A smart user role setup on your Drupal website delivers multiple benefits in one move. It brings consistency to workflows, reduces human error, and boosts website security through fine-grained access.
Drupal has always been about flexibility and control. The amazee.ai AI Provider takes that same spirit and applies it to artificial intelligence. It lets you connect a Drupal site to powerful AI models in less than two minutes. No hidden dependencies and no waiting around for credentials to propagate. All of this is free for the first 30 days so you can experiment and use recipes that require LLMs and VectorDBs, and build!
Fast, Open, and Built for DrupalThe provider installs on any Drupal site running 10.2 or higher. Once enabled, it connects you to enterprise-grade AI models and a vector database built directly into the service. There’s no need to configure an external database or manage API tokens across multiple vendors. Everything works inside your existing Drupal environment - no need to change your hosting provider.
It’s also open source and built by the Drupal community in partnership with amazee.ai. That means full transparency, data sovereignty, and no surprises about how your data is handled. You can choose processing regions in Switzerland, Germany, the US, or Australia to meet compliance needs without compromise. If you need a different region, just ask the amazee folks.
Try It Without LimitsEvery new install comes with 30 days of unlimited AI tokens. That’s a full month to experiment, automate, and build without worrying about quotas. If you’re a developer contributing to Drupal AI, maintaining modules, or running trainings/workshops, you can request a developer account that gives you ongoing access at no cost.
When the trial ends, a regular account costs only $30 per month for a Pro Account, $100 per month for a Growth Account, and if you need more, amazee.ai can tailor an Enterprise account as well. It’s predictable, simple, and keeps you connected to the same infrastructure used for professional Drupal AI development.
In workshops, we’ve had participants install the provider, connect it, and build working AI features before the session break. The setup is fast enough that you spend time building, not troubleshooting. If you’re doing a talk, running a workshop, or conducting a training - reach out and we can explain how to spin up fully operational sites for you and your students in 2-3 minutes with no credit card.
Built for How the Community WorksThe amazee.ai AI Provider was created to support Drupal’s open ecosystem. It’s maintained in public view, designed for collaboration, and made for people who want control over how AI runs on their sites. It works on any hosting platform, whether you’re using Acquia, Pantheon, Platform.sh, or a self-hosted stack.
It’s the easiest path yet to bring AI into Drupal without giving up data ownership or flexibility.
https://www.drupal.org/project/ai_provider_amazeeio
File attachments: amazee image.jpegThe standard eCommerce workflow requires users to navigate to a product page and click an “Add to Cart” button. Simple. Direct. Most people are familiar with it. But for certain applications, you want to streamline this experience and remove as much friction as possible.
Membership renewals, email or SMS campaigns for specific products, quotes generated from sales reps, and embedded purchases within content. We developed the Commerce Cart Links module for these situations, and more.
The module exposes a /cart-links route that accepts product variation IDs, quantities, and optional parameters for controlling cart behavior and redirects. When a user visits a cart link URL, the module processes the specified product variations, adds them to a cart, and optionally redirects to a specified destination.
Here's a quick demo:
Use casesMembership renewal workflowsMembership organizations with tiered structures can use cart links to send direct purchase links to members during renewal periods. Each member receives a URL specific to their membership tier, bypassing the need for them to navigate your website.
This approach reduces support overhead from members purchasing incorrect membership tiers and streamlines the renewal process for organizations managing thousands of members.
Read moreToday we are talking about AI, New Drupal Features, and the future of AI in Drupal with guest Jamie Abrahams. We'll also cover Orchestration as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/527
TopicsJamie Abrahams - freelygive.io yautja_cetanu
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Maya Schaeffer - evolvingweb.com mayalena
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
The upcoming Drupal core security release window has been rescheduled from November 19, 2025 to November 12, 2025. As normal, the window will occur between 1600 UTC and 2200 UTC.
Schedule change for back-to-back DrupalConsThis schedule change is due to DrupalCons Vienna and Nara overlapping the October and November core security windows. We do not schedule core security windows during DrupalCons so that site owners and agencies can attend these conferences without having to worry about their sites or clients.
December is also not typically used for core security releases due to the quick sequencing of the Drupal core minor releases and the end-of-year holidays. This would mean a period of four months where we could not provide any regularly scheduled security update.
No special release proceduresThe schedule change is not due to any highly critical issue that would require special release procedures.
As a reminder, a Drupal core security window does not necessarily mean a Drupal security release will occur, only that one is possible.
Coordinated By:Dries Buytaert has made a clear and timely case: orchestration is no longer a supporting layer in software architecture. It is becoming the hub where business logic resides, workflows are developed, and decisions are executed. This shift elevates orchestration tools from optional utilities to essential infrastructure. For those involved in building and maintaining digital platforms, this is not just a new idea. It is a new foundation.
