We’re super happy to announce that we’ve joined the Drupal Association’s Drupal Certified Partner Program!

What is the Drupal Certified Partner (DCP) Program?

The DCP program was created to incentivize the makers (as opposed to takers) within the Drupal ecosystem. The ultimate goal of the project is to enable potential customers to recognize the value of organizations that are contributing to Drupal.

There are several different tiers, starting from “bronze”, and going all the way up to “top tier”.

The DropTimes concludes its eight-part Drupal AI series with a spotlight on AI-driven translation modules that streamline multilingual content workflows. These tools integrate Translation Management Tool (TMGMT) with leading AI and enterprise platforms, enabling scalable, high-quality translation for global audiences.

Free Coaching for the Drupal Community

In 2024 I became a certified coach to round out the informal coaching that I’ve been providing for many years. I’ve used that training to support a variety of people in several different volunteer communities, including folks who attended our Leadership Training for Open Source course last year. In an effort to support the Drupal community more broadly I’m offering some free sessions for Drupalers.

Addison Mon, 12/08/2025 - 03:45

Advent Calendar day 8 – Help Help My search page is getting hammered by a bot james Mon, 12/08/2025 - 09:00

As we enter the second week of our Advent calendar, we welcome Rachel Lawson, who recommended today’s talk from DrupalCamp England:

Help Help My search page is getting hammered by a bot

Rachel says:

Antje has an incredible ability to describe issues in an understandable way and provide really practical solutions. There’s something relevant and useful for us all in this talk.

Antje Lorch is a Dutch developer who has been using Drupal since version 4.6 and describes her job as “Building websites for a better world”.

Here’s the talk video:

Rachel Lawson works for Cambridge University Press building a…

Tags

• Advent Calendar 2025
• Search
• Bots
• Bot protection

When visiting a website, how do you find the information you’re looking for?

Historically, users have fallen into one of two camps: those who head straight for the search bar (“seekers”) and those who browse through menus (“explorers”).

Seekers know what they are looking for and simply need a quick path to it. Explorers, on the other hand, may be unsure where to begin—or may not trust the site’s internal search. They rely on navigation to orient themselves and understand what the site offers.

For the past 20 years, websites have been designed to support both behaviors, usually pairing a prominent search field with a full-width navigation bar. This approach has served users well. But with the rise of AI-driven search, natural language interfaces, and changing browsing habits, it’s worth asking: Does traditional navigation still matter?

TL;DR Upsun has been (and remains) a great sponsor of DDEV, but is lowering their support level next month. We need you to fill the gap!

I'm sure you remember how much Upsun (formerly Platform.sh) has helped the DDEV project along the way. When we were about to lose the ability to use the "DDEV" name, they stepped in and solved the problem. Then they sponsored DDEV at a very high level for a couple of years, and in 2025 at a lower level. They have also managed the DDEV trademark and are now transferring it to the rapidly maturing DDEV Foundation. We appreciate their significant ongoing support very much, and fully recognize and appreciate their critical role in our history.

Starting next month, Upsun will be lowering their sponsorship level to $1000/month. They are still one of our most significant supporters, but this leaves a significant gap in our funding.

Starting in January, we'll be at about 53% of our sponsorship goal, down from 70% as of December 2025. The current sponsorship level is about $8300/month; with the decrease from Upsun it will drop to about $6300/month. That's a big hole to fill, and we're counting on you to help!

In 2025, the DDEV Foundation (through your support) paid between $8,000-$10,000 per month to developers working on the project for you. Without additional funding, we're estimating a shortfall of about $2000 a month.

How You Can Help

DDEV is free and open-source because sponsors like you make it possible. Whether you're an individual developer, an agency using DDEV for client work, or an organization that depends on DDEV, now is the time to contribute.

Ways to sponsor:

• GitHub Sponsors - Quick and easy, starting at any amount, personal or organizational.
• Support contracts - Get priority support while funding development
• Custom invoicing - We work with your procurement process
• One-time contributions - Every bit helps!

Contact us to discuss sponsorship options that work for your organization.

