Planet Drupal

When should you move from WordPress to Drupal? Learn the signs, the process, and what it looks like in a real migration case.

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.

Last week at DrupalCon Chicago, that vision took another huge step forward with the pilot launch of the Drupal Site Template Marketplace at marketplace.drupal.org.

Ready-made starting points, built the right way

The marketplace launches with an initial set of purpose-built site templates covering the use cases where Drupal has always excelled: nonprofits, higher education, healthcare, government, events, SaaS, and more, with more templates to follow as the programme grows.

Each template is a complete, working starting point. Not a design skin, but a fully configured site with real content models, editorial workflows, and Drupal's full architecture underneath. Install one inside DrupalCMS and you have a professional, sector-appropriate website that's ready to customise, not a blank slate dressed up nicely.

Free and premium options are available.

Why this is different from a WordPress theme

This distinction matters, and it's worth being direct about it.

Theme marketplaces, the kind WordPress is known for, offer visual overlays. They change how a site looks. They don't change how it works. That's fine for simple sites, but organisations that need real editorial workflows, structured content, access controls, multilingual support, or compliance requirements quickly find that a theme doesn't help. They're building the architecture from scratch regardless of how they started.

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Just under the deadline for the March newsletter!

I spent the last week at DrupalCon Chicago, seeing lots of old friends and having lots of discussions about the impact of AI on open-source developers everywhere.

Scaling Maintainership for DDEV (and everywhere)

I'm noticing that because of AI it's getting easier for our lovely community to contribute to DDEV. But I'm also seeing that our PR queue is getting longer, and Stas and I are feeling more pressure from it, because we sure don't like to frustrate contributors. In many cases, we have been getting good quality and nontrivial contributions, and contributions that have been prioritized. But they may not be exactly the things that we were hoping to put our own energy toward. And a couple of them are difficult to review because they touch low-level areas.

And I even notice that I am tempted to create too many new PRs because it's easy. On the train back from Chicago (30 hours) I couldn't help myself and did two new diagnostic commands for DDEV (using Claude Code). It's all well and good, but that's two more PRs that I have to study carefully, manually test on multiple platforms, and that Stas has to look at and test.

We'd love to have your comments and feedback about this cycle. Here are some thoughts that came up in various conversations:

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Live from DrupalCon Chicago, Nic Laflin is joined by Tim Plunkett, Steve Wirt, Martin Anderson-Clutz, and John Picozzi to discuss the event's tone, Dries Notes and key themes including Drupal Canvas, Drupal AI, and new site templates/marketplace progress and more.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/546

Topics

• Reconnecting With Community
• Must See Sessions
• Vibe And Starshot
• Attendance And Venue
• Community Party Returns
• Dries Note and AI Debate
• Roadmap And Templates
• Recipes And Exports
• AI In Engineering Workflows
• Keynote Style Takeaways
• Dries Note Takeaways
• Canvas Content Templates
• View Modes Roadmap
• Translation Plans Explained
• Gala Highlights
• Commemorative Tokens
• Future Excitement Roundtable
• DrupalCon Orlando Tease
• Wrap Up and Contacts

Guests

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

Tim Plunkett - timplunkett

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan

Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

My LocalGov Drupal contributions for March 2026

Having spent last month working on the new design for the demo theme, I decided to do something similar and focus on a project for March. This month I worked on LocalGov Services.

markconroy 31st Mar 2026

In my portion of the “Drupal CMS Spotlights” keynote, I made the case that in my 19+ years of being involved in the Drupal community, now is the most exciting time in Drupal’s history.

I showed up to DrupalCon very anxious, because we had one training, three sessions, one booth session, and an extra “appearance” beyond that. Phew! In addition, Andy, Adam G-H, and I had only just wrapped up the work on Drupal CMS that allowed for paid site templates in the installer.

Drupal innovation & getting sh** done

With all of the work being done on 1) Drupal CMS, 2) Drupal Canvas, and 3) Drupal AI, it really feels like the pace of innovation has increased significantly from just two years ago. It’s exciting, but oftentimes it's also a bit overwhelming!

