Keegan presented today at DrupalCon Chicago on creating social feed style content on your Drupal site and publishing it out to different social media platforms, all from Drupal.
This week, the 1xINTERNET team lands in "Windy City" as DrupalCon Chicago 2026 takes place. From March 23-26 DrupalCon brings together over 1.300 developers, designers, strategists, and business leaders from all over the world to shape the future of the Open Web.
This week, the 1xINTERNET team lands in "Windy City" as DrupalCon Chicago 2026 takes place. From March 23-26 DrupalCon brings together over 1.300 developers, designers, strategists, and business leaders from all over the world to shape the future of the Open Web.
SXSW has always been a place for trendspotters. The content and experience is known for being everything, everywhere, all at once. Only when backing away and reflecting, can one see above the waves.
This year, my realization hit close to home. Health is no longer siloed and treated separately from other industries. It is becoming part of something bigger: an interconnected system that spans technology, biology, environment, and the basic human behaviors and desires we often set aside for industry specialization.
One session that really stayed with me was led by Dr. Samantha Tucker-Samaras, who shared new research on the skin microbiome. For the first time, scientists are drawing a direct connection between the presence of specific bacteria, particularly Cutibacterium, and lower stress levels and improved mood. The mechanism is the skin:brain axis. It challenges how we have traditionally thought about both mental health and skincare.
While these kinds of biology and science talks were the most interesting to me, no one can deny how we’re getting to these breakthroughs; it’s the underlying presence in every conversation-- the role of AI. The patterns connecting microbiome data to emotional wellbeing were uncovered through advanced models that can see and synthesize what humans cannot (in any reasonable amount of time, anyway). These recognizable patterns build on something I have been exploring over the last couple of years: how can AI unlock insights about our health that were previously invisible? In my own experience, data paired with the right tools can become a real game changer as we start to take more responsibility for our own health and wellbeing.
Each session in the SXSW Health Track pushed the idea further. Conversations about optimizing metrics like sleep or fitness were almost non-existent. Through the emergence of insights and learnings derived by AI, we are starting to understand that our bodies function as a complex ecosystem that responds to a wide range of inputs, not just 3 or 4 KPIs. What we eat, what we put on our skin, and the environments we spend time in all play a role and can impact/disrupt our ecosystem.
Of course, in having the privilege of Phase2 sending me to this event, they asked: what does all of this learning mean for our business? How can we be better at pushing forward AI in Health, practically and accurately.
At Phase2, over the last couple of years, we’ve been focused on helping organizations move beyond experimentation and into real application of AI. We’ve been building digital products that work in complex environments like healthcare. The challenge is not just generating insight and crunching large data sets, but actually implementing it in a way that is scalable, connected, and centered around real human needs. It feels like the healthcare industry is a mirror image of our biological bodies: detailed, dependent on myriad functions, and… balance and symbiosis is everything.
Connecting those dots and having these conversations with new and old friends made SXSW especially meaningful this year. A common mindset and inspired innovation can sometimes be hard to find, but at this conference, it was in abundance. For example, I spent some time with Caitlyn Craft from Genentech, whose work sits at the intersection of learning, technology, and innovation. There was a shared focus on how to apply emerging technology thoughtfully, not just for efficiency, but for real impact.
It is easy to talk about the future of health in abstract terms. It is different to be surrounded by women who are actively shaping it. There is a level of clarity, practicality, and systems thinking that makes the conversation feel grounded and real.
Walking away from SXSW, the takeaway for me is that the future of health is holistic. It is not about isolated solutions. It is about understanding and working with the systems that shape us.
That is true in our bodies and it is true in the products and experiences we are building. And it is where some of the most meaningful innovation is starting to happen.
In partnership with our CEO, Nicole’s mission as Chief of Staff is to ensure alignment across all organizational areas of Phase2. By empowering our leadership team and focusing on integration across departments, she oversees growth across our capabilities and offices. Nicole is also a driving force behind Phase2’s Tech Unites Us social impact program and our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative.
