DrupalCon Rotterdam ran from 28 September to 1 October. On 29 September Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert, gave his regular “Driesnote” keynote. His own summary of the message is one line:
Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation.
You can read his write-up, the Drupal Association’s recap, or watch the recording. This is our summary of what was announced, and what we think it means if you run public services on Drupal.
Digital sovereignty
According to the Drupal Association’s recap, the keynote opened with Europe’s effort to depend less on technology it does not control. Dries described Drupal as “Stewarded Open Source”: software that comes with ongoing maintenance, security releases and a community behind it, and that no single vendor owns. The recap quotes him: “Europe needs Drupal. And Drupal needs Europe too.”
The same theme opened the Government Summit the day before.
Multilingual, JavaScript and headless
- Multilingual. Drupal Canvas, the new page builder, now supports translated pages, and multilingual sites are easier to set up. This shipped in Drupal CMS 2.2.
- JavaScript. Canvas components can be written in React, using tools that front-end developers already know.
- Headless. Drupal Canvas Headless lets a team manage content in Drupal and build the front end separately in Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular or Nuxt, while editors keep the visual page builder and an accurate preview.
AI assistants, with Drupal still in charge
There is now a public Drupal AI demo that anyone can try. The more interesting part for our sector was a demo in which an editor asked an AI assistant to unpublish a page. Dries’s account of it is that Drupal “remained in control”: it checked whether the editor was allowed to unpublish the page and applied the site’s publishing rules, as it would if they had done it by hand.
Behind that demo is the Tool module, which gives modules a standard way to describe what they can do so that other software can use it. Dries said exposing his own photo album module took about 1,000 lines of code, and that an experimental change he is working on with Matt Glaman reduces that to about 20 PHP attributes. The Drupal AI Initiative’s follow-up post is clear that this part is “a prototype, not a release”. A four-day “Rosetta Sprint” with key maintainers is planned to take it forward. Its date and location have not been announced.
Credit for talking about Drupal
The announcement with the most immediate effect is the Drupal Advocacy Program, a pilot run by the Drupal Association. Work that helps people outside the community understand Drupal, such as articles, talks, tutorials, demos, translations and project stories, can now earn contribution credit, the same credit that recognises code. Submissions are open at drupal.org/advocacy. The recap quotes Dries on the aim:
Drupal doesn’t need hype. It needs a better public record.
What this means for public sector teams
These are our own conclusions, not announcements.
- Write up what you have built. A plain account of a service you moved to Drupal, and what it cost and saved, is exactly the “public record” the keynote asked for. Project stories are on the Advocacy Program’s list of work that counts.
- Ask the governance question about AI. The demos kept permissions, revisions and publishing workflows in Drupal. That is the right test for any AI feature a supplier proposes: who is allowed to do what, and where is it recorded?
- Treat the prototypes as prototypes. Multilingual Canvas and Canvas Headless are released. The simpler way to expose module features to AI assistants is not, yet.
- Use the sovereignty argument carefully. It is a strong case for open source, but it only holds if someone maintains the software. That brings it back to who contributes, and how buyers check.