Falling in the playground

Using the metaphor of a playground for my AI Drupal development environment now feels completely fitting, based on my experience building a module using AI. Good playgrounds have a variety of structures that challenge kids of different ages and confidence levels, helping them develop their physical and social skills.

For example, most kids don't just run into a playground and immediately climb to the top of the monkey bars as their first move; yes, some daredevils will go straight there, and foolish ones will cry for help if they get stuck. My specific playground experience with AI was learning how to fall, get up, and try again. My obstacle was building a module using Claude Code. Similar to kids trying their first climb on the monkey bars, they expect to reach the top effortlessly, but as they climb, they face reality, their hands get sweaty, and they look down.

Unrealistic expectations

I had glorious expectations for my experience building a fairly complex module with Claude Code. I assumed that a fully documented module specification plan would guide Claude in creating a working solution.

Personally, I am not very skilled at writing requirements, specifications, and documentation. At best, I excel at writing self-documenting code, which is somewhat of a cop-out. For me, having a complete plan in place before starting implementation feels like a refreshing change. Creating better plans for AI coding agents will help me become a better mentor to humans.

Prompting a comprehensive plan

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Drupal 12 will hash passwords with Argon2id by default. It moves every Drupal site to what is now best practice for password storage, recommended by OWASP and aligned with NIST guidance.

Drupal is often used for security-sensitive and large-scale sites, so these kinds of changes matter.

Early versions of Drupal stored passwords as simple MD5 hashes, which is extremely weak by today's standards. Drupal 7 introduced a modified version of the phpass library using SHA-512 with multiple iterations and a salt, and Drupal 10 switched to bcrypt. Each jump was a response to attackers getting faster hardware, and this change continues that pattern.

When I first looked at this change, I wanted to understand what Argon2id actually does differently from bcrypt.

Its key advantage is that it is "memory hard". Each Argon2id hash requires far more memory to compute than a bcrypt hash, and the amount is configurable.

Modern GPUs can run many bcrypt computations in parallel because each one uses very little RAM. GPUs have a lot of total memory, but it is shared across thousands of parallel computations. As a result, Argon2id limits how many hash computations can run in parallel, making it harder and more expensive to scale attacks.

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git worktree lets you check out multiple branches of the same repository into separate directories—all sharing one .git directory. Combined with DDEV, this gives you multiple running versions of the same project without duplicate clones.

There are many ways to use this, but some common patterns:

• Keep directories named after the branch they contain.
• Work on a hotfix and a feature branch without them interfering with each other.
• Set up Claude Code to work on two features at once in two distinct directories.

Here's our March 26, 2026 Contributor Training on using git worktree with DDEV:

The slides are available at rfay.github.io/git-worktree-ddev.

See also the presentation at Florida Drupal Camp.

The Problem: Multiple Versions of a Project

When you need to work on several branches of a project simultaneously—say, a feature branch and a hotfix branch—the naive approach is to clone the repository twice:

git clone git@github.com:ddev/d11simple fancy-feature-1
git clone git@github.com:ddev/d11simple fancy-feature-2

This works, but each clone is a full redundant copy, and sharing objects or refs between them is awkward.

DDEV Project Names and Directories

By default, DDEV names a project after the directory it lives in. When you remove the name: key from .ddev/config.yaml, every checkout of a project gets the name of its parent directory automatically.

You can make this the global default:

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Following on from my last article, an introduction to HTMX in Drupal, I wanted to start looking at examples of HTMX being used to power interactivity in Drupal in different ways.

I thought a good place to start this off would be to look at using HTMX in a simple controller. By creating a route to a controller we can render content and then inject HTMX attributes to perform actions with the same controller.

In this article I will put together a controller action to load some pages of content to display them as a list. An element containing HTMX attributes will be used to make a request back to the same controller action and generate more items in the list. These new items will be appended to the existing list along with another element containing HTMX attributes that we can use to request more items.

The HTMX element will act like a "load more" button, which will load more and more content as long as there is content to load.

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.   

First, let's create the route to the controller.

The Route

The route we create here just links the path requested with the controller class. As we are only using a single action in this example we don't need to provide a second route for the HTMX request.

