In 2018 we released Commerce ifthenpay, the module that brought Multibanco references to Drupal Commerce. Seven years later, we are publishing version 3.0.0: the module's biggest evolution since then, with dynamic Multibanco references generated by the ifthenpay API, MB WAY payment retries and full support for Drupal 10 and 11.

The silent problem of locally generated references

A Multibanco reference has 9 digits, and the classic local generation algorithm reserves only 4 of them for the order number. It works perfectly up to order 9999. Beyond that, the number has to be compressed to fit, and this is where mathematics turns against the store.

Version 2.x mitigated the problem by spreading order numbers across 9000 possible combinations. It sounds like a lot, but the birthday paradox is relentless: around 112 simultaneously open references are enough for a 50% chance that two different orders share exactly the same reference. In a busy store, that means payments that can be matched to the wrong order, or never reconciled at all. Worst of all, the problem is invisible: everything seems to work, until the day a customer pays and their order stays "unpaid".

The solution: references generated by ifthenpay

Version 3.0.0 introduces a new mode on the Multibanco gateway: instead of computing the reference locally, the module requests it from the ifthenpay REST API, using the account's MB Key. The differences are structural:

• The order number is sent in full (up to 25 characters): no truncation, no compression, no collisions;
• Each transaction receives a unique identifier, and the payment confirmation is validated against it;
• References can have an expiry date (from 1 day to 2 years), something impossible in local mode;
• There is a sandbox environment to validate the integration without real transactions.

The local mode remains available for backwards compatibility, and open references generated the old way keep reconciling after the switch: stores migrate with no downtime window.

MB WAY: promise delivered, and then some

When we wrote about version 2.x, MB WAY was "future development". Version 3.0.0 closes the loop: besides push payments at checkout, customers can re-send the payment request from their order history without going through checkout again, and the store team can trigger a push directly from the backoffice. Fewer orders abandoned because a push expired on someone's phone.

Ready for Drupal's future

Version 3.0.0 supports Drupal 10 and Drupal 11, and Commerce 2.x and 3.x. The module now runs continuous integration on drupal.org, with more than 50 automated tests validating every change on both Drupal versions, and stable releases are covered by the community's security advisory policy.

If your store runs version 2.x, we recommend upgrading: the 2.x branch is no longer supported and does not include the protections against reference collisions.

composer require 'drupal/commerce_ifthenpay:^3.0' Need help with payments in Drupal Commerce?

Bloomidea develops and maintains Commerce ifthenpay and has been building Drupal Commerce stores for the Portuguese market for more than a decade: Multibanco, MB WAY, cards, Stripe and PayPal, with ERP and logistics integrations. Talk to us about your project.

The debate over open-source infrastructure often ends at agreement. Matthew Saunders wants it to continue into budgets, governance, and contributor support.

Your Drupal site is on a current version, gets security updates, and technically works - yet editing is painful and every small change waits in a developer queue. The platform is rarely the problem.

Fourteen common implementation mistakes that make a Drupal site feel broken - with symptoms, diagnosis, and fixes for each. Most cost a fraction of a rebuild to put right.

Take Away At Tag1, we believe in proving AI within our own work before recommending it to clients. This post is part of our AI Applied content series, where team members share real stories of how they're using Artificial Intelligence and the insights and lessons they learn along the way. Here, Lucas Hedding, Senior Backend Engineer & Migration Lead and Drupal core subsystem maintainer for authentication/authorization, used Claude to work through over 1,200 open issues in the Drupal auth/authZ issue queues and co-architect a new pluggable authentication system for Drupal core, without writing a single line of code.

When approaching AI, I've done so warily. Maybe it was because I was a skeptic, but my first endeavors were not glowing success stories. My first real attempt to kick the tires ended with me kicking AI to the curb and doing some regex and search/replace to finish what it started. I chalk it up to a mix of model maturity and, let's be honest, my own ill-directed uses.

But more recently I've been finding wins. I find AI very useful for writing test cases for test-driven development (TDD). It's also really good at troubleshooting. It takes a bug report, follows the code paths, and writes a failing test that reproduces the bug. When you solve the problem, you can be sure you have solved it. And more importantly, that it was even a problem in the first place.

