Today we are talking about The Midwest Open Source Alliance, What they do, and How they support Drupal with guests April Sides & Tearyne Almendariz. We'll also cover Canvas Field Component as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/552

Topics

• Congratulations to April as the 2026 Aaron Winborn award!
• What is MOSA, and what gap in the Drupal ecosystem was it created to fill?
• How did MOSA get started, and who were the key people behind its formation?
• MOSA acts as a fiscal sponsor—what does that actually mean in practice for Drupal events and initiatives?
• What are some of the projects or camps MOSA currently supports?
• How does MOSA help sustain and grow regional Drupal communities over time?
• What does membership in MOSA look like, and who should consider getting involved?
• How does MOSA balance local community focus with broader, national or global Drupal efforts?
• What are the biggest challenges MOSA faces as a nonprofit supporting open source communities?
• How has MOSA evolved in recent years, and what's different today compared to when it launched?
• Looking ahead, what's the long-term vision for MOSA and its role in the Drupal ecosystem?

Resources

• MOSA Website
• MOSA Drupal Project
• Aaron Winborn
• Handbook
• Moline, Illinois

Guests

Tearyne Almendariz - nlbcworks.com NineLivesBlackCat April Sides - weekbeforenext

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to place Drupal-rendered fields into your Drupal Canvas templates? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Canvas Field Component
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2026 by me! With some help from a couple of AI models
  • Versions available: 1.0.0, which works with Drupal 11.2 or newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - a README, but is designed to be narrow in scope
  • Number of open issues: technically 5 open issues, but all marked as fixed
• Usage stats:
  • 41 sites
• Module features and usage
  • By design, when using Drupal Canvas to create templates for content types, the idea is to map field values to properties in the template's components
  • That is a new system, however, so site builders may find there are gaps in terms of available mappings for field types they need to use, or may want to draw on mature formatting options such the responsive image definitions that come with Drupal CMS
  • With the Canvas Field Component module installed, you'll find a new "Field display" option available in your Canvas component library. When you drag that into a Canvas template layout, you can choose which field from the content type you want to display, and the formatter to use
  • That, in turn, will expose all settings for the chosen formatter, as well as any third-party settings available, for example if using Date Augmenters with Smart Date fields
  • Those settings will be reflected in real-time inside the Canvas UI preview, and then on rendered content once the template changes are published
  • This module started as a simple idea, based on my own experience using other UI-based Drupal solutions for laying out content type templates, like Layout Builder or Acquia Site Studio. Over the years, I've come to appreciate the flexibility of being able to place Drupal-rendered fields into templates, so you can mix-and-match existing, robust formatting options with flexible ways of pulling field values into layouts that also include more bespoke elements. Or, just use this as a way to add more layout flexibility to Drupal's default, linear display controls. That's what I do on my own blog, where I use Layout Builder but don't have a single custom layout on the site. It's only used for enhancing the layout of structured content.
  • Full disclosure: I also used the idea for Canvas Field Component as the impetus to venture into vibe coding, inspired by the conversations happening in the AI Learners Club, which listeners will hear more about in an upcoming episode.

Learn more about the implementation that helped automatically verify transactions for AML.

Overall SummaryOur 35th UI Suite Monthly was one of the most packed sessions yet — a full hour of demos, strategy updates, and an urgent call to action for the community. We covered major progress on the Display Builder (now mid-beta with half its scope completed), a breakthrough demo of symmetric and asymmetric translation support, a roadmap for cleaning up and refocusing UI Patterns this summer, the exciting new ability to use SDC components as form elements, and two critical core proposals — the Design Token API and the Style API — that need community support before the May 15th freeze. We also gave a first look at our AI strategy for display building, with a live demo coming next month. In short: our ecosystem is maturing fast, and the next week is decisive.

The AI industry spent years presenting automation as a cheaper alternative to human labour. In 2026, organisations are discovering that the economics are more complicated. According to Boston Consulting Group, enterprises are expected to increase AI spending significantly this year, even as pressure grows to demonstrate measurable returns. At the same time, infrastructure costs tied to inference workloads, data centres, and continuously running AI systems continue to rise across the industry.

That shift helps explain why Drupal’s AI direction has increasingly focused on operational flexibility rather than “AI-first” positioning. The Drupal AI Initiative’s provider-agnostic architecture allows organisations to move between commercial and open-source models without rebuilding workflows, while Drupal’s structured content model reduces unnecessary token usage by providing cleaner contextual data to language models. Recent work around AI observability, governance, and usage tracking reflects a broader industry movement toward cost predictability, monitoring, and infrastructure control as AI systems transition from experimentation into production environments.

The conversation around AI adoption is therefore beginning to move away from novelty and toward sustainability. Questions around inference costs, infrastructure ownership, governance, auditability, and long-term operational flexibility are increasingly shaping enterprise decision-making. Across the broader ecosystem, the organisations likely to benefit most from AI adoption may not be those deploying the largest models, but those building systems capable of managing automation reliably, transparently, and economically over time.

Editorial note: Editor’s Pick | Vol. 4 | Issue 18 referenced reporting and analysis from a blog post by Michael Anello on beginner Drupal training programmes without sufficient attribution. The newsletter has since been updated with proper credit and source links. The Drop Times regrets the oversight and thanks Michael Anello for bringing the matter to our attention.

Now, let’s move on to the story highlights from the past week.

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Mautic Content Provider Module Standardises Drupal–Mautic Content Workflows
• Dries Buytaert Introduces AI-Generated Rector Rules for Drupal Upgrades
• AI-Assisted Workflows Increase Demand for Creativity, Strategy, and Communication Skills
• Drupal Entity Webhook Module Enables Config-Driven Integrations
• AI Schema.org JSON-LD Module Introduces Prompt-Based Structured Data in Drupal
• Drupal 11 Expands Attribute-Based Hooks and Moves Away From .module Files
• Drupal Content Packages Module Introduces Git-Based Editorial Workflow

EVENT

• DrupalCamp Poland 2026 Rescheduled to 12 September in Wrocław
• Drupal AI Initiative Announces Webinar on Southwark Council’s AI PDF Workflow
• Drupal Meetup Frankfurt Set for 20 May at OpenSense Labs
• Minsait Hosts Drupal AI Event on Productivity, Automation, and Web Development
• Drupal Spotlight Meetup to Explore AI, Drupal CMS, ECA, and Media Workflows

DRUPAL COMMUNITY

• Drupal Community Health Team Urges Early Collaboration Before Conflict Reports

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• Acquia Expands Acquia Source and Introduces Acquia AI for Content Operations
• Mautic 