Featured Blog Post? Yes Has this blog post been deprecated? No Summary SXSW has always been a place for trendspotters. The content and experience is known for being everything, everywhere, all at once. Only when backing away and reflecting, can one see above the waves. This year, my realization hit close to home. Health is no longer siloed and treated separately from other industries. It is becoming part of something bigger: an interconnected system that spans technology, biology, environment, and the basic human behaviors and desires we often set aside for industry specialization. Topic Artificial Intelligence SXSW Banner Plum.png Promo ImageMissed the Driesnote? You can watch it here.
Drupal, the open source content management platform that runs some of the most demanding websites on the planet, turned 25 in January. But while the community is celebrating what is a remarkable milestone for any open source project, it is actively strengthening its foundations to lead in the AI era and looking ahead to a future it intends to shape.
This week at DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert delivered his annual keynote, the DriesNote, and it was one of the more honest talks you'll hear at a tech conference. A clear-eyed look at what's working, what's under pressure, and what the plan actually is.
AI is Disrupting Everything, But Deep Expertise is IrreplaceableFor more than two decades, the Drupal ecosystem has rested on three things: the platform itself, the agencies that build with it, and the community that maintains it. That triangle has survived waves of new technology and constant change. It's been remarkably resilient.
But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at once? When anyone can spin up a decent-looking site in fifteen minutes, what does that do to the people who've spent years building something better? That’s what is happening at the moment, as the world is being flooded with AI-generated “average”. Average content, average code, average websites - average is easier to attain than ever.
What it means is that the only thing that will actually matter, to customers, to organisations, to the people trying to build something lasting on the open web, is genuine, hard-won, deep expertise.
What AI Actually Can't DoHere's something worth understanding, because it gets lost in the noise.
AI can generate a beautiful website in about fifteen minutes. Tools like Lovable and Replit are genuinely impressive. You give them a prompt, they give you something that looks polished and professional. It feels like magic.
But a prototype is not a production system.
The moment you need structured content that editors can actually update, workflows that a real team can follow, permissions, governance, security, accessibility, multilingual support, compliance... you're not building a website anymore. You're building a system. And building systems is exactly what Drupal has excelled at for 25 years.
The demo at DrupalCon made this tangible. A beautiful event site built in Lovable in minutes, then migrated into Drupal CMS using AI coding tools, where the hard-coded layout became structured, reusable, editable content. Same visual ambition. Completely different foundation.
The pitch is simple: AI gets you to visual ambition fast. Drupal makes that ambition durable.
What's Actually ShippingThis isn't a vision talk. Things are being built and released.
DrupalCMS 2.1 landed at DrupalCon, built on top of Drupal Core 11.3. Over the last 18 months, core database and cache utilization have roughly halved, meaning every Drupal site in the world gets faster when it upgrades. That's not a minor thing. That's the compounding benefit of a serious engineering community.
Site templates and a marketplace are now live at marketplace.drupal.org, with more than ten purpose-built templates covering nonprofits, education, healthcare, events, government, and SaaS, built by agencies that understand those sectors. Free and premium options, with direct access to the people who made them if you need help.
Canvas, Drupal's new page-building layer, lets teams create and customise pages at speed without sacrificing the structured content underneath.
The Context Control Centre is a system for storing and managing your organisation's institutional knowledge (brand guidelines, content strategy, audience personas, live analytics) and it's moving from prototype to production. The idea is that AI tools are only as good as the context they're given. Without it, you get the average of the internet. With it, you get something that actually knows your brand.
And in the AI layer itself, a demo showed what it looks like when a marketer can drop a raw content brief into Drupal, have the system read it, load the right brand and strategy context, ask clarifying questions, and generate a production-ready page, with proper cross-linking, structured data for AI search engines, and an accessibility check built in.
That's not a concept. That's a demo running on real code.
One Developer, Six Weeks, 90,000 Lines of CodeThe most striking moment of the keynote was a contribution from Jurgen Haas, one of the Drupal community's most experienced developers. He builds ECA, Drupal's automation engine, running on thousands of production sites.
Three years ago, he knew what ECA needed. He knew how to build it. He never had the time.
Six weeks ago, he started. With AI as a collaborator, handling scaffolding, generating tests, refactoring code, he shipped a completely rebuilt workflow editor: a new visual interface, built-in debugging and replay, in-context automation for non-technical users. 90,000 lines of code. Full test coverage. One person.