Why This Matters

DDEV serves nearly 20,000 developers and teams worldwide every week. Your sponsorship ensures continued development, maintenance, security updates, and community support. When you sponsor DDEV, you're investing in a tool that saves your team countless hours and makes local development reliable and consistent.

Let's work together to keep DDEV strong and sustainable. Thank you for being part of this community!

Claude Code was used for editing and ideas helped with this post.

I encountered an issue on a Drupal 11 site recently where I had a block that was rendering an entity to display on a page.

There was nothing unusual about what was going on in the rendering process, but in this case I needed to add some attributes to the entity markup and I found that this process wasn't that simple. The solution was to intercept the rendering process half way through using a pre-rendering callback method.

As it wasn't that simple I took some notes and decided to convert them into an article to show how to do the same. In this article we will look at using the view builder to generate a renderable view of an entity and then look at how to alter the attributes of the view mode without using a preprocess hook.

Rendering An Entity

To get a content entity ready for rendering we need to use the entity_type.manager service to get the correct view builder for the entity in question. Once we have the view builder object we can use the view() method to get our renderable array.

For example, assuming that we have a Media entity of some sort, we get that entity ready for rendering using the following.

$viewBuilder = \Drupal::service('entity_type.manager')->getViewBuilder('media'); $mediaView = $viewBuilder->view($media, 'default');

The $mediaView variable will now contain the array needed to render the entity using the "default" view mode for the entity. The contents of the array depends on what you are rendering, but if its a media entity then the entity object will be present, along with the view builder object, the view mode and theme of the entity, and some cache information. 

Read more

Advent Calendar day 7 – Not Just a Comeback james Sun, 12/07/2025 - 09:00

Building a Drupal community isn’t easy, events like DrupalCon and DrupalCamps help hold communities together, so when events like Covid happen, it can be hard to keep things going, and to rebuild afterwards.

Nikita Aswani talks about her experience building the DrupalCamp in Pune, India, and growing the Drupal community in India.

Her talk from DrupalCon, Nara is below:

Tags

• community
• DrupalCamp
• India

Day 6 - Status Messages Dec 06, 2025 0

You click "Add to Cart" and a little notification pops up: "Item added!" You submit a form and see "Thank you, your message has been sent." You start typing in a search box and results appear below as you type. These instant feedback messages are everywhere on modern websites - but are they accessible to everyone?

For sighted users, these visual cues are obvious. But for someone using a screen reader, these dynamic updates can be completely invisible unless they're coded properly. The page content changed, but their screen reader said nothing about it.

Read More

Advent Calendar day 6 – From starters to solid Drupal team members james Sat, 12/06/2025 - 09:00

An important aspect of building a sustainable community is bringing new people into Drupal organisations, and helping them to embrace the community. Today Jess Vetsuypers and Eline Van Coillie from Dropsolid talk about finding and retaining new talent.

They discuss some interesting approaches in both finding and evaluating potential team members, and then ensuring they integrate well into your organisation.

I particularly liked their use of LEGO as part of the selection process with a live building challenge as part of the talk. It’s a shame the recording is audio only, as it would have been…

Tags

• talent
• recruiting
• training

Day 5 - Resize Text Dec 05, 2025 0

Picture this: you're reading an article on your phone, or maybe you're at your desktop after a long day of staring at screens. The text is just a bit too small, making your eyes work harder than they should. You zoom in... and suddenly half the content disappears off the side of the screen, or worse - text overlaps and becomes completely unreadable.

Read More

Search functionality on your Drupal website directly affects customer satisfaction, user experience, and conversion rate. You’ve likely experienced firsthand how satisfying it is to use a search bar and instantly find what you’re looking for — fast, convenient, and frustration-free.

The Drop Times (TDT) December Townhall kicks off today, December 5, at 8:00 PM IST. This open community meeting invites Drupal-aligned contributors and readers for an hour-long discussion on editorial planning, tech updates, and more. Don’t miss your chance to shape what’s next for TDT.

