Drupal CMS News Digest
developments tricks, articles and reviews from Drupal specialists
DDEV Blog: Introducing coder.ddev.com: DDEV in the Cloud
What is coder.ddev.com?
coder.ddev.com is a free, experimental cloud DDEV service. You log in with GitHub, create a workspace, and get a full DDEV environment in the cloud — no local Docker, no local installation needed.
:::warning[Experimental Service]
This is an experimental service with no guarantees of data retention, uptime, or long-term availability. The future of its maintenance and sustainability is uncertain. Do not store irreplaceable work here without pushing it to Git. Treat it as a convenience, not a platform to depend on.
:::
Want a quick overview? Watch the 6-minute intro video starting from the very beginning:
Table of Contents
How It Works
coder.ddev.com runs on Coder, an open-source platform for remote development environments. Each workspace is an isolated container (using the Sysbox runtime for secure Docker-in-Docker) with DDEV, Docker, and VS Code pre-installed.
Your files persist on a remote volume across workspace restarts. When you delete a workspace, the data is gone — so push your work to Git before deleting. But until you delete the workspace, or it's garbage-collected (not yet implemented), your work persists..
The source code for the templates and Docker image is at github.com/ddev/coder-ddev. Other projects can use this and deploy their own fully-DDEV-capable Coder instances.
Getting Started
1. Log In with GitHub
Go to coder.ddev.com and...
https://ddev.com/blog/coder-dd
Dries Buytaert: What it costs to run Drupal's infrastructure
Yesterday I wrote about how Open Source infrastructure across many ecosystems is fragile and underfunded.
Drupal is no exception.
Like most Open Source projects, Drupal runs on infrastructure that millions of people depend on but very few people directly pay for.
Drupal's infrastructure costs roughly $3 million per year, including servers, bandwidth, CDNs, software, and staff.
Funding comes from a mix of donated infrastructure from AWS and the OSU Open Source Lab, corporate memberships through our Drupal Certified Partner program, in‑kind contribution from Tag1, and revenue from DrupalCon, donations, and sponsorship on Drupal.org.
Last year, Drupal Association board member Tiffany Farriss and CTO Tim Lehnen analyzed the project's infrastructure costs. Their estimate: infrastructure for Drupal 8+ sites costs about $10 per active website per year.
But the Drupal Association spends only about $7.50 per site per year. About $3 comes from DrupalCon and the Certified Partner program. The remaining $4.50 comes from in-kind support: donated hosting, Tag1's infrastructure partnership, and volunteer contributions. That is all we have to spend.
The missing $2.50 per site shows up as technical debt: certain upgrades get deferred, legacy systems persist longer than they should, and the community sometimes wonders why infrastructure progress feels slow.
Even the $7.50 per site we...
https://dri.es/what-it-costs-t
What it costs to run Drupal's infrastructure
Yesterday I wrote about how Open Source infrastructure across many ecosystems is fragile and underfunded.
Drupal is no exception.
Like most Open Source projects, Drupal runs on infrastructure that millions of people depend on but very few people directly pay for.
Drupal's infrastructure costs roughly $3 million per year, including servers, bandwidth, CDNs, software, and staff.
Funding comes from a mix of donated infrastructure from AWS and the OSU Open Source Lab, corporate memberships through our Drupal Certified Partner program, in‑kind contribution from Tag1, and revenue from DrupalCon, donations, and sponsorship on Drupal.org.
Last year, Drupal Association board member Tiffany Farriss and CTO Tim Lehnen analyzed the project's infrastructure costs. Their estimate: infrastructure for Drupal 8+ sites costs about $10 per active website per year.
But the Drupal Association spends only about $7.50 per site per year. About $3 comes from DrupalCon and the Certified Partner program. The remaining $4.50 comes from in-kind support: donated hosting, Tag1's infrastructure partnership, and volunteer contributions. That is all we have to spend.
The missing $2.50 per site shows up as technical debt: certain upgrades get deferred, legacy systems persist longer than they should, and the community sometimes wonders why infrastructure progress feels slow.
Even the $7.50 per site we...
https://dri.es/what-it-costs-t
The Drop Times: Making Governance Visible: Embedding Content Rules Directly Into Drupal
DrupalCamp NJ 2026 will take place from 12 March 2026 to 14 March 2026 at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, bringing together Drupal developers, site builders, and community members for three days of training, sessions, and collaboration. Among the scheduled presentations is “Governance You Can See: Embedding Content Rules Directly Into Drupal,” a session by Nathan Wallace that explores how governance guidance—often stored in documents and policies—can be embedded directly within Drupal’s publishing experience to help teams maintain content quality, accountability, and editorial clarity.
https://www.thedroptimes.com/6
DrupalCon News & Updates: Agency, Business & Marketing Track at DrupalCon Rotterdam
Rotterdam is calling - DrupalCon Europe 2026 is heading to the Netherlands this September, and the call for session proposals is officially open!
