When I tell people that Acquia Source will let customers export their entire website and leave our platform anytime, I usually get puzzled looks.

We really mean the entire site: the underlying Drupal code, theme, configuration, content, and data. The export gives you a complete, working Drupal site that you can run on any infrastructure you choose.

Most SaaS platforms do the opposite. They make it hard to leave. When you export, you may get all your content, but never the code.

Why do we want to make it easy for customers to leave?

First, when leaving is easy, customers stay because they want to, not because they are trapped. That accountability pushes us to build better products. It means that at Acquia, we have to earn our customers' business every day by delivering value, not by making it hard to leave.

Second, the ability to leave means teams can start small and scale without hitting a wall. All SaaS products have constraints, and Acquia Source is no exception. When your application reaches a level of complexity that requires deeper customization, you can take your entire site to Acquia Cloud or any other Drupal hosting environment. You never need to start over.

Last but not least, because Acquia Source is built on Drupal, we want it to reflect Drupal's open source freedoms. Full export is how we make those principles real in a SaaS context.

We call this Open SaaS.

We first tried this idea with Drupal Gardens in 2010, which also allowed full exports. I loved that feature then, and I still love it now. I have always believed it was a big deal. More importantly, our customers did too.

One of Acquia's largest customers began on Drupal Gardens more than a decade ago. They used it to explore Drupal, then naturally grew into Acquia Cloud and Site Factory as their needs became more complex. Today they run some of the world's biggest media properties on Drupal and Acquia.

Trust comes from freedom, not lock-in. The exit door you'll never use is exactly what makes you confident enough to stay. It does seem counterintuitive to make leaving easy, but not all SaaS is created equal. With our Open SaaS approach, you get the freedom to grow and the ability to leave whenever you choose.

At DrupalCon Nara 2025, long-time Drupal agency Studio Umi embraced its dual role as sponsor and community advocate. In an interview with The DropTimes, Tomoka Moriyama shared how the company’s legacy, technical leadership, and local roots shaped their participation—and why the event felt especially meaningful.

Changing the agency that supports your Drupal system or obtaining quotes from several companies usually requires sharing the technical details of your project. The problem is that the database contains customer data, the configuration stores API keys, and the custom code reveals the company's business logic. In this article, I’ll show you an open source tool that solves this problem. Druscan collects all the technical information needed for analysis, while protecting sensitive data. I invite you to read the blog post or watch an episode from the “Nowoczesny Drupal” series.

Advent Calendar day 3 – Beyond 99 Red Balloons: a guide to alternative text and accessible images james Wed, 12/03/2025 - 09:00

An important aspect of every website project is accessibility, and an important part of that is giving your images meaningful “alt” text to describe their contents.

At this year’s European DrupalCon in Vienna, AmyJune Hineline and Chris Vickery discussed aspects of alt text images, with many examples, mostly from their favourite album covers.

I think when AmyJune says “Hi James” near the start, it was me arriving late, so apologies for my tardiness.

Here is the talk video:

The video makes reference to bonus slides in the presentation, which they didn’t get to in the talk. It includes helpful…

Tags

• Advent Calendar 2025
• accessibility
• alt text

Every business on the planet has invested time and money into their infrastructure. Infrastructure which includes the applications the business uses on a day to day basis.  Think of that one application in any of the organizations you've ever worked for that was so mission critical that if it were to disappear tomorrow, the business would struggle to operate. Generally speaking, that application tends to be something so fundamental to the business that just about everyone uses it. What makes process automation powerful is allowing the customer to keep using their applications of choice while connecting Maestro's business process automation to them.

 

Every page with insightful content is a fresh opportunity to engage, inspire, and inform your audience. Plus, the more valuable content you have, the better your chances of ranking higher in search results. That’s how websites with hundreds — or even thousands — of pages can become true online powerhouses for their organizations.

 

Day 2 - Multiple Ways Dec 02, 2025 0

If you have a lot of content, finding something specific can be a challenge for your users. For accessibility, this guideline was created to support people that have different ways of thinking or finding things -- but I find this useful in all sorts of contexts. Strong navigation implies structure on your site, structure that can help people find what they are after.