"This is what one Drupal developer can build in six weeks," he said. "Imagine what all of us can build next."
The key detail: Jurgen could explain every line. He could defend the architecture. He owned what he built. AI removed friction. It didn't replace expertise.
The Harder ConversationNot everything in the keynote was product news.
Dries was honest about the pressure on Drupal agencies. When AI commoditises production, and it is, the business models that agencies have built over years start to look shaky. An agency leader named Aidan Foster, seventeen years into running a Drupal shop, described the feeling plainly: "AI had converted making things into a commodity. That shook the foundations I had spent 17 years building."
But Aidan's conclusion was interesting. The bottleneck isn't production anymore. It's creativity, strategy, and judgement. If you use AI without asking the hard questions, who are we, who are our audience, what makes us different, you get the boring average. The agencies that will win are the ones that get good at encoding expertise, not just delivering outputs.
There's also a challenge for the community itself. AI lowers the barrier to contribute code, which sounds good, until you realise the burden of reviewing that code falls on the same small group of maintainers. And when people use AI to skip the deep learning that used to come from contributing, the community gets shallower. A shallow community can't maintain what's been built.
Dries' response was a new mantra:never submit code you don't understand. It doesn't matter what tools you used to write it. If you submit it, you own it.
The Bet Worth MakingTwenty years ago, Dries was a bedroom inventor who collapsed from stress on a street in Belgium. He had a choice: take a safe job, walk away from the thing he'd built, or ask for help and become a deliberate leader.
He made the harder choice. The community that grew up around that choice is why Drupal is still here, still relevant, still running critical infrastructure for organisations around the world.
Now there's another crossroads. AI is both the flood and the drainage system. It destabilises the foundations and it can help rebuild them stronger.
Twenty-five years of Drupal is twenty-five years of expertise built patch by patch, merge request by merge request. A community that showed up not because it had to, but because it cared. That's not a liability in the age of AI. That's exactly what this moment needs.
DrupalCon Chicago runs through this week. The marketplace is live at marketplace.drupal.org. The Context Control Centre is approaching production. The Drupal AI initiative is moving fast.
File attachments: DriesNote1.png DSC_8250.JPG DSC_8272.jpgGreat digital experiences don't happen by accident, they're built with intention, inclusion, and users at the heart of every decision. At DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the UX, Accessibility and Usability track is bringing together designers, developers, content strategists, and decision-makers to explore how Drupal powers truly user-centred digital products.
We're looking for speakers with real stories to tell. Whether you've transformed an accessibility audit into lasting organisational change, built a design system that scaled beautifully across channels, or used user research to completely reshape a development roadmap — we want to hear from you.
ImageFoto by Matthew Saunders
We're particularly interested in sessions covering:
· Accessibility beyond compliance - embedding WCAG and ATAG into everyday workflows
· User research that drives real development decisions
· Design systems and collaborative design-development workflows
· Usability improvements backed by evidence and data
· Content design and strategy, including practical uses of AI
· Digital sustainability - designing for efficiency and longevity
This track is for anyone who believes that inclusion, usability, and good design aren't nice-to-haves — they're essential. Whether you're sharing a case study, a practical toolkit, or a freshperspective, your session could help Drupal practitioners everywhere build better, more inclusive digital experiences.
Submissions close 13 April.
Submmit your session: https://events.drupal.org/rotterdam2026/program-glance
Don't wait! Share your expertise and help shape the conversation at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.
When making code changes or fixing issues, it's easy to leave @todo comments behind. Sometimes they mark areas waiting on an upstream fix, sometimes they're reminders that never got revisited. Either way, they accumulate — and the ones tied to the specific issue you're working on should be resolved before the MR merges.
phpstan-drupal 2.0.12 adds TodoCommentWithIssueUrlRule to catch this in the GitLab CI jobs on Drupal.org.
This rule is inspired by staabm/phpstan-todo-by, which handles expiring todos by date, version constraint, and issue tracker status. It doesn't currently support custom issue fetchers or alternative detection mechanisms, such as matching ticket IDs to branch names — but that flexibility could make its way there someday.
