We take over projects from other agencies and see them through to completion – even if they are stuck, have errors, or require urgent intervention.

In recent months, a number of Acquia customers have independently made the same strategic decision: to migrate hundreds of websites from WordPress and other platforms to Drupal.

Some of these sites will move to Acquia Cloud, our Drupal PaaS, while others will move to Acquia Source, our Drupal SaaS. Drupal CMS played an important role in these decisions by making Drupal more approachable to marketers and site builders.

Why are different organizations making the same choice? One key reason is the cost of CMS fragmentation.

A few months ago, a CMO told me that her team had purchased a new digital asset management system (DAM). The estimate to connect it to the organization's websites came back at nearly $100,000 and three months of work.

Why so much? The organization ran three CMS platforms: Drupal, WordPress, and Contentful. The DAM had to be integrated with all three. That meant not only three integrations, but also three sets of expertise, three rollout plans, and three ongoing maintenance responsibilities. One new capability had become three separate projects.

Organizations are under pressure to move faster and reduce costs. CMS fragmentation creates a recurring tax through duplicated integrations, security practices, governance policies, infrastructure, technical expertise, and more. It also fragments attention and makes it harder to share improvements across teams and websites.

Organizations pay that tax every day through higher operating costs and slower execution, not only when they introduce new capabilities. When it consistently slows their ability to improve digital experiences, it can become a competitive disadvantage.

Some of this duplication can be reduced by standardizing hosting and portfolio governance across multiple CMS platforms. That is valuable, but it addresses only one layer of the problem. Each CMS still has its own extension model, editorial experience, security considerations, and required expertise.

This fragmentation usually happens for understandable reasons. Teams often make technology decisions independently, and different sites can have genuinely different requirements.

A marketing team may need to launch a campaign site in days without involving developers, making SaaS solutions attractive. A team responsible for a high-traffic enterprise application with custom integrations may need the flexibility and control of an Open Source solution running in a PaaS environment.

Each decision can make sense for the individual project while creating significant duplication across the organization.

More than 15 years ago, I argued in a post about Acquia's product strategy that organizations should standardize on a common CMS while choosing the right operating model for each site.

Today, the case is even stronger. Websites depend on more integrations, digital experiences are more complex, and AI is becoming another shared capability that organizations need to deploy across their portfolios. With multiple CMS platforms, every new capability becomes harder and more expensive to deploy safely.

Standardizing on a single CMS lets teams reuse more of their design systems, security practices, integrations, and expertise across sites. Marketers get a more consistent way to create and manage content, while developers spend less time implementing the same capabilities on unrelated platforms.

But standardizing on Drupal does not mean forcing every site into the same architecture or operating model. Organizations can share a common CMS foundation while choosing a different balance of convenience and control for each site.

That is where Acquia Source and Acquia Cloud fit together.

Acquia Source provides the SaaS operating model. It is designed for teams that value speed and simplicity. Acquia manages the underlying platform, while marketers and site builders customize experiences through the user interface, reusable components, and supported integrations. Developers can extend sites through custom components, APIs, webhooks, and other supported tools without managing the Drupal codebase or installing arbitrary modules.

Acquia Cloud provides the PaaS operating model. It is designed for sites that need deeper customization and more developer control. Teams can build custom Drupal modules, use contributed modules, manage code through Git, run CI/CD pipelines, and integrate Drupal more deeply with other systems.

Both are built on Drupal. This gives organizations a shared foundation for skills, content practices, design systems, security, and integrations, while allowing each site to choose the right balance of speed, simplicity, flexibility, and control.

A site can begin on Acquia Source when speed and simplicity matter most. If its requirements later grow to include custom modules, deeper integrations, or more developer control, the organization can export its source code, database, and files and move to Acquia Cloud or another Drupal environment without adopting a different CMS.

I have been calling this "Open SaaS": the convenience of SaaS combined with the ownership and portability of Open Source. Organizations can choose a different operating model without leaving Drupal or surrendering control of their sites.

When organizations standardize this way, the economics change dramatically. We have helped some customers save millions of dollars each year by reusing shared capabilities instead of rebuilding them for different platforms.