The impact on existing platforms, including Drupal, is significant. As orchestration becomes the layer where integration, automation, and intelligence reside, every platform must reconsider its position within a broader network of systems. Drupal is well-suited to operate as a content and data hub; however, it must evolve to function as part of a distributed ecosystem, rather than assuming a central or controlling role. This requires architectural flexibility and a willingness to adapt.
What matters now is how the community responds. The orchestration layer is becoming the connective tissue of digital operations. That demands shared standards, openness, and collaboration. If this is where modern software systems come together, then the values behind it will shape how inclusive, resilient, and extensible those systems can be. Dries has shown where things are heading. The responsibility to build in that direction belongs to all of us.
Before we close, I'd like to extend a quick invitation. On Wednesday, November 5, we're holding our monthly TDT Townhall, an open planning meeting where we share progress, shape priorities, and listen to the community. If you're aligned with our mission to expand Drupal’s reach and want to contribute ideas around content, outreach, or technology, we’d love to have you on board. It’s a one-hour session, fully open, and you’re welcome to listen or bring something to the table. Join us on Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/vrw-naam-ire
TutorialCase StudyDiscover DrupalWe 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.
The public sector is overflowing with knowledge – from reports to evaluations. The challenge has long been to find this information in the sea of PDFs. Ramsalt Lab has been central to the development of Kudos – a national knowledge portal. By implementing groundbreaking AI-based document analysis, we have helped turn a chaotic document base into a goldmine of searchable insight.
The public sector produces enormous amounts of knowledge – reports, studies, evaluations and analyses. But where does all this knowledge go? Too often it ends up in digital drawers, hard to find and impossible to search.
This is the problem Kudos (Knowledge Documents in the Public Sector) solves.
Ramsalt have been a key technical partner in the development of this groundbreaking service for Directorate for Public Administration and Financial Management (DFØ). Our developer, Thomas Andre Karlsen, has been a key member of the team that built the technical engine that powers Kudos.
Ramsalt Lab is a digitalization partner with Directorate for Administration and Financial Management The contract has a value of up to 150 million NOK over a 10-year period and Kudos is one of several projects Ramsalt is doing for the directorate.
Kudos is a joint search solution that brings together knowledge and management documents from ministries, directorates and government agencies in one place. The service, which is a collaboration between DFØ and the National Library, aims to streamline the entire knowledge process – from production to sharing and reuse.
The Challenge: A Bunch of PDFsBuilding a portal for tens of thousands of documents (at the time of writing, over 40 000!) is a big task in itself. But the real challenge lies not only in the volume.It is in the metadata.
Many of the documents that are retrieved (often via "scraping" of various public websites) lack basic information:
A document without good metadata is almost as bad as a lost document. This is where the magic – and Ramsalt’s contribution – comes in.
The solution: AI that cleans, analyzes and enrichesTo solve the metadata tangle, Ramsalt's developer Thomas Andre Karlsen has been central to building an advancedAI-based document analysis tool inthe heart of Kudos.
This tool is not just a simple tagging function. Here's how it works:
The result is that documents that were previously black boxes suddenly become data-rich, perfectly indexed, and extremely easy to find for users. This saves countless hours of manual work and dramatically improves the quality of the entire database.
Ask questions about knowledgeRamsalt's contributions don't stop there. The team has also experimented with implementing aLLM search engine, RAG pipeline.
This allows users to "talk" to the database. Instead of just searching for a word, one can ask a question like:"What is the criticism of the Health Platform?"
The system will then find the most relevant documents in the Kudos database, read them, and then generate a fact-based answer for the user, complete with source references. This is a completely new way to extract precise information from a massive knowledge base.
A gold mine for the state, researchers and journalistsLike the newspaper Media 24 has pointed out, Kudos is a gold mine for anyone who needs to know what the state knows.
Public employees can easily find relevant knowledge from other organizations and avoid ordering reports that already exist. Researchers gain access to a huge dataset for their analyses. Journalists can use the service to uncover connections and dig into public administration.
At Ramsalt, we pride ourselves on delivering technology that has real societal value. The Kudos project is a prime example of how we use our expertise in Drupal, data mining, and artificial intelligence to build robust and intelligent solutions for the public sector.
Does your business have large amounts of data that are difficult to utilize? Do you need help structuring, enriching and making your information accessible? Contact us at Ramsalt for a chat about how we can use AI and smart search solutions to transform your data into valuable knowledge.