Read More

By default, drush updb clears the cache after applying database updates. For deployments where you want to avoid an unnecessary performance hit, you can prevent this default behavior using a Drush pre-command hook. The updb command has a --cache-clear flag that you can set up in your CI workflow, but what about local testing? Will you or your team remember to set that flag every time?

I've come to learn this may be a controversial take. This requires having a deployment identifier set and crafted update hooks for specific cache invalidations, router rebuilds, etc. But if you want a highly performant Drupal application with faster deployment times, it's crucial.

Klaro is the simplest Cookie Consent Management solution for Drupal

Here's a super quick outline of how to set up Klaro cookie management system for your Drupal website.

markconroy 2nd Dec 2025

Advent Calendar day 2 - Autowiring all the things james Tue, 12/02/2025 - 10:00

Today we are getting a bit technical and diving into Autowiring with Luca Lusso.

What is autowiring? Well, since version 8, Drupal has used Services to provide many small pieces of functionality. Basically, a service is a black box you can use to do something on your site. For example, the Messenger service displays status messages on a page.

In Drupal 8 and 9, when you used a service in your code, you needed to tell Drupal what service you wanted. This was a bit messy, because you needed to find out the class that the service creates, and you also needed the service name. It also required you…

Tags

• Advent Calendar 2025
• Autowiring
• Services

The recent Talking Drupal episode featuring Mike Gifford and Tiffany Farriss present how Drupal is playing a role in the global conversation on digital public infrastructure. Their discussion highlights what the Drupal community already knows, governments are beginning to treat open source as a strategic requirement.

Tiffany Farriss representing Drupal at United Nations’ Open Source Week.

The United Nations’ Open Source Week brought together policymakers, Open Source Program Office (OSPO) leaders and practitioners from across sectors, and Drupal had a seat at the table. The UN uses Drupal, as do most of their members. It reflects the project’s maturity, governance structure and long record of delivering large-scale public services.

The episode goes beyond event commentary. Mike and Tiffany confront a core tension in today’s public-sector technology landscape. Digital public infrastructure is becoming a contested space, shaped by national policy, commercial influence and competing definitions of “openness”. Drupal’s model—global, diverse, community-governed, and not tied to a single vendor—puts it in a different category than many projects marketed as “open”. Their conversation makes the case that Drupal’s longevity and governance give it credibility that is hard to replicate. If you work in public-sector digital services or care about the future of open source in government, this is worth your time.

Most importantly, the talk challenges Drupal professionals to think bigger. If open source is becoming the backbone of digital government, then Drupal contributors have a role to play in shaping that future. That requires awareness, coordination and a willingness to step into policy-adjacent discussions. Mike and Tiffany lay out why these global conversations matter and how Drupal can show up with confidence.

Tim Lehnen and Mike Gifford at United Nations’ Open Source Week

If you want to understand where Drupal fits in the next decade of public-sector digital transformation, watch or listen to the episode and explore the details at https://talkingdrupal.com/528

Permanent deletions frustrating you? Add a safety net, restore content, and control permanent purges. Read this blog to learn how to handle soft deletions with the Drupal Trash module.

Advent Calendar day 1 - Neurodiversity: An Underrated Superpower in Business james Mon, 12/01/2025 - 23:59

I really enjoy keynotes at DrupalCon, particularly those given by guests from outside the Drupal community. This year’s European DrupalCon in Vienna was no exception, and I think Vera Herzmann’s talk on Neurodiversity resonated with everyone present.

I loved how she highlighted neurodiverse people are not disabled or a problem to be solved, but people with superpowers valuable to business, and an asset to be cherished.

She also really engaged with the audience, giving us items to discuss with the people nearby, and I think the audience came back with some excellent points.

The video of her…

Tags

• Advent Calendar 2025
• Neurodiversity
• Keynote

Advent Calendar 2025 - the new plan james Mon, 12/01/2025 - 19:02 Image Body

So first, an apology. I have failed in my original plan. A nasty cold/flu thing sapped my energy, and I wasn’t organised enough to make it work.

The plan was to have initiative leads nominate people who have made an important contribution to their projects, and to feature those “People of Drupal” behind the doors.