The goal is not to operate every website in the same way. A campaign site and a mission-critical application require different levels of speed, flexibility, and control, but they do not need unrelated CMS platforms.

The goal is to create operating leverage across an organization's digital portfolio. Each site can use the operating model that fits its needs, while teams reuse investments in content, design, integrations, security, and expertise.

Then, when the organization adds a DAM, a personalization engine, an analytics platform, or an AI capability, teams can build on shared work rather than start over for each CMS. The result is faster execution, greater returns on digital investments, lower costs, and less risk.

One CMS foundation with multiple operating models makes that possible.

In recent months, a number of Acquia customers have independently made the same strategic decision: to migrate hundreds of websites from WordPress and other platforms to Drupal.

Some of these sites will move to Acquia Cloud, while others will move to Acquia Source. Drupal CMS played an important role in these decisions by making Drupal more approachable for marketers and site builders.

Why are different organizations making the same choice? One key reason is the cost of CMS fragmentation.

A few months ago, a CMO told me that her team had purchased a new digital asset management system (DAM). The estimate to connect it to the organization's websites came back at nearly $100,000 and three months of work.

Why so much? The organization ran three CMS platforms: Drupal, WordPress, and Contentful. The DAM had to be integrated with all three. That meant not only three integrations, but also three sets of expertise, three rollout plans, and three ongoing maintenance responsibilities. One new capability had become three separate projects.

Organizations are under pressure to move faster and reduce costs. CMS fragmentation makes both harder by creating recurring duplication. Integrations, security practices, governance policies, design systems, and technical expertise must all be developed and maintained across multiple platforms.

Some of this duplication can be reduced by standardizing hosting and portfolio governance across multiple CMS platforms. That is valuable, but it addresses only one layer of the problem. Each CMS still has its own extension model, editorial experience, security considerations, and required expertise.

This fragmentation usually happens for understandable reasons. Teams often make technology decisions independently, and different sites can have genuinely different requirements.

A marketing team may need to launch a campaign site in days without involving developers, making SaaS solutions attractive. A team responsible for a high-traffic enterprise application with custom integrations may need the flexibility and control of an Open Source solution running in a PaaS environment.

Each decision can make sense for the individual project while creating significant duplication across the organization.

More than 15 years ago, I argued in a post about Acquia's product strategy that organizations should standardize on a common CMS while choosing the right operating model for each site.

Today, the case is even stronger. Websites depend on more integrations, digital experiences are more complex, and AI is becoming another shared capability that organizations need to deploy across their portfolios. With multiple CMS platforms, every new capability becomes harder and more expensive to deploy safely.

Standardizing on a single CMS lets teams reuse more of their design systems, security practices, integrations, and expertise across sites. Marketers get a more consistent way to create and manage content, while developers spend less time implementing the same capabilities on unrelated platforms.

But standardizing on Drupal does not mean forcing every site into the same architecture or operating model. Organizations can share a common CMS foundation while choosing a different balance of convenience and control for each site.

That is where Acquia Source and Acquia Cloud fit together.

Acquia Source provides the SaaS operating model. It is designed for teams that value speed and simplicity. Acquia manages the underlying platform, while marketers and site builders customize experiences through the user interface, reusable components, and supported integrations. Developers can extend sites through custom components, APIs, webhooks, and other supported tools without managing the Drupal codebase or installing arbitrary modules.

Acquia Cloud provides the PaaS operating model. It is designed for sites that need deeper customization and more developer control. Teams can build custom Drupal modules, use contributed modules, manage code through Git, run CI/CD pipelines, and integrate Drupal more deeply with other systems.

Both are built on Drupal. This gives organizations a shared foundation for skills, content practices, design systems, security, and integrations, while allowing each site to choose the right balance of speed, simplicity, flexibility, and control.

A site can begin on Acquia Source when speed and simplicity matter most. If its requirements later grow to include custom modules, deeper integrations, or more developer control, the organization can export its source code, database, and files and move to Acquia Cloud or another Drupal environment without adopting a different CMS.

I have been calling this "Open SaaS": the convenience of SaaS combined with the ownership and portability of Open Source. Organizations can choose a different operating model without leaving Drupal or surrendering control of their sites.