Experts from across the open-source community will meet in Paris for the Drupal AI Summit 2025, a one-day program focused on practical AI implementation, governance and content readiness. The Drop Times spoke with several speakers to understand the themes and approaches they will bring to the event.

Advent Calendar day 5 – The future of Drupal core and the ecosystem in the age of Drupal CMS james Fri, 12/05/2025 - 09:00

At this year’s most recent DrupalCon in Nara, Japan, Gábor Hojtsy brought the core of Drupal back into focus.

A lot of attention has been on Drupal CMS for the last year or so, so what is happening with core? Will it be discontinued? Or will Drupal CMS get merged into core?

Gábor makes it clear, the answer is no to both questions.

However, many changes have been happening in Drupal core. A lot of these are directly to support Drupal CMS, such as recipes, site templates, support for Canvas, project browser, and automatic updates.

Another way that Drupal CMS is affecting core is in the removal of…

Tags

• drupal core
• Drupal CMS

What is Drupal.displace() and why should I care?

While working on a Drupal core bug in the Navigation module’s toolbar, Mike Herchel discovered the issue was related to the usage of Drupal.displace(), which is included in Core’s JavaScript and CSS APIs. He breaks down what Drupal.displace() is and how to use it.

Addison Thu, 12/04/2025 - 23:45

AI workflow automation is the new standard in process automation. Discover why previous agentic workflows are reaching their limits and how FlowDrop offers a simple and cost-effective alternative to AI workflow automation.

We're excited to announce that the DDEV Foundation has officially established a Board of Directors! This is a significant milestone in our journey toward enhanced governance and long-term sustainability for the DDEV project.

Today we filed an amended Articles of Incorporation with the Secretary of State of Colorado, which includes the Board of Directors.

Introducing the New Board Michael Anello (@ultimike)

Mike Anello is a seasoned Drupal developer with over 15 years of experience. He specializes in Drupal consulting and training through his business, ensuring clients leverage Drupal's full potential. Mike is a notable community contributor and advocate, sharing his expertise and insights widely. Mike is already serving as the Treasurer of the Foundation.

Jen Lampton (@jenlampton)

Jen Lampton has been building websites since 1997 and participating in Open Source communities since 2006. She is a co-founder of Backdrop CMS and a provisional member of the Drupal security team. Jen currently maintains dozens of Open Source projects and contributes to other projects (including DDEV!) as it applies to her work.

Benni Mack (@bmack)

Benni Mack is a long-time TYPO3 core developer and contributor, serving as TYPO3 CMS Team Lead. He brings extensive experience in open source project governance and community building. Benni is passionate about developer experience and has been instrumental in modernizing TYPO3's development practices.

Andrew Berry (@deviantintegral)

Andrew Berry has been a member and contributor in the Drupal community since 2006. He is also the VP of Technology at Lullabot, where teams rely on DDEV for local development. When not doing Drupal and DDEV, Andrew spends his time working on home automation and related open source projects.

Randy Fay (@rfay)

Randy is the original maintainer of DDEV, enjoying it since 2016. He has deep roots in the Drupal community and has done loads of traveling by bike.

Our Vision: Sustainability and Financial Stability for the Project

Improved governance is one of our key long-term goals for the project, and was a key goal for 2025. We know that this will be an ongoing process that we'll have to grow into, and we invite your participation. We meet every two months as a group, and the entire community is invited. Subscribe to the meeting announcements and summaries and ask for a calendar invitation if you'd like. These meetings are also announced in the monthly DDEV Newsletter.

Of course the key long-term goal is sustainability in general. We don't want to depend on any single maintainer, and we want to ensure that DDEV can continue to thrive and grow for years to come. Financial sustainability is a key part of that, but just one part. Read more about our path to sustainability.

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to hear from you! Or get active and join our DDEV Advisory Group.

Do you have questions or want to talk (about sponsoring or anything else)? Contact us! or join us in Discord.

Have you signed up for the monthly DDEV Newsletter? We'd love to have you.

Claude Code was used for editing and formatting in the blog post.

When we launched Drupal CMS 1.0 eleven months ago, I posted the announcement on Reddit. Brave of me, I know. But I wanted non-Drupal people to actually try it.