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The Quiet Room at DrupalCon mtift March 28, 2026 March 28, 2026 Dries borrowed an idea from Fred Rogers at the Driesnote: stop everything and think of the people who helped you get here. Ten seconds. That moment, and the Quiet Room down the hall, changed how I experienced DrupalCon this year.

• Read more about The Quiet Room at DrupalCon
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At DrupalCon Chicago 2026, the Drupal Community Working Group was honored to announce April Sides as the recipient of the 2026 Aaron Winborn Award. Named in memory of longtime contributor Aaron Winborn, this award recognizes individuals who embody kindness, integrity, and a deep, above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community.

About April Sides

April Sides truly embodies the spirit of the Aaron Winborn Award through the care, consistency, and intention she brings to everything she does in the Drupal community. She has been a driving force behind initiatives like A11yTalks and Drupal Camp Asheville, while also contributing to programs like MOSA and serving on the CWG Community Health Team to foster a more welcoming and supportive space for all. As a speaker, trainer, organizer, and volunteer at nearly every camp she attends, April shows up again and again for this community. Her work is grounded in accessibility, inclusion, and genuine care for people, and her impact is felt not just in what she builds but in how she supports and uplifts everyone around her.

Heartfelt Nominations

April is not just a stellar professional. They are a habitual contributor. Serving their local Drupal community and now serving on a non-profit board over Drupal events, April is an inspiration. When I think of April, I remember how they brighten the room, with humble fashion sense, making the multitudes of duties seem easy.

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The Drupal CMS track is back at DrupalCon Europe! Whether you are a site builder, a contributor, an agency leader, or someone just getting started with Drupal CMS, this is the place to share your story, learn from others, and help shape the future of Drupal CMS together.

From Barcelona to Rotterdam

What began as a mini-track at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 has quickly grown into one of the most popular tracks at DrupalCon Europe. In Vienna 2025, the track showcased the journey toward Drupal CMS 1.0 — and the community responded with enthusiasm, filling sessions and sparking conversations across the event.

 

Image

          Foto by PD Johnson

Now, with Drupal CMS continuing to mature and gain adoption, DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 is the perfect stage to highlight real-world experiences, new features, and the road ahead.

What We Are Looking For

We are interested in hearing from the innovators who are driving Drupal CMS development as well as organisations adopting Drupal CMS on topics such as:

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This year, Drupal turned 25. DrupalCon Chicago felt like the right place to mark that milestone. My keynote was part celebration and part wake-up call. I talked about Drupal's foundations, how AI is putting pressure on them, and why I believe we can rebuild them stronger than before.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (32.6 MB).

Site templates and the marketplace

About a year ago at DrupalCon Atlanta, I introduced the idea of site templates and a marketplace to go with them. By DrupalCon Vienna, we had one site template, but no marketplace.

In Chicago, I showed eleven site templates available in a basic marketplace at marketplace.drupal.org. All eleven can be installed directly from the Drupal CMS installer.

AI for site building

For more than 20 years, Drupal's ecosystem has rested on a stable triangle: the platform itself, digital agencies who bring Drupal into the real world, and the community that builds and maintains it. That triangle has proven remarkably resilient through many waves of new technologies.

But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at the same time? In my keynote, I showed how we are responding.

I started off by showing a demo of a workflow I think will become common for Drupal agencies. You spend 15 minutes prototyping a website with AI, then convert it to a Drupal site with the help of AI and a skilled developer in a matter of hours.

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At DrupalCon Vienna, Dries Buytaert opened his keynote with a question the room was already asking: what happens to Drupal in a world full of AI?

He answered with a live demonstration showcasing three things the initiative had built and shipped:

• Pace of delivery: pages that used to take hours now get built in minutes. 
• Brand and voice control: a new Context Control Center feature lets teams set their brand voice once, and every AI agent applies it. 
• Governance at scale: autonomous agents scan the site, find internal references, and propose updates.

The keynote highlighted an important aspect: humans stay in the loop and approve every change before anything goes live.

The Drupal AI Initiative arrives in Chicago with more to show

Since Vienna, 10 new organisations have joined as partners, bringing the total to 31. The initiative has now secured the equivalent of $1.5 million in combined support, comprising both direct funding and a committed contribution of 50 staff dedicated to advancing the work.