When organizations standardize this way, the economics change dramatically. We have helped some customers save tens of millions of dollars each year by reusing shared capabilities instead of rebuilding them for different platforms.

The goal is not to operate every website in the same way. A campaign site and a mission-critical application require different levels of speed, flexibility, and control, but they do not need unrelated CMS platforms.

The goal is to create operating leverage across an organization's digital portfolio. Each site can use the operating model that fits its needs, while teams reuse investments in content, design, integrations, security, and expertise.

Then, when the organization adds a DAM, a personalization engine, an analytics platform, or an AI capability, teams can build on shared work rather than start over for each CMS. The result is faster execution, greater returns on digital investments, lower costs, and less risk.

One CMS foundation with multiple operating models makes that possible.

Drupal 7 has reached its end of life, and the jump to modern Drupal is in practice a rebuild, not an upgrade – new architecture, a contrib audit, a theme rewritten from scratch. There has always been a calmer answer, and it carries a name this community knows well: Backdrop CMS, the community continuation of the Drupal 7 lineage. What was missing was the road. BOA-5.88.8, the 'Continuity Edition', builds it: Backdrop as a first-class citizen on the Ægir control panel, and a supported upgrade which converts a copy of your Drupal 7 site while the original keeps serving, so you decide at leisure when to hand over the keys. Even Drupal 6 sites can travel D6 to D7 to Backdrop entirely through panel tasks. Here is how the whole road works, and why it never touches your original site.

Visual page builders often arrive with a familiar promise: fewer developer handoffs and more control for editors. Drupal CMS 2.0 makes that promise concrete by using Drupal Canvas as its default editing experience, with drag-and-drop composition, live previews, and editing directly on the page. The change does not remove front-end development. It moves the unit of work from the individual page towards reusable components and the rules surrounding them.

Single-Directory Components make those rules visible in code. Part of Drupal core’s render system since Drupal 10.3, a component can keep its Twig template, metadata, CSS, JavaScript, and related assets together. Props define structured inputs, slots create controlled areas for nested content, and schemas can restrict the values a component accepts. Drupal’s SDC quickstart describes these inputs as an application programming interface, or contract, for the component.

Consider a featured article card. Developers can encode its semantic markup, heading structure, image treatment, responsive behaviour, accessibility requirements, spacing, and permitted visual variants. Editors can choose the article, label, image, and approved presentation without adding arbitrary classes or rebuilding the markup. The editor gains useful control because the developer has already decided where flexibility is safe.

Recent Drupal publications make this division of labour clearer. In the 4 December 2025 blog post “Drupal Canvas 1.0 Released,” Drupal founder Dries Buytaert described reusable components that match a team’s design system. His 23 October 2025 State of Drupal recap presented visual page building for end users alongside component work for front-end developers, while Drupal.org’s 24 March 2026 post “Drupal at 25: Built to Last. Ready for What’s Next.” said Canvas can speed page creation without sacrificing structured content. The pattern is clear: visual tools redistribute development work rather than make technical expertise unnecessary.

Canvas also extends component development beyond traditional Twig-based theming. Its code components contain JavaScript and CSS, can receive page data and custom inputs, and can be created in the browser or maintained in a local codebase. They render through Preact with a React compatibility layer. For teams that need source control, shared files, static assets, or package dependencies, the local workflow supports development outside the Canvas interface and synchronisation with the Drupal site.

Greater component power creates a governance question. A schema can restrict the values a component accepts, but the development team must still decide which choices are meaningful, who owns the component, and how changes will affect pages already using it. Too many exposed options can weaken the design system, while too few can recreate the bottlenecks that visual building is meant to reduce. Reusable components should therefore be reviewed as public interfaces, with clear defaults, accessibility checks, documented variations, and predictable behaviour.

Existing custom themes do not need to adopt this model in one large rewrite. Teams can begin with repeated elements such as cards, teasers, calls to action, and heroes, then move their inputs into documented props and their flexible regions into deliberate slots. Components can be tested within the theme before mature and stable choices are exposed through Drupal Canvas. The future Drupal developer may assemble fewer pages directly, but will carry more responsibility for building the platform on which those pages can be assembled safely.

