Drupal CMS News Digest
developments tricks, articles and reviews from Drupal specialists
Dries Buytaert: Drupal's AI roadmap for 2026
For the past months, the AI Initiative Leadership Team has been working with our contributing partners to define what the Drupal AI initiative should focus on in 2026. That plan is now ready, and I want to share it with the community.
This roadmap builds directly on the strategy we outlined in Accelerating AI Innovation in Drupal. That post described the direction. This plan turns it into concrete priorities and execution for 2026.
The full plan is available as a PDF, but let me explain the thinking behind it.
Producing consistently high-quality content and pages is really hard. Excellent content requires a subject matter expert who actually knows the topic, a copywriter who can translate expertise into clear language, someone who understands your audience and brand, someone who knows how to structure pages with your component library, good media assets, and an SEO/AEO specialist so people actually discover what you made.
Most organizations are missing at least some of these skillsets, and even when all the people exist, coordinating them is where everything breaks down. We believe AI can fill these gaps, not by replacing these roles but by making their expertise available to every content creator on the team.
For large organizations, this means stronger brand consistency, better accessibility, and improved compliance across thousands of pages. For smaller ones, it means...
https://dri.es/drupal-ai-roadm
Drupal's AI roadmap for 2026
For the past months, the AI Initiative Leadership Team has been working with our contributing partners to define what the Drupal AI initiative should focus on in 2026. That plan is now ready, and I want to share it with the community.
This roadmap builds directly on the strategy we outlined in Accelerating AI Innovation in Drupal. That post described the direction. This plan turns it into concrete priorities and execution for 2026.
The full plan is available as a PDF, but let me explain the thinking behind it.
Producing consistently high-quality content and pages is really hard. Excellent content requires a subject matter expert who actually knows the topic, a copywriter who can translate expertise into clear language, someone who understands your audience and brand, someone who knows how to structure pages with your component library, good media assets, and an SEO/AEO specialist so people actually discover what you made.
Most organizations are missing at least some of these skillsets, and even when all the people exist, coordinating them is where everything breaks down. We believe AI can fill these gaps, not by replacing these roles but by making their expertise available to every content creator on the team.
For large organizations, this means stronger brand consistency, better accessibility, and improved compliance across thousands of pages. For smaller ones, it means...
https://dri.es/drupal-ai-roadm
The Drop Times: EverLMS Offers a Self-Hosted Enterprise LMS Built on Drupal
EverLMS, developed by Hai Nguyen, is an open-source, Drupal-based learning management framework designed for self-hosted deployment. Built for agencies and enterprises, it integrates AI-assisted authoring tools, SCORM and H5P support, structured reporting, and role-based access control within a single-tenant architecture. Rather than functioning as an LMS add-on, EverLMS presents a full learning system built directly on Drupal.
https://www.thedroptimes.com/6
Droptica: WordPress vs Drupal – Comparing 5 Key Tools and Their Equivalents
Switching from WordPress to Drupal raises many concerns. Will the migration be too complicated? Will I find equivalents for the tools I use every day? In this article, I compare five of the most important WordPress tools with their Drupal counterparts: Custom Post Types, ACF, WP Query, WP Forms, and Page Builders like Elementor. For each one, I show what working in Drupal looks like with real examples and a live demo in Drupal CMS. After reading this post, you’ll see that Drupal isn’t hard at all, and concepts familiar from WordPress translate to Drupal almost one-to-one. Feel free to read the article or watch the episode from the Nowoczesny Drupal series.
https://www.droptica.com/blog/
DrupalCon News & Updates: What’s going on in Chicago?
The Drupal Community Working Group (CWG) recently posted about Health and Safety at DrupalCon Chicago. We encourage all attendees to review their blog post and the updated DrupalCon Chicago 2026 Health & Safety information.
Have questions or concerns about DrupalCon Chicago? Feel free to drop by the Community Working Group's public office hours this Friday, February 13 at 10am ET / 1200 UTC.
Join the #community-health Drupal Slack channel for more information. A meeting link will be posted there a few minutes before office hours.
Chicago was booked as the venue for DrupalCon North America in late 2024. Since then, there has been a lot of news from Chicago.
Chicago has been the target of “enhanced” immigration enforcement operations by the US federal government under the name “Operation Midway Blitz”. Local news outlet Block Club Chicago has written in-depth about the ongoing situation:
Chicago Under Siege How Operation Midway Blitz Changed Our City
Feds Used Chemical Weapons On Chicagoans At Least 49 Times — Even After Judge Said To Stop
While the government shifted the bulk of its operation to Minneapolis in December, operations continue around the city and across the country. We encourage attendees to inform themselves on the political climate in the USA before making the decision to attend DrupalCon.