The Agency, Business & Marketing track is built for business owners, marketing team leaders, agency leaders, project managers, and sales teams who run on Drupal. It's consistently one of DrupalCon's most popular tracks. A platform to share insights, spark conversations, and raise your profile in the community.
Got a story worth telling? Submit your session proposal today!
Share Your Expertise
We're looking for bold, real-world perspectives across topics that are shaping agency and business success today, including:
AI-driven innovation in project delivery and management
Scaling smart: strategies for sustainable business growth
Building high-performance teams in a hybrid world
Client relationships that convert and last
Navigating digital transformation without losing momentum
Leadership in the modern agency landscape
Sales, growth marketing, and business development in 2025
Submit your session proposal today!
Make Your Proposal Impossible to Ignore
The strongest proposals don't just inform. They inspire action. Here's what makes a session stand out:
Lead with outcomes: what will your audience walk away knowing or doing differently?
Make it a conversation: interactive sessions create lasting impact. Show us...
https://events.drupal.org/rott
Matt Glaman: The nightmare of permissions and OAuth scopes in Drupal
The Nightmare of Permissions and OAuth Scopes in DrupalDrupal's role-based access control is one of its strengths. Permissions and roles are well-understood, and the system is mature. But the moment you step outside the standard cookie-based session — say, into OAuth with the authorization code flow — you hit a wall that the core permission model never anticipated.Super-permissions and their hidden assumptionsDrupal treats administer nodes and bypass node access as super-permissions. If a user has either, NodeAccessControlHandler assumes they can perform any operation on any content type and skips the granular checks entirely. bypass node access is actually more powerful than administer nodes — a quirk of legacy cruft going back to early Drupal versions.
https://mglaman.dev/blog/night
CodeLift: Making Drupal config UUIDs deterministic: storage decorators, UUIDv5, and edge cases
UUIDv5 with config name as input. Storage decorators that intercept every write path. A hashed-table edge case that almost caused data loss. Here is how the module works.
https://codelift.ai/en/article
Drupal AI Initiative: Upcoming Webinar: A Real-World Example of Responsible AI: World Cancer Day
Every year, the global campaign organised by the Union for International Cancer Control invites people affected by cancer to share their personal experiences as part of World Cancer Day. These stories provide an important human perspective on the realities of cancer. They help build solidarity, encourage early diagnosis, and ensure the voices of patients, survivors, families and carers are heard around the world.
However, when a global campaign encourages participation at scale, the practical challenges quickly become clear. Hundreds of deeply personal stories can arrive from many different countries in a short period of time. Each submission needs to be reviewed carefully, handled with sensitivity, and prepared for publication. For a small team responsible for managing the campaign, this can create significant pressure during the peak period around World Cancer Day.
To address this challenge, the World Cancer Day team partnered with 1xINTERNET to explore how artificial intelligence could support their existing editorial workflow within Drupal.
Balancing efficiency and human oversight in AI assisted moderation
Rather than attempting to automate the process entirely, the approach focused on supporting human decision making. AI was introduced to assist moderators by helping them review incoming submissions more efficiently. This allowed the team to process stories more quickly...
https://www.drupal.org/about/s
Specbee: What is CiviCRM? FAQs for Nonprofits on contact and donation management
Can one open-source CRM manage all your donors and donations in one place? If you’re working for a nonprofit, you must read this blog to find out how CiviCRM can manage contacts and fundraising efficiently for you.
https://www.specbee.com/blogs/
ImageX: Celebrating 25 Years: The Sessions We’re Bringing to DrupalCon Chicago 2026
A fresh breeze of innovation is set to sweep through Chicago this spring. As March 23–26 draws near, the Windy City is gearing up to host DrupalCon 2026, the world’s largest Drupal gathering.
https://imagexmedia.com/blog/i
Drupal AI Initiative: Drupal AI Summit NYC: Building AI that lasts
Written by guest blogger María Fernanda Silva
Something is shifting in how organizations think about AI. The early excitement around what it could do is giving way to a harder, more important question: how do you build AI that actually holds up — at scale, under pressure, and over time?
On 14 May 2026, New York City becomes the place where that question gets answered. The Drupal AI Summit brings together enterprise leaders, digital decision-makers, and senior practitioners from across the US and Europe — not to explore AI in theory, but to share what responsible, durable AI looks like in practice.