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

(Kazima Abbas, sub-editor at The DropTimes, writes and curates this week’s Editor’s Pick.)

Chris Kelly links the board candidacy to a question now facing Drupal: how the project can make installation and upgrades easier without weakening security, independence, or open-source safeguards.

Michael Kinnunen and Steve Wirt share how they each got started with Drupal through higher-ed jobs and stayed for the communit. They compare those community values to FIRST Robotics, explaining FIRST's K–12 programs (FRC, FTC, and FIRST LEGO League), kickoff-style challenges, and the "coopertition" culture where teams help competitors with parts and repairs. Both mentor highschool robotics teams in the US.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe019

Topics

• Cafe Catch Up
• Drupal Origin Stories
• Why Drupal Community
• What Is FIRST
• Mentoring Journeys
• Team Names Numbers
• Kickoff Build Sprint
• Coopertition In Action
• Awards And Impact
• Drupal for Team Ops
• Trying Recipes and Canvas
• Time Investment and Module Fixes
• Getting Students into Drupal
• Mentor Load and Teaching Java
• Student Run Team Culture
• Robot Ecosystem and Everybot
• Team Roles and Onboarding
• Adversity and Grit Lessons
• FIRST Programs and How to Join
• Wrap Up and Good Luck

Steve Wirt

Drupal Developer for CivicActions by day, FIRST Robotics mentor by night Steve has been a Drupal Developer for 19 years and helps government agencies build tools that help improve their mission. He is founding mentor of FRC team Compass Robotics.

Michael Kinnunen

Backend Engineer for CivicActions Michael has been working with Drupal for about a decade, starting with Drupal 7 in 2016 as a Web Developer at Northern Michigan University. He has also spent the past six years as a mentor for the Negaunee Minerbotics FRC team, where he has helped students build technical skills in programming and engineering.

Guests

Steve Wirt - swirt

Michael Kinnunen - mkinnune

Resources

FIRST Robotics Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition Michael's team

• https://github.com/minerbotics
• https://www.facebook.com/MinerBotics4827/

Steve's team - Compass Robotics

Drupal is not named in the HTML First paper, but the argument lands close to home. It gives Drupal teams a useful test for deciding when server rendering, Twig, components, and JavaScript should each carry the frontend load.

Some thirty years ago we started working with Adgrafix, the American company which shipped the world's first web hosting control panel, written entirely in Perl. This is the story of everything since: our own Perl panel and web store in the nineties, the Perl-to-PHP crossing which taught us to never strand a customer, the years of testing every open source CMS on the planet, the Drupal adventure, the Ægir torch which Bryght left behind, our Barracuda & Octopus (BOA) stack, and the 8 in our name finally tipping over into ∞ this year, when Backdrop CMS joined the family. Written for the anniversary, and for everyone who keeps old sites alive.

LocalGov Drupal is a Drupal distribution that combines Drupal, some configuration, and a collection of modules with the aim of making it easier for councils to create websites. The functionality provided includes content pages, news pages, bus timetables, and waste collection systems. What's more, it's maintained by a vibrant community of people.

The LocalGov Drupal Waste Collection module is a module that allows local bin collection schedules to be displayed to users. This uses a combination of an address lookup and collection data to show users the bins collection schedule for that address for the next few months.

A plugin interface is used to allow different banks of data to be used in the bank end of the module, with CSV and Whitespace API integration coming with the module. Whitespace is a company used across the UK to manage waste collection systems and the Whitespace plugin interfaces with a SOAP API to pull bin collection data into the site.

I've been using the Waste Collection module for a little while now with a few different projects. Whilst the information that the module provides is good, I needed to alter this data in a recent project with Central Bedfordshire. This required the use of a hook to alter the Whitespace plugin class and output more customised waste collection schedules.

In this article I will go through the issue I needed to correct, and how I altered the data coming out of the Whitespace API without creating a new plugin.

The Problem

When you set up Whitespace integration using this module it pulls a set of service names, which is essentially a list of the types of collections that can happen. This will be things like "Refuse (black bin)" or "Recycling" and shows residents what sort of bin they need to put out for collection on that day.

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