As autonomous agents increasingly interact with technical documentation, traditional HTML can introduce challenges by filling limited context windows with layout elements, navigation, and scripts. This structural cluttering not only drains computing resources but directly causes context pollution and AI hallucinations.
Discover how you can reduce this “token tax” and create cleaner, more AI-friendly documentation experiences.
Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it's used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We'll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545
TopicsLiz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Our release schedule includes three potential release dates for Drupal 12.0.0, depending on when critical requirements are completed:
Many great improvements landed recently. The main branch is on Symfony 8 and most deprecated modules are removed already. With only a few days remaining until the March deadline of the first release option though, we are confident that not all critical requirements will be completed by March 27. Therefore, we are officially announcing that our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is August 10, 2026, and the beta deadline for critical requirements is May 15, 2026.
We need your help to complete requirements by May 15!While there are other pending improvements that are not hard requirements for Drupal 12's release, these are the most urgent needs:
While our ultimate goal is to support PHPUnit 13 in Drupal 12, there are significant API changes in PHPUnit 12 that we first need to adopt. See #3527936: Introduce support for PHPUnit 12
CKEditor 5 is changing their installation method in the near future. See #3527914: [PP-1] Use New installation methods for CKEditor5
To support this, we need a JavaScript import maps API in core. See #3398525: Add an API for importmaps
To test update paths from Drupal 11.3.0, we need to generate new database dumps. See #3569127: Add new 11.3.x database dump fixtures, without modules deprecated for removal in 12.x
Remove older upgrade paths. See #3580877: [PP-1] Remove updates added prior to 11.3.0 from 12.x
To reduce the size of core, we are excluding tests from core release packages, and offering them via a different namespace. This is a disruptive change and should only be done in a major release.
See #3067979: Exclude test files from release packages.
The Toolbar Module needs to be removed from core now that the Navigation module is stable and in the standard profile. See #3484850: [PP-1] [meta] Deprecate Toolbar module
There are more dependencies, modules and themes that are still possible to remove. See #3466088: [meta] Deprecate dependencies, libraries, modules, and themes that will be removed from Drupal 12 core
Gin is in core as an alpha experimental extension. Help make it stable and so it can replace Claro.
See #3576488: [meta] Admin theme: path to stable.
The coding standard checks are using the unsupported ESLint 8. We need to update to version 9. See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.
See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.
The above list are the current highest priorities. We'll keep identifying and tagging Drupal 12 release priority issues. The up to date list can be found using the Drupal 12.0.0 release priority tag.
DrupalCon Chicago 2026 has begun, bringing together the global Drupal community from March 23 to 26 at the Hilton Chicago. As the event kicks off, attention is turning to the sessions scheduled over the coming days, many of which focus on accessibility, inclusion, and how Drupal teams are responding to evolving real-world requirements.
In the lead-up to the event, The DropTimes published a series of articles previewing selected sessions from the program. These included Palak Agarwal’s coverage of accessibility audits on Drupal websites, highlighting recurring issues such as missing alt text, poor contrast, and structural inconsistencies that continue to affect many Drupal projects.
Among the upcoming sessions is “Future-Proofing Accessibility: Strategies for Government & University Platforms,” featuring M. Nikki Flores, Javier Reartes, and Kat Shaw, scheduled for March 24. The session will focus on moving accessibility earlier into the workflow, drawing from large-scale public sector and university implementations.
Another session featured in our coverage, “Designing for Difference: Practical Strategies for Building a Neuroinclusive Organization” by J. Matthew Saunders, will explore how workplace systems can be redesigned to reduce friction and support neurodivergent teams.
As DrupalCon Chicago gets underway, these sessions point to the conversations that will shape the week ahead. The focus is not only on what Drupal can do, but how it can be built and used in ways that are more accessible, inclusive, and effective in practice.
DISCOVER DRUPALAdditional developments from across the Drupal ecosystem were published during the week. Readers may follow The DropTimes on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for continuing updates. The publication also maintains a presence on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.
Thank you.
Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor
The DropTimes
Links help shape the experience of discovery: they are like little portals that transfer readers to a different place on the web with a single click. For search engines, they act more like pathways that reveal how your content connects to everything else. The practical importance of both internal and external links deserves special coverage, which we’ll explore in this post.