What is most exciting to me is not just what we’ve built, but how we’ve built it. With a growing group of contributors and more than $1.5 million in funding, this is now a coordinated effort to bring AI into Drupal in a way that is open, trusted, and built to last.

Dries Buytaert 

A portion of funds is being invested in delivery management. The initiative conducted a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process to appoint delivery partners responsible for coordinating work across both the innovation and product development streams. QED42 and 1xINTERNET were selected to lead the innovation and product development work streams respectively.

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In his ‘#DriesNote’ presentation at DrupalCon Chicago 2026, Dries addressed the elephant in the room: AI is currently flooding the web with "average" content: fast to produce, but hard to distinguish. While there are tools that can generate beautiful prototypes in 15 minutes with no technical skill, those prototypes lack the structured data, governance, and durability required by serious organizations.

Drupal is bridging the gap between “AI speed” and enterprise assurance through two key innovations: the Context Control Centre (CCC) and Drupal Canvas AI, a new approach to building digital experiences.

The Context Control Centre (CCC): Institutional ‘Knowledge as a Service’

The most significant hurdle for AI today is a lack of context. Without it, AI simply gives you the "average response." The Context Control Centre changes this by allowing organizations to store their unique "DNA" directly within Drupal.

The CCC organizes institutional knowledge into actionable data:

• Brand Guidelines: Specific rules for tone, voice, and formatting.

• Personas: Detailed profiles of target audiences (e.g., Controllers vs. IT Ops).

• Dynamic Context: A groundbreaking feature where the CCC connects to live data sources like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Built into your Drupal CMS, AI tools don't just guess; they work within your specific business reality to ensure their output is always on brand, within guidelines, and relevant to the contextual nuances of the task at hand.

Drupal Canvas AI: Where Speed Meets Substance

The second half of the equation is Drupal Canvas AI, the next-generation page builder. 

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I'm trying here…

I got Claude to help me set up my Drupal (AI) Playground using Drupal Recipes. Claude is also writing my /docs and generating the project's CLAUDE.md (also known as an AGENTS.md) file. My exploration uses a variation of the crawl-walk-run approach to learning to use Claude Code.

At this point in my journey, running feels a little out of reach, which I am okay with because Agentic coding is a major software development paradigm shift. I'm eager to run and have Claude generate some 'production' and reviewable quality code for me. Still, when researching CLAUDE.md files, people recommend using or creating skills that simply offer reusable instructions to guide a prompt in the right direction. Installing some Drupal-specific skills should increase Claude's reliability when working with Drupal.

Still unsure what I'm doing here

I'm not sure what I'm doing here and am always seeking advice. The suggestions on Reddit range from adding agent skills and plugins to give Claude superpowers to the idea that Claude is already superpowered and doesn't need much help.

I'm skeptical about how much nudging Claude really needs when using skills. For example, I have been using Claude's Chat to plan a module without any additional context or information, and Claude is doing an excellent job generating a 'simple' module project specification. Claude fully understands Drupal APIs and some Drupalisms, but AIs are known to make mistakes; therefore, exploring skills is worthwhile and helpful for repetitive custom tasks, such as upgrading or refactoring codebases.

Ask the AI for help getting started

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The DrupalCon Chicago 2026 Driesnote kicked off with a keynote that was equal parts celebration and wake-up call. With 1,310 attendees in the room and Drupal turning 25, Dries Buytaert delivered one of his most candid Driesnotes yet. He acknowledged a tough market, AI disruption hitting all sides of the Drupal ecosystem at once, and then laid out a concrete plan for what comes next.

This wasn’t the typical “look what we shipped” keynote. Dries shared personal stories, showed real working demos, and ended with a direct challenge to every person in the room. I want to walk you through the 10 things that stuck with me the most.

The numbers are settled. The questions are not. Following Drupal’s infrastructure cost breakdown, developers and organisations are now debating how open source systems should be funded—and who is responsible for keeping them running.

Keegan presented today at DrupalCon Chicago on creating social feed style content on your Drupal site and publishing it out to different social media platforms, all from Drupal.

Read more and discuss at agaric.coop.