Source Alliance, What they do, and How they support Drupal with guests April Sides & Tearyne Almendariz. We'll also cover Canvas Field Component as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/552

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Learn more about the implementation that helped automatically verify transactions for AML.

Overall SummaryOur 35th UI Suite Monthly was one of the most packed sessions yet — a full hour of demos, strategy updates, and an urgent call to action for the community. We covered major progress on the Display Builder (now mid-beta with half its scope completed), a breakthrough demo of symmetric and asymmetric translation support, a roadmap for cleaning up and refocusing UI Patterns this summer, the exciting new ability to use SDC components as form elements, and two critical core proposals — the Design Token API and the Style API — that need community support before the May 15th freeze. We also gave a first look at our AI strategy for display building, with a live demo coming next month. In short: our ecosystem is maturing fast, and the next week is decisive.

The AI industry spent years presenting automation as a cheaper alternative to human labour. In 2026, organisations are discovering that the economics are more complicated. According to Boston Consulting Group, enterprises are expected to increase AI spending significantly this year, even as pressure grows to demonstrate measurable returns. At the same time, infrastructure costs tied to inference workloads, data centres, and continuously running AI systems continue to rise across the industry.

That shift helps explain why Drupal’s AI direction has increasingly focused on operational flexibility rather than “AI-first” positioning. The Drupal AI Initiative’s provider-agnostic architecture allows organisations to move between commercial and open-source models without rebuilding workflows, while Drupal’s structured content model reduces unnecessary token usage by providing cleaner contextual data to language models. Recent work around AI observability, governance, and usage tracking reflects a broader industry movement toward cost predictability, monitoring, and infrastructure control as AI systems transition from experimentation into production environments.

The conversation around AI adoption is therefore beginning to move away from novelty and toward sustainability. Questions around inference costs, infrastructure ownership, governance, auditability, and long-term operational flexibility are increasingly shaping enterprise decision-making. Across the broader ecosystem, the organisations likely to benefit most from AI adoption may not be those deploying the largest models, but those building systems capable of managing automation reliably, transparently, and economically over time.

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This is part five of a series of articles looking at HTMX in Drupal. If you are interested in reading more then there will be a list of related articles at the end of this article.

When I was thinking about ideas on demonstrating HTMX in Drupal I implemented things like infinite scroll, a tabbed interface, and a cascading select form. I basically recreating some things that I had done in non-Drupal HTMX inside a Drupal module.

I then had an idea to create something that I might actually find useful in my day to day work as a Drupal developer. This was some way of displaying nodes in different view modes.

In this article we will look at creating a simple form that allows users to enter a node ID and a view mode and see the node rendered in that view mode.

All of the code contained in this article can be found in the Drupal HTMX examples project on GitHub, but here we will go through what the code does and what actions it performs to generate content.   

Just like the other articles on HTMX, I'm going to start with the basics and define the route.

The Route

The route we need here just needs to point the path /htmx-examples/display-mode-preview at our form class.

drupal_htmx_examples_display_mode_preview_form:
  path: "/htmx-examples/display-mode-preview"
  defaults:
    _form: '\Drupal\drupal_htmx_examples\Form\DisplayModePreviewForm'
    _title: "HTMX Display Mode Preview Form"
  requirements:
    _permission: "access content"

There isn't anything unusual about this route, it's just a regular form route.

Let's create the form for this route.

The Form

The form class has a couple of injected dependencies, which are as follows:

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Read moreSome places do not merely offer a view. They give you direction. Athens did that to me. During Drupal Dev Days, I found myself looking at the Acropolis from a distance. The Parthenon was there, standing above the city, glowing with a presence that is difficult to describe if you have not seen it in person.

From Athens to Rotterdam: Why Drupal AI Needs an "Athena" Release

AISaturday, May 9, 2026 - 16:16