Put very simply: If you feel unsafe attending...
https://events.drupal.org/chic
Drupal.org blog: The old version of the Drupal.org Automatic Updates API will be discontinued on May 4th, 2026
The Drupal Association engineering team is announcing the end of life (EOL) of the first generation of the Automatic Update API, which relies on a different original signing solution for update validation than later versions.
Drupal.org’s APIs for Automatic Updates 7.x-1.x and 8.x-1.x will be discontinued on May 4th, 2026. These versions of automatic updates have been unsupported since the versions of Drupal core they are compatible with, 7 and 8, became unsupported.
Release contents hash files (example) will not be updated and will expire May 12th, 2026. They may be removed after this date with no notice.
In place updates (example) will no longer be generated after May 4th, 2026. These are generated on demand and existing update files will be removed.
APIs for supported versions of Automatic Updates will continue to be supported indefinitely.
Automatic Updates v1 was an important early step toward improving the safety and reliability of Drupal updates. However, its underlying signing and validation model has now been superseded by a more robust and secure approach, with TUF and Rugged.
Next steps
If you are still using Automatic Updates under the 7.x-1.x or 8.x-1.x branches, now is the time to plan your update to a supported version, or implement custom updates using the supported API with your own CI, etc. Doing so ensures continued support, improved security, and alignment...
https://www.drupal.org/drupalo
Undpaul.de: Maintainable Code Is a Question of Responsibility, Not of AI
AI can write code in seconds today. But maintainable software is not created by tools, it’s created through responsibility and standards. Why the claim "AI code isn’t maintainable" misses the real issue - and what that means for teams and leadership.
https://www.undpaul.de/en/blog
Droptica: Multisite, Domain Access, or Headless – How to Handle Multiple Domains in Drupal?
Handling multiple domains within a single CMS is a challenge many organizations face. Choosing the right architecture at the start of a project can save significant time and money. Drupal offers three proven approaches: multisite, Domain Access, and headless CMS. In this article, I'll compare their strengths and weaknesses, show real-world implementation examples, and help you decide which approach works best for different business scenarios. I invite you to read the post or watch an episode from the series Nowoczesny Drupal.
https://www.droptica.com/blog/
Dries Buytaert: The Software Sovereignty Scale
"Buy European" is becoming Europe's rallying cry for digital sovereignty. At the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in Berlin in November 2025, France pushed for European preference in public procurement. The logic is intuitive: if you want independence from American technology, buy from European companies instead.
I think "Buy European" gets one thing right and one thing wrong. It's right that Europe benefits from a stronger technology industry. But buying European does not guarantee sovereignty. Sovereignty is not about where a company is headquartered or where software was originally written. It is about who ultimately controls the technology, and that control can change.
The right question to ask about any technology: can someone take the software away from you?
Sovereignty has two dimensions: how much control you have today, and how much of that control is structural, built into the legal foundations.
The proposed scale measures the second. It evaluates how resilient software is to change, whether through acquisition, relicensing, or loss of critical funding.
I used five levels, modeled on Europe's familiar A-through-E labels for energy efficiency and food nutrition, from structurally sovereign to fully dependent. This scale is meant as a starting point, and I expect it to improve through scrutiny and feedback. Type Can someone...
https://dri.es/the-software-so
The Software Sovereignty Scale
"Buy European" is becoming Europe's rallying cry for digital sovereignty. The logic is intuitive: if you want independence from American technology, buy from European companies instead.
However, I think "Buy European" gets one thing right and one thing wrong. It's right that Europe benefits from a stronger technology industry. But buying European does not guarantee sovereignty.
Sovereignty is not about where a company is headquartered or where software was originally written. It is about who ultimately controls the technology, and that control can change.
The right question to ask about any technology: can someone take the software away from me?
Sovereignty has two dimensions: how much control you have today, and how much of that control is structural, built into the legal foundations.
The proposed scale measures the second. It evaluates how resilient software is to change, whether through acquisition, relicensing, or loss of critical funding.