There were a lot of positive reactions, but there was also honest feedback. The most common? "Wake me up when your new experience builder is ready". The message was clear: make page building easier and editing more visual.

I was not surprised. For years I have heard the same frustration. Drupal is powerful, but not always easy to use. That criticism has been fair. We have never lacked capability, but we have not always delivered the user experience people expect.

Well, wake up.

Today we released Drupal Canvas 1.0, a new visual page builder for Drupal. You can create reusable components that match your design system, drag them on to a page, edit content in place, preview changes across multiple pages, and undo mistakes with ease.

Watch the video below. Better yet, show it to someone who thinks they know what Drupal looks like. I bet their first reaction will be: "Wait, is that Drupal?". That reaction is exactly what we have been working toward. It makes Drupal feel more modern and less intimidating.

I also want to set expectations. Drupal Canvas 1.0 helps us catch up with other page builders more than it helps us leap ahead. We had to start there.

But it helps us catch up in the right way, bringing the ease of modern tools while keeping Drupal's identity intact. This isn't Drupal becoming simpler by becoming less powerful. Drupal Canvas sits on top of everything that makes Drupal so powerful: structured content, fine-grained permissions, scalability, and much more.

Most importantly, it opens new doors. Frontend developers can create components in React without having to learn Drupal first. And as shown in my DrupalCon Vienna keynote, Drupal Canvas will have an AI assistant that can generate pages from natural language prompts.

Drupal Canvas is a remarkable piece of engineering. The team at Acquia and contributors across the community put serious craft into this. You can see it in the result. I'm thankful for the time, care, and skill everyone brought to it.

So what is next? We keep building. Drupal Canvas 1.0 is step one, and this is a good moment for more of the Drupal community to get involved. Now is the time to build on it, test it, and improve it. Especially because Drupal CMS 2.0 ships in less than two months with Drupal Canvas included.

Shipping Drupal Canvas 1.0 is a major milestone. It shows we are listening. And it shows what we can accomplish when we focus on the experience as much as the capability. I cannot wait to see what people build with it.

For years, Drupal has been the platform of choice for organizations that need serious digital capabilities—think universities managing millions of pages, government agencies with complex workflows, and Fortune 500 companies running mission-critical websites. The power is undeniable, but there's always been a catch: you needed technical expertise to unlock it.

That’s why one of the most exciting areas of Drupal’s journey has been the work underway on more intuitive, visual building experiences. The community has spent years exploring how to make Drupal feel more accessible to site builders and content teams without sacrificing the flexibility and robustness that define Drupal.

Drupal Canvas is the next step in that journey.

More than a “new feature drop,” Drupal Canvas represents an ongoing, community-driven effort to modernize how we build with Drupal. Canvas adds a more visual, flexible way to arrange and adjust page components, helping non-developers work more independently while providing developers space for deeper technical work.

No More Trade-offs 

As Lauri Timmanee, Drupal Canvas's product lead, explained: "There's a trade-off that exists in Drupal - either you're forced into building sort of a cookie cutter website...or you go into complex coding. We want to break that trade-off by providing better tools so that you can actually build websites that are custom to your brand without having to know complex code."

What's Included in Drupal Canvas 1.0

Drupal Canvas provides the foundation for a more intuitive page-building workflow in Drupal. Built with React on the frontend and integrated with Drupal's core APIs on the backend, it focuses on helping site builders arrange and adjust content more easily, with features such as:

• Component based visual page building with a drag-and-drop interface
• In-browser code components that allow you to add new building blocks
• Create and preview multiple pages before publication with multi-step undo

Try It Out and Get Involved

Drupal Canvas represents the Drupal community's collaborative innovation at its best—open and with a foundation of real-world use cases. As work continues, community feedback will continue to play a large role in shaping the next phases.

• Check out the Drupal Canvas demo with the Drupal brand. Local installation instructions at https://github.com/phenaproxima/canvas-demo
• Join the #drupal-canvas channel in Slack for active community discussion.

Your feedback and involvement will directly shape the future of content management in Drupal.