Putting AI to Work on a Real Problem

It was at this point, I realized that AI might be able to help me with my Drupal Core maintainer duties. For those that don’t know, I maintain an insane number of contrib modules and am a core subsystem maintainer in 3 areas, namely migrate, image, and authentication/authorization. The last area of auth/authZ is in desperate need of modernization.

The planning issue requirements and roadmap are all open. The community design review hasn't started yet, so now is a good time to take a look: [Plan] YAML-Based Pluggable Authentication Flow

The first part of the problem for auth/authZ is that there aren't any core components in the core issue queue for the sub system. I have to look in a few module queues and the base system to find relevant issues. I filed this issue to establish a dedicated auth/authZ component in the Drupal core queue.

To help me get my mind around the space, I had AI query all 1,200 issues in the module-based issue queues. Then it spun out from there to find referenced issues. I leveraged a local file cache of d.o issues so I didn’t have to hit the drupal.org API repeatedly as I was tweaking the discovery.

This demonstrates the first lesson I’ve learned with AI. It is really good at doing directed research and planning. But you need to give it guard rails. I had to tell it to add a cache. I had to tweak the issue filters. I had to think about what I wanted. AI wouldn’t think for me. But at the end, I had several hundred issues downloaded locally.

Making Sense of 1,200 Issues

Then came the next step. I asked AI to create a mind map using mermaid.live. With over 1,000 issues, I didn’t want something that was too unmanageable. I picked a couple issues that seemed key to me and asked AI to give me a mind map with issues directly related to authentication (excluding authorization for the moment). That shrank things down to just a few hundred. But the large picture of categorized issues in a mind map started to tell a story.

The mind map story led me back to the planning phase again. This time I used BMAD, an AI methodology specifically structured to guide planning a task using AI. I fed it the pain points and asked it to look at some reference PHP and non-PHP authentication frameworks. It researched Laravel, Symfony, Drupal and Keycloak. At this point I had enough data to request it to write some pros/cons and possible pseudo implementations.

Somewhere in this whole process DrupalCon Chicago happened. Then a few weeks later MidCamp in Chicago happened. This gave me ready access to real people to bounce ideas off. They asked some really great questions. I fed these questions back into AI and refined the design even further.

Then more recently, I had the opportunity to speak at a Drupal meetup on Zoom. I took all the data I’d gathered, the mind maps, the design artifacts generated by BMAD and created a nice slideshow presentation. But the source data was from research provided by AI. The attendees at the meetup had even more feedback. I fed this feedback back into AI and now have a pretty defensible architecture for a new authentication system in Drupal core — the YAML-Based Pluggable Authentication Flow outlined in the planning issue. Broken down into phases with dependencies identified between phases of work.

The Blank Sheet Problem

We haven’t built the new system. No code has been written. But AI helped architect everything. I don’t think a human could parse that many hundreds of drupal.org issues, create a mind map, and build a new architecture without massive amounts of effort. AI is great at holding lots of nuggets of data in memory all at once. It is optimally designed to help with just such a task as I went through.

Time will tell if the architecture co-developed by AI proves useful. I do know it has helped with the “blank sheet of paper” -syndrome. The feeling where you know you need to do something but don’t know where to start. You just sit there staring at the blank sheet of paper hoping for inspiration. Even if we entirely threw out the new architecture, we have something to start.

For those interested in the artifacts from this discovery, you can visit https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3593328.

phpstan-drupal 2.1.0 is out. The theme of this release: rules and behaviors that proved themselves as opt-ins are now the defaults. If you run `composer update` and see new errors, that is the release working as intended — everything below includes the configuration to opt back out.

Nine rules are now enabled by default

These rules shipped as opt-ins over the 2.0 cycle. They have had time to bake, and they catch real bugs, so they no longer require configuration:

Join us THURSDAY, July 16 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

We don't have anything specific on the agenda this month, so we'll have plenty of time to discuss anything that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits. Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google document at https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone.

Information on joining the meeting can be found in our collaborative Google document.

Boerland links his board candidacy to a question now facing Drupal: how the project can expand institutional support without narrowing the path for contributors, local communities, and site owners.