The decisions that define what AI becomes
Thirteen focused sessions. Real case studies. The Summit is built around the strategic and organizational questions that determine whether AI delivers real value or stays stuck in pilot mode: governance, investment, long-term architecture, and what it actually takes to scale. If you are responsible for those decisions, this is where you belong.
Open source and the architecture of trust
Most AI implementations fail quietly — locked into black boxes, disconnected from the workflows where real work happens, impossible to adjust without starting over.
There is a different path. When AI is embedded directly into content, data, and workflow systems (where enterprise work actually happens), teams maintain transparency, organisations retain control...
https://www.drupal.org/about/s
Dries Buytaert: Open Source infrastructure deserves a business model
Open Source software is free to download. But the infrastructure that makes it usable is not.
When developers install or update dependencies through npm, Composer, pip, or Cargo, those tools rely on package registries that host and distribute millions of software packages. When maintainers collaborate, they depend on hosted services: Git repositories, CI pipelines, and other tools to build, test, and release software.
Most of this infrastructure is invisible to end users, and almost no one thinks about what it costs to run.
But it is not free. Someone has to operate the servers, pay for bandwidth, respond to support questions, patch security issues, and keep everything reliable.
Much of the modern software ecosystem depends on these services working reliably. And yet the organizations operating them are almost always scrambling to fund them.
A patchwork of fragile arrangements
Every large Open Source project has found some way to keep its infrastructure running. Usually that means a mix of donated services, sponsorships, fundraising, cross-subsidy, or patronage from a single company.
The table below highlights the primary funding mechanisms various Open Source projects depend on, even though most projects combine several. Donated infrastructure Multi-company sponsorship Community funding Single-company patronage PyPI ☑ ☐ ☐ ☐...
https://dri.es/open-source-inf
Open Source infrastructure deserves a business model
Open Source software is free to download. But the infrastructure that makes it usable is not.
When developers install or update dependencies through npm, Composer, pip, or Cargo, those tools rely on package registries that host and distribute millions of software packages. When maintainers collaborate, they depend on hosted services: Git repositories, CI pipelines, and other tools to build, test, and release software.
Most of this infrastructure is invisible to end users, and almost no one thinks about what it costs to run.
But it is not free. Someone has to operate the servers, pay for bandwidth, respond to support questions, patch security issues, and keep everything reliable.
Much of the modern software ecosystem depends on these services working reliably. And yet the organizations operating them are almost always scrambling to fund them.
A patchwork of fragile arrangements
Every large Open Source project has found some way to keep its infrastructure running. Usually that means a mix of donated services, sponsorships, fundraising, cross-subsidy, or patronage from a single company.
The table below highlights the primary funding mechanisms various Open Source projects depend on, even though most projects combine several. Donated infrastructure Multi-company sponsorship Community funding Single-company patronage PyPI ☑ ☐ ☐ ☐...
https://dri.es/open-source-inf
Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #543 - Commerce 3.x
https://sacstudio.libsyn.com/t
The Drop Times: Women in the Making of Community
Across the Drupal ecosystem, much of the work that keeps the project moving forward happens through sustained community effort. Developers maintain modules and review patches, accessibility specialists improve inclusive design practices, documentation writers clarify complex workflows, and organisers run DrupalCamps, DrupalCons, and local meetups that bring contributors together.Women across the Drupal community play visible roles in many of these areas. They lead accessibility initiatives, maintain projects, organise community events, and guide product and platform discussions that influence how Drupal evolves. In recent years, these contributions have shaped areas ranging from documentation and mentoring to platform initiatives such as Drupal CMS and accessibility-driven improvements across the ecosystem.International Women’s Day offers a moment to acknowledge that work without separating it from the technical core of the project. The stories in this week’s issue highlight the broader ecosystem in motion—from new developer tools and experimental modules to DrupalCon Chicago announcements and community initiatives reported over the past week.With that context, here are the major stories from last week.EVENTMike Herchel Previews DrupalCon Chicago Sessions on Theming, Contributions, and Drupal CMSManaging Multisite Configuration with Config Split at DrupalCon Chicago 2026Drupal...
https://www.thedroptimes.com/n
The Drop Times: Ship Faster, Catch Bugs Earlier: How Georgia Rebuilt QA and UAT for 80+ Drupal Sites
Staging-server bottlenecks often slow releases, compress QA into the final days of a sprint, and leave stakeholders reviewing work too late to give meaningful feedback. In this DrupalCon North America 2026 session, Jasmyne Epps of Digital Services Georgia and James Sansbury of Tugboat explain how the State of Georgia redesigned QA and UAT for GovHub by moving testing and stakeholder review directly into pull requests. The result is a workflow that helps teams catch issues earlier, collaborate continuously, and scale delivery across more than 80 state agency websites.
https://www.thedroptimes.com/6