Think you to all the people who made great suggestions, and thank you to the people they suggested who responded positively, but we’ve run out of time to make it work.

I still think “The People of Drupal” has great potential, and hopefully we can make it work if we start much earlier…

Contrast Issues -- can you read the text? Dec 01, 2025 0

One of the most common issues we run into making websites accessible is contrast -- making sure the difference between the color and brightness of the text against the background is enough that it's clearly readable.

Blue text on a dark background can be very difficult to read -- but it's not just brightness. Red-green color-blindness affects around 8% of males around the world. Take a screen out into bright sunlight and try to read text that's similar brightness to its background, and you can start to understand that contrast issues affect everyone.

Read More

Drupal has been counted out for years, yet it continues to power some of the most active and trusted websites on the internet. Trends come and go, but the data keeps pointing to the same truth: Drupal remains central to major digital experiences people rely on every day. That is why we built the Discover page at The DropTimes, a space that shows this reality plainly and in real time.

The Discover page gathers top Drupal sites using Tranco rankings based on actual traffic, not assumptions. It cuts through noise and shows who is using Drupal at scale and why it matters. Along with the rankings, we are steadily adding case studies that explain how organisations put Drupal to work in the real world. These insights highlight the decisions, goals and impact behind serious digital projects across industries.

With more than 3,000 sites already listed and many more on the way, our goal is simple: make Drupal’s ongoing relevance visible, understandable and impossible to ignore. As the page grows, so does the picture of a platform that is stable, adaptable and backed by a global community. This is an open invitation to explore, learn and contribute to a clearer understanding of what Drupal continues to achieve.

INTERVIEW

• Oaisys 25 Is Almost Here; Vidit Anjaria Has the Inside Story
• How Witze Van der Straeten Uses AI to Build a Figma-to-Drupal Workflow

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Discover Leading Drupal Websites and Real-World Use Cases on 'TDT Discover'
• UI Suite Launches Display Builder Beta 1, Advances Core Integration and AI Component‑Generation
• Drupal AI Pushes Forward: MCP 1.2, LMStudio Integration, and 2.0 Development Underway
• Call for Drupal Core Subsystem and Topic Maintainers Following 2025 Check-In
• Drupal AI Initiative Launches Industry Guides to Bridge AI Strategy and Real-World Impact
• Drupal MCP 1.2 Released with Security Coverage, Tools API Integration, and OAuth Support

TUTORIAL

• Testing Isn’t Broken – But Your Method Might Be

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• DevBranch’s Remote Driesnote Watch Parties Reflect Wartime Resilience and Drupal Loyalty
• The Human Edge in Presales: Beating AI-Drafted Drupal Proposals
• Dropsolid AI Raises €1.4M to Build Europe’s First Open, Sovereign AI Digital Experience Platform

PHP

• PHP 8.5 Released with Major New Features for Developers

EVENTS

• DrupalCon Chicago 2026 T-Shirt Design Contest Opens—Submit Your Creative Vision!
• Call for Speakers Opens for Drupal Developer Days Athens 2026 

 

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now. To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you. 

Sincerely, 
Alka Elizabeth, 
Sub-editor, 
The DropTimes.

DrupalCon Asia 2025 in Nara, Japan, was more than just a tech conference. With thousands of attendees converging in a city steeped in history, the event reflected a deep sense of purpose and place. Mayor Gen Nakagawa’s remarks underscored Nara’s commitment to fostering global collaboration and open-source innovation.

My LocalGov Drupal contributions for November 2025

This month I focussed on fewer, but larger, issues. Let's see ...

markconroy 1st Dec 2025

If you run an education business today—whether it’s an online academy, coaching platform, corporate training portal or skill-development institute—choosing the right Learning Management System (LMS) is one of the most important decisions you will make. Your LMS becomes the backbone of your teaching, course delivery, student engagement and business growth. Among the many LMS plat

The Drop Times spoke with Witze Van der Straeten about his AI-driven Figma-to-Drupal workflow and how experimenting with SDCs, Canvas, and MCP shaped his approach to front-end work. He also reflects on how the Drupal community influenced his growth as a developer.