I used five levels, modeled on Europe's familiar A-through-E labels for energy efficiency and food nutrition, from structurally sovereign to fully dependent. This scale is meant as a starting point, and I expect it to improve through scrutiny and feedback. Type Can someone take it away? Examples A Copyleft + distributed copyright No. Relicensing requires consent from thousands of...
https://dri.es/the-software-so
ComputerMinds.co.uk: Upgrading legacy Solr servers
A client of ours has millions of items on their Drupal website that they index into Solr using the fantastic Search API Solr module. However, they've been stuck on a set of very old Solr servers until earlier this year, when moving to some shiny new Solr servers became possible. ComputerMinds helped them to make the leap from the legacy version they were on to the latest Solr 9 version. We were going to do so with minimal or no downtime to their busy site that gets more than 10 search-related page views every second. Our first job was to get the Solr 9 server configured to use config and schema written for the legacy Solr server. Thankfully most of this task had been done for us, because we leverage open source software and so the configuration had already been updated by other members of the community and we simply got to benefit from that work for free. Thank you open source maintainers!We stood up a Solr 9 server in our DDEV development environment, added in the updated configuration, and then we pointed Drupal's Search API Solr module at the new development server. We indexed our small development database into Solr and tested out all the site functionality: everything was working perfectly, we just needed to repeat those steps on production, right?We stood up a new Solr 9 server in production and again configured the Search API Solr module to connect to...
https://www.computerminds.co.u
Specbee: Semantic search VS Keyword search: What’s the difference?
Relying on keyword search alone? Read this blog to add semantic search and AI-powered search terminologies to your SEO dictionary to build smarter, modern enterprise websites.
https://www.specbee.com/blogs/
Jacob Rockowitz: Should Drupal core include an AGENTS.md file?
Unlocking AI agent-driven developmentLast fall at NedCamp, Brian Perry shared his experience as a front-end developer, unlocking the power of agent-driven development with rules. In short, he walked through how he used rules and guidelines to get Cursor's coding agent to generate high-quality front-end components. Everything he showed made sense, but it was a little complicated to determine which guidelines to define and how to leverage them, because at that time, there were many standards across different platforms and coding agents. He wished that the newly created non-proprietary standard for coding agent guidelines, called AGENTS.md, would become the de facto solution. I walked out of his session feeling that one of the key things for coding Drupal with AI to succeed is that we must give them enough guidance to understand the broader context of the Drupal application being built, not just a few initial prompts with some web crawling.Embracing AGENTS.mdLike many developers, I've used AI code completion and chat daily. Still, I felt I was falling behind the AI tidal wave. I could not wrap my head around the concept of vibe coding until I learned that Drupal-specific AGENTS.md files were being shared within the Drupal community.Things are moving very fast, and in the last few months, Brian's hope that AGENTS.md files would become the de facto standard has been realized. My...
https://www.jrockowitz.com/blo
Dripyard Premium Drupal Themes: Dripyard Webinar: Meet Dripyard's newest theme (and see what changed with our others)
Join us this Thursday for another live Dripyard webinar!Mike and Andy are taking Meridian for a spin, showing off our newest theme, brand-new components, and meaningful upgrades to existing ones. We’ll dig into what’s new, why it matters, and how you can put it to work right away.Register Now!You’ll see a full walkthrough of our new layout components, grid-wrapper and grid-cell, including how they work together in Drupal Canvas, plus a few handy tricks we’ve picked up along the way.
https://dripyard.com/blog/drip
The Drop Times: David Bishop on Council Insight and Rethinking How UK Council Websites Are Evaluated
Council Insight analyses thousands of user journeys across UK council websites to reveal how content performs in real use. In this interview, David Bishop explains why journey-based analysis matters, how automation and AI can support everyday content work, and what Council Insight offers local government web teams.
https://www.thedroptimes.com/i
ComputerMinds.co.uk: Drupal Pivot EU
In mid-January 2026 a group of business leaders in the Drupal space came together to discuss strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and more for Drupal in the coming months and years at the Drupal Pivot event in Gent, Belgium.We gathered at a simply amazing venue: Winter Circus that welcomed us in and had all the right spaces for the conference; I must applaud the sound isolation of the meeting rooms, as soon as the doors were closed you simply couldn't hear the outside at all, it was amazing!The conference itself had an unconference structure and so we defined the topics that we wanted to talk about and collaboratively designed the agenda. This took a lot of time and I was a bit annoyed that we were spending so much time planning and not actually talking about the problems and solutions, but on reflection I think that this was actually a great way to feel out the general 'state of the room' and get everyone sort of on the same page for the discussions to come.Well done to Kristof Van Tomme for wrangling us all and encouraging us to share, it took a little while, but we got the hang of it. Day 1: sessionsAI Hype vs. RealityI actually proposed this session, as I often hear about all the amazing things you can do with AI, but I've not come across many people actually using AI in production.In the session we had plenty of valid, real-world use cases, they were:Free text...
https://www.computerminds.co.u