Getting each audience to the right section is only half the job. The harder part is making the experience feel personal and routing every visitor to the right form without a maze of options.

Part 2 of this Drupal guide covers user journeys, smart Webform contact routing, and pragmatic content personalization for multiple audiences.

Got your Drupal website up and running but haven't figured how to maintain it? Read to find out how you can optimize your site and make it future-ready.

Drupal site security rarely stops at core and module updates. Canonical’s survey shows why package provenance, Linux maintenance, and patch ownership remain part of delivery risk.

One website, three completely different visitors. The hardest part of a multi-audience site is not building it - it is making sure each group finds its path without tripping over everyone else's.

Part 1 of this Drupal guide covers audience research, hybrid navigation strategy, and how to structure content with taxonomy, menus, and Views.

Today we are talking about Content, syndication, and Synchronization between Drupal Sites with guest Thiemo Müller. We'll also cover Drupal core 11.4 as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/560

Topics

• Origins and Use Cases
• Hub Model and Flexibility
• Media Sync and Governance
• Composable Pages Challenge
• Governance With Blocks
• Canvas And Recipes
• Real Time Syndication
• Scaling To Thousands
• GEO And AEO Explained
• GEO Audits And Loops
• ContentSync Recommendations
• Permissions And Drupal 11
• AIM Assess Improve Monitor
• Boosting Drupal AI Presence
• Ecosystem Alignment Signals
• Recency And Messaging Tips

Resources

• Content Sync
• Content Sync A-I-M
• Content Sync Drupal Module
• Deprecated extensions meta issue
• GEO
  • Generative engine optimization
• Semrush
• Peec ai
• Otterly ai
• Profound

Guests

Thiemo Müller - content-sync.io thiemo

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ashraf Abed - drupito.com ashrafabed

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Are you excited for a feature release of Drupal core that delivers even more performance acceleration, a modernized developer experience, and a slew of administrator and editor improvements? Drupal core 11.4 delivers all that and more
• Module name/project name:
  • Drupal core 11.4
• Brief history
  • How old: created on July 1 2026 by catch of Tag1
• Changes
  • Performance improvements
    • When Drupal 11.3 was released, we talked about what a massive performance jump it represented, the biggest improvement in a decade. 11.4 has done it again! Database queries are reduced by half, across a range of requests due to optimizations in how entity fields are loaded. Overall, that represents a nearly ⅔ improvement for database and cache lookups on a cold cache compared to Drupal 11.0 or 10.6
    • Entity listing queries have also been refactored to use fewer table joins, reducing slow queries. Additionally, the link field introduces a resolvable_uri property and token, which returns a ready-to-use front-end link (like /#main-content) right out of the API instead of raw internal URIs, which will be a huge benefit for anyone using Drupal for decoupled and JSON:API-based use cases
    • Applying recipes in Drupal 11.4 is significantly faster, reportedly twice as fast, and that includes installing Drupal CMS
    • Drupal now supports Brotli compression, which should yield 15-25% better compression of CSS and JS assets
  • Security
    • Drupal 11.4 offers a new password hashing algorithm, argon2id, that will become the default in Drupal 12 later this year
    • Also, the drupal/core-recommended package no longer strictly locks minor versions for critical dependencies like Guzzle, Twig, or Symfony Polyfills, making it easier to immediately receive important security updates
    • Drupal's default robots.txt now blocks well-behaved search crawlers from indexing search queries, helping to solve a potential source of traffic overload on sites using faceted search
  • Developer experience
    • There's been a significant shift towards the adoption of PHP Attributes in recent Drupal releases, and 11.4 is no exception
      • You can now define application routes directly within your PHP controller and form classes using the Symfony #[Route] attribute. This drastically reduces the need to jump back and forth into *.routing.yml files
      • The new #[Bundle] attribute allows developers to define bundle classes directly, eliminating the need to write old-school entity_type_info or entity_type_info_alter hook implementations.
      • All core .theme and .theme-settings.php files have been moved entirely to PHP classes. Support for legacy .theme files will be dropped in Drupal 13. Furthermore, dozens of core .module files have been fully converted into clean PHP classes
    • Front controllers now leverage the symfony/runtime component to isolate bootstrapping logic from request handling, preparing the Drupal core architecture for advanced environments like FrankenPHP, known for its blazing-fast performance, among other features
    • Drupal 11.4 introduces a native, extensible command-line tool (./vendor/bin/dr) built in partnership with Drush maintainers. This kicks off a transitional period where Drush commands will gradually be migrated to the core native binary
    • Also, the new HttpKernelUiHelperTrait for kernel tests lets developers make mock HTTP requests and assertions without running the full Drupal site installer. This allows many traditional browser tests to be rewritten as much faster kernel tests
  • Editor experience
    • Drupal 11.4 includes the new Default Admin theme, a version of the popular Gin admin theme, now in core
    • The Navigation module is now enabled by default, replacing the legacy toolbar
    • CKEditor once again has a fullscreen button available without a contrib add-on, allowing editors to fully immerse themselves in a WYSIWYG element's content, great for working on long-format pieces
  • Deprecations
    • The initial 11.4.0 release actually removed a number of core recipes. They were since restored in an 11.4.1 release, but they are deprecated and will be removed from Drupal 12
    • Also on their way out are a number of modules, including Ban, Contact, Field Layout, History, Migrate Drupal and its UI, Search, Settings Tray, Shortcut, Telephone, Toolbar, and a flag module called layout_builder_expose_all_field_blocks. For themes, Claro, Stable 9, and Olivero are all deprecated, and will be moved from core. We'll include the meta issue about these deprecation in the show notes, and if any of these are important to you, it's worth tracking where they are on the path of moving to contrib