Back at the end of 2024, Tag1 added performance testing to Drupal CMS 1.0 prior to its release. We then did a comparison between Drupal CMS and WordPress in which we dug into out-of-the-box performance between the two, and Drupal CMS came out pretty well. Now Drupal CMS is preparing for its 2.0 release, including a new theme, Mercury, and Drupal Canvas enabled by default. In preparation for this release we updated our performance tests, and wrote a new one for Drupal CMS’s new site template, Byte.
Gander: PHPUnit Performance Testing for DrupalDrupal core’s performance tests allow PHPUnit assertions to be made for both back and front end performance metrics, including the number and size of CSS and JavaScript files, as well as the number of database queries and cache operations. Between these metrics, we get a high level overview of how a site performs. Additionally, timings from tests, which can vary based on external factors and aren’t precise enough to assert against exact values within a PHPUnit test, are sent to an Open Telemetry Grafana/Tempo dashboard. Gander is used to test Drupal Core, Drupal CMS and site templates, contributed modules such as the popular redirect module, and real sites via Drupal Test Traits integration, such as london.gov.uk
We added performance testing while Drupal CMS 2.0 was in alpha and Drupal Canvas was in release candidate, and that helped uncover a few issues.
Front End PerformanceDrupal CMS’s new Mercury theme is based on Tailwind CSS, which allows for a lot of customization without having to write new CSS. While this should allow Drupal CMS theming to be very flexible, it does involve serving quite a lot of CSS out of the box.
When testing the Byte site template, we wrote a performance test that covers one of the more common front end performance problems that sites face.
Drupal’s CSS and JavaScript aggregation combines smaller files into minified larger files, to reduce HTTP requests and filesize. This is an effective strategy for most Drupal libraries and components, which often include many small CSS and JavaScript files attached to specific page elements, and which may only appear on specific pages or for users with certain permissions, etc. Serving these files on demand reduces unused CSS and JS when those elements aren’t there.
However, when a large CSS or JavaScript file is included on every page (or most pages), that file can be duplicated between different asset aggregates, meaning the same visitor downloads it over and over again if they visit multiple different pages with slightly different combinations of libraries. Our test shows over 2mb of CSS being downloaded across six pages, each page has around 350kb of CSS individually.
We filed an a issue and (Merge Request) MR against the Mercury theme to exclude the main.min.css file from minification (because it’s already minified, avoiding wasted CPU and memory trying to minify and already minified file) and aggregation, so that only a single copy is downloaded per visitor. This issue has already been committed and the improvement should be visible in the performance test for Byte once there’s a new release.
While we were looking for the source of those large CSS files in Chromium devtools, we also noticed some chained HTTP requests for both fonts and JavaScript files and opened issues to document both. When the browser has to first parse a CSS or JavaScript file before loading fonts or another file, this requires at least two round trips from the browser before the chained request can be served, which can significantly affect page loading performance.
Byte also includes a webform newsletter signup on the front page. We noticed that the Webform module attaches a details library to every page showing a webform , whether the webform will render a details element or not. Because the details library depends on jQuery, this adds around 100kb of JavaScript for anonymous users that otherwise might not be needed. This discovery is an example of how adding performance tests for Drupal CMS can test not only Drupal CMS itself, but also many of Drupal’s most popular contributed modules, finding performance issues that can affect many sites in the wild.
CanvasOur original Drupal CMS 1.0 tests cover both anonymous and authenticated visitors. For Drupal CMS 2.0 we noticed that authenticated visitor page requests required many more database queries and cache operations than Drupal CMS 1.0. We tracked this down to the Canvas module which sets max_age: 0 when rendering its ComponentTreeItemList field in some circumstances, disabling the dynamic page cache for any requests that render Canvas’ page entity type. We also noticed that the tree rendering itself is quite expensive although this may become less of an issue once render caching is fixed.
These were the only backend performance issues we noticed, so assuming they’re fixed prior release, back end performance should be broadly similar between Drupal CMS 1.0 and 2.0.
ConclusionThese findings show how important it is to validate performance before releasing code to production, so that unexpected regressions in application or browser performance can be caught and fixed before reaching site visitors. At the time of writing, several of the issues we opened already had MRs attached or had already been committed by the Drupal CMS team. Drupal’s Gander testing framework, originally developed by Tag1, provides an ideal mechanism to add continual testing with repeatable results to any kind of Drupal project.
Keep Your Drupal Sites Fast and Reliable
Performance testing isn’t just a step in development, it’s the foundation of a seamless user experience. Tag1 helps engineering, product, and marketing teams ensure that sites are fast, stable, and ready to scale. Using performance monitoring solutions like Gander, we make performance enterprise-ready so your sites stay smooth, secure, and always available.
Lear more about website performance management and let us know how we can help!
