Planet Drupal

This week, the 1xINTERNET team lands in "Windy City" as DrupalCon Chicago 2026 takes place. From March 23-26 DrupalCon brings together over 1.300 developers, designers, strategists, and business leaders from all over the world to shape the future of the Open Web.

This week, the 1xINTERNET team lands in "Windy City" as DrupalCon Chicago 2026 takes place. From March 23-26 DrupalCon brings together over 1.300 developers, designers, strategists, and business leaders from all over the world to shape the future of the Open Web. 

April Sides has been named the recipient of the 2026 Aaron Winborn Award, recognising her sustained contributions to the Drupal community through organising, accessibility advocacy, and community support initiatives. Presented at DrupalCon Chicago, the award honours individuals who demonstrate integrity, kindness, and long-term commitment to open source collaboration. Announced by members of the Drupal Community Working Group, the recognition situates her work within broader efforts to sustain participation and community health across Drupal.

Missed the Driesnote? You can watch it here.

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.

This week at DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert delivered his annual keynote, the DriesNote, and it was one of the more honest talks you'll hear at a tech conference. A clear-eyed look at what's working, what's under pressure, and what the plan actually is.

AI is Disrupting Everything, But Deep Expertise is Irreplaceable

For more than two decades, the Drupal ecosystem has rested on three things: the platform itself, the agencies that build with it, and the community that maintains it. That triangle has survived waves of new technology and constant change. It's been remarkably resilient.

But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at once? When anyone can spin up a decent-looking site in fifteen minutes, what does that do to the people who've spent years building something better? That’s what is happening at the moment, as the world is being flooded with AI-generated “average”. Average content, average code, average websites - average is easier to attain than ever.

What it means is that the only thing that will actually matter, to customers, to organisations, to the people trying to build something lasting on the open web, is genuine, hard-won, deep expertise.

What AI Actually Can't Do

Here's something worth understanding, because it gets lost in the noise.

Read more

Great digital experiences don't happen by accident, they're built with intention, inclusion, and users at the heart of every decision. At DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the UX, Accessibility and Usability track is bringing together designers, developers, content strategists, and decision-makers to explore how Drupal powers truly user-centred digital products.

We're looking for speakers with real stories to tell. Whether you've transformed an accessibility audit into lasting organisational change, built a design system that scaled beautifully across channels, or used user research to completely reshape a development roadmap — we want to hear from you.

Image

          Foto by Matthew Saunders

We're particularly interested in sessions covering:

·    Accessibility beyond compliance - embedding WCAG and ATAG into everyday workflows

·    User research that drives real development decisions

·    Design systems and collaborative design-development workflows

·    Usability improvements backed by evidence and data

·    Content design and strategy, including practical uses of AI

·    Digital sustainability - designing for efficiency and longevity

 

Read more

When making code changes or fixing issues, it's easy to leave @todo comments behind. Sometimes they mark areas waiting on an upstream fix, sometimes they're reminders that never got revisited. Either way, they accumulate — and the ones tied to the specific issue you're working on should be resolved before the MR merges.

phpstan-drupal 2.0.12 adds TodoCommentWithIssueUrlRule to catch this in the GitLab CI jobs on Drupal.org.

This rule is inspired by staabm/phpstan-todo-by, which handles expiring todos by date, version constraint, and issue tracker status. It doesn't currently support custom issue fetchers or alternative detection mechanisms, such as matching ticket IDs to branch names — but that flexibility could make its way there someday.

Simply ranking high in Google is not enough today. Learn how to get your content chosen by AI in this brief guide to AI Search Optimization.

As autonomous agents increasingly interact with technical documentation, traditional HTML can introduce challenges by filling limited context windows with layout elements, navigation, and scripts. This structural cluttering not only drains computing resources but directly causes context pollution and AI hallucinations.

Discover how you can reduce this “token tax” and create cleaner, more AI-friendly documentation experiences.

When I wrote my last post one year and one day ago, “vibe coding” was new. In fact, I heard about it for the first time while walking to some DrupalCon Atlanta social event — Bálint and Lauri were talking about it after a long conference day. By the end of 2025, it was in the dictionary. Three months into 2026 and it’s everywhere — for better or worse.1

Also at the end of 2025, Bálint did a very impressive demo for the Canvas team: AI tools that knew nothing about Canvas were able to successfully generate Canvas code components. During his demo he called out something unexpected (for 2024 Wim): the demo worked with minimal prompting thanks to Canvas’ code components’ detailed validation. 😮

How did we get here?!

Config validation for more reliability & less frustration

I started advocating for validating Drupal’s configuration in 2022–2023. I argued Drupal’s config (schema) system was powerful but unreliable, that we should add validation to Drupal core’s config entity types.

Read more

Drupal’s 25th anniversary keynote in Chicago moves beyond retrospective framing to address a structural shift affecting the CMS ecosystem. Dries Buytaert outlines how artificial intelligence is changing how websites are built, where value is created, and how Drupal must respond through product changes, new workflows, and a renewed emphasis on structured content and governance.

Peace of mind and confidence online start with knowing your website is safe. Still, the digital world comes with countless risks: a server glitch, a corrupted file, or a failed update can compromise your website’s data.

Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it's used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We'll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545

Topics

• What Is DKAN
• Who Uses Open Data
• 20:08 DKAN Origin Story
• Why Drupal Fits DKAN
• From Distribution to Module
• DKAN 2 Rebuild and JSON Shift
• Async Jobs and API First
• How Teams Publish Data
• What a Dataset Really Is
• Metadata vs Data Access
• Why DKAN Left Drupal Org
• Migration Path to DKAN Four
• Harvesting and Data Store ETL
• APIs Visualizations and Bots
• Roadmap Data Store and AI
• Contributing and Where to File Issues

Resources

• DKAN
• DKAN Drupal Module
• DKAN on GitHub
• Public sites using DKAN 2
• DKAN channel on Drupal Slack
• JSON Form Widget

Guests

Liz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder

Read more

The latest update to the CKEditor contributed modules brings AI writing and editing directly into Drupal. Premium Features module 1.8.0 introduces CKEditor AI, adding AI Chat, AI Review, AI Translate, and AI Quick Actions inside the rich text editor. Authors can write, review, and translate content without the back and forth of third-party tools.

Recap of Drupal 12 release windows

Our release schedule includes three potential release dates for Drupal 12.0.0, depending on when critical requirements are completed:

1. Week of June 15, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by March 27
2. Week of August 10, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by May 15
3. Week of December 07, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by September 11

Our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is the week of August 10, 2026

Many great improvements landed recently. The main branch is on Symfony 8 and most deprecated modules are removed already. With only a few days remaining until the March deadline of the first release option though, we are confident that not all critical requirements will be completed by March 27. Therefore, we are officially announcing that our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is August 10, 2026, and the beta deadline for critical requirements is May 15, 2026.

We need your help to complete requirements by May 15!

While there are other pending improvements that are not hard requirements for Drupal 12's release, these are the most urgent needs:

1. PHPUnit 12 support

   While our ultimate goal is to support PHPUnit 13 in Drupal 12, there are significant API changes in PHPUnit 12 that we first need to adopt. See #3527936: Introduce support for PHPUnit 12

2. Import maps API

   CKEditor 5 is changing their installation method in the near future. See #3527914: [PP-1] Use New installation methods for CKEditor5

Read more

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 has begun, bringing together the global Drupal community from March 23 to 26 at the Hilton Chicago. As the event kicks off, attention is turning to the sessions scheduled over the coming days, many of which focus on accessibility, inclusion, and how Drupal teams are responding to evolving real-world requirements.

In the lead-up to the event, The DropTimes published a series of articles previewing selected sessions from the program. These included Palak Agarwal’s coverage of accessibility audits on Drupal websites, highlighting recurring issues such as missing alt text, poor contrast, and structural inconsistencies that continue to affect many Drupal projects.

Among the upcoming sessions is “Future-Proofing Accessibility: Strategies for Government & University Platforms,” featuring M. Nikki Flores, Javier Reartes, and Kat Shaw, scheduled for March 24. The session will focus on moving accessibility earlier into the workflow, drawing from large-scale public sector and university implementations.

Read more

A DrupalCon Chicago session will outline the next phase of the ECA module, focusing on making workflow automation accessible to a wider range of users. Despite adoption across more than 16,000 sites, ECA is estimated to be used by only a small portion of the Drupal ecosystem. The presentation will explore how usability, onboarding, and guided workflows are being reworked based on community feedback.

Links help shape the experience of discovery: they are like little portals that transfer readers to a different place on the web with a single click. For search engines, they act more like pathways that reveal how your content connects to everything else. The practical importance of both internal and external links deserves special coverage, which we’ll explore in this post.

Noble Friends and Free Software Communities mtift March 21, 2026 March 21, 2026 The Drupal contributor guide lists dozens of roles, such as maintainer, initiative coordinator, and documentation writer. But the role that has shaped me most isn't on the list: friend.

• Read more about Noble Friends and Free Software Communities
• Add new comment

Come Monday, March 23rd, for a day devoted to Drupal in healthcare— a relaxed and friendly opening to DrupalCon with information-packed presentations plus two "table talk" sessions which will give everybody a chance to dive deeply into key topics, including privacy and overall takeaways. Whether you are in a state department of health, a non-profit hospital, a public health organization, or anyplace else in the broad healthcare space, there are unique needs in ensuring security, accessibility, compliance, and availability of important information and tools.

Online communication and emerging technologies promise improved access and capabilities for patients and professionals. Useful and inspiring digital experiences, however, must be built on a foundation of privacy, accessibility, and legal compliance. Come listen to healthcare technology practitioners share their experience solving these and more challenges in healthcare.

Get tickets to go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!

Ticket includes lunch, and we will be all wrapped up by 4pm.

Who Should Attend

Everybody interested in hearing and discussing how companies and the community are creating rich digital experiences in the healthcare space. All levels of colleagues in the pharma, medical, clinical, hospital, payers, caregivers, advocates, and healthcare professional space should go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!

Bring your needs to the table talks and we will embark on facilitated peer-to-peer problem solving with others who are affected and tech and healthcare industry experts.

COVID-19/DrupalFlu Safer Space

We will have a sensor in the room to monitor CO₂ levels and if they remain between at 800–1000 ppm.

Read more