This is the second and final part of a two-part guide to building a component-based corporate website with Drupal Paragraphs. Turn the bare components from part 1 into a flexible, production-grade library with color variants, responsive layouts, spacing controls, conditional fields, and admin UX.

Add style variants with CSS custom properties and Paragraphs behavior plugins, build mobile-first responsive layouts, give editors margin and padding controls, and polish the admin experience with Gin, conditional fields, and smart defaults.

Recent Drupal news fits inside a wider question Dries Buytaert raised in his blog post, License-only versus Stewarded Open Source: what turns code that is merely available into infrastructure people can depend on? The distinction is useful because this week’s updates are not only about individual announcements. They show the work that sits behind dependable open source: governance, maintenance, security response, shared knowledge, and long-term care.

The 2026 Drupal Association at-large board election brings that work into the governance layer. One community-elected seat on the association’s board is now moving through its election cycle, giving individual members a direct role in how Drupal’s institutional support is represented. In a project where technical decisions and community structures constantly shape each other, governance is not a background process. It is part of how shared infrastructure is kept accountable.

The same distinction between availability and dependability appears in the ten contributed-project security advisories published on 8 July 2026. Four were rated Critical. Three direct site owners to uninstall unsupported projects, while the fourth addresses SQL injection in Location Selector. Unsupported projects may still exist in repositories and production sites, but that does not make them safe to keep using.

For site teams, the response is practical rather than abstract. Affected modules need to be identified, fixed releases need to be applied where available, and unsupported projects without advisory-listed fixes need to be removed. This is the maintenance layer of open source that rarely attracts attention until something breaks.

ECA crossing 20,000 reported Drupal site installations shows the same issue from the maintainer side. The Event-Condition-Action module allows site builders to model workflows through events, conditions, and actions instead of relying on custom glue code. Adoption at that scale is not just a usage milestone; it changes the weight of future commits, API decisions, and compatibility promises.

In a written response to The DropTimes, project co-founder Jürgen Haas said the milestone changes how he thinks about maintenance responsibility. That is the cost of relevance in practical form. Once a module becomes part of thousands of working sites, its maintainers are no longer only improving a tool. They are helping support a piece of shared infrastructure.

The week’s event deadlines extend the same theme into community programming. Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2026 is accepting proposals ahead of its October event in Vancouver, British Columbia, while DrupalCamp Italy 2026 has extended its Call for Papers to 31 July 2026 for its one-day camp in Bologna. Event programmes are another support structure for the ecosystem because they turn project work, lessons, failures, and experiments into knowledge others can use.

Taken together, these updates make a selected but coherent brief. They are not the whole week in Drupal, and they are not a ranking of every important story. They are a thread through the work that keeps open source dependable after the code is released: electing representatives, closing security gaps, maintaining widely used modules, and making room for contributors to share what they are learning.

Readers can follow The DropTimes on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook, or join the publication’s Drupal Slack channel at #thedroptimes.

(Allen Jason, junior sub-editor at The DropTimes, writes and curates this week’s Editor’s Pick.)

This is part 1 of a two-part guide to building a component-based corporate website with Drupal Paragraphs. By the end of the series you'll have a library of 10-12 universal paragraph types with style variants, responsive layouts, and editor-friendly spacing controls.

Plan a reusable component library, set up the Paragraphs module, and build Hero, Text + Image, and Feature Grid paragraph types with Twig templates and CSS.

Step debugging is one of the first things every developer should master in any language or environment, and it's my opinion that it's just as fundamental as version control. With DDEV, getting Xdebug working with PhpStorm takes less than five minutes and no php.ini fiddling. This screencast shows the whole thing on a TYPO3 project, start to finish.

Watch the Video What You'll See

• Installing the DDEV Integration Plugin for PhpStorm
• Setting a breakpoint at the entry point of a TYPO3 project
• Telling PhpStorm to listen for PHP debug connections
• Enabling Xdebug with ddev xdebug on
• Stepping over (F8) and stepping into (F7) code as a page loads

The Steps

1. Install the DDEV Integration plugin from the PhpStorm marketplace (not required, but it handles most of the setup for you)
2. Set a breakpoint
3. Tell PhpStorm to listen for PHP debug connections
4. ddev xdebug on
5. Visit the page — PhpStorm stops at your breakpoint automatically

That's it. No manual php.ini changes, no fussing with host.docker.internal, no separate Xdebug install.

Works the Same Everywhere

This screencast uses PhpStorm, but the same setup works identically with VS Code, on Linux, and on Windows with WSL2. If you're setting up a new machine, see:

• DDEV on Linux in 10 Minutes
• Watch: DDEV from scratch with Windows WSL2
• Watch: DDEV From Scratch with macOS

More on Xdebug and DDEV

• The ddev utility xdebug-diagnose --interactive command can help with port conflict and related setup problems. Try it out!
• Xdebug in DDEV: Understanding, Debugging, and Troubleshooting Step Debugging — the updated guide
• DDEV and Xdebug: Debugging and sorting out problems
• Xdebug.org and its step debugging documentation

Xdebug is created and maintained by Derick Rethans. He's been maintaining it for 20+ years. Send money to the Xdebug project!. The DDEV Foundation supports it as an upstream project, you can too.

Learn More

• Full details on DDEV's Xdebug integration, including troubleshooting, are in the DDEV documentation.

If you have questions, reach out in any of the support channels.

Follow our blog, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and join us on Discord. Sign up for the monthly newsletter.

This article was edited and refined with assistance from Claude Code.

Accessibility failures often surface after budgets, architecture, and delivery plans are already fixed. Mike Gifford argues that public agencies can reduce that pattern by contributing fixes upstream.

Discover how to leverage AI as a reasoning partner in Drupal development, moving beyond coding to high-level architecture and system design.

Editors often rely on developers for simple display variations. ERVMS moves those decisions into the editorial workflow without changing Drupal's existing display architecture.

Drupal Anti-Spam: NoBotIQ vs CAPTCHA, Honeypot, CleanTalk, and Other Solutions admin Fri, 07/10/2026 - 14:18

Hi friends! It's been a while since our last article, and you might have been wondering when we'd be back with something new. Thanks for your patience—we're excited to return with a fresh topic that many Drupal site owners, marketers, and developers deal with on a regular basis: spam. Drupal websites can be secure, flexible, and high-performing. But there is one issue that keeps bothering site owners, marketers, and developers again and again. It is spam.

Spam is no longer only about strange messages in a contact form. Today, it can mean fake registrations, low-quality leads, disposable emails, bot-driven submissions, and AI-generated junk content. All of this creates extra moderation work, pollutes your CRM, and wastes your team’s time.

That is exactly why Drupal anti-spam protection matters much more now than it did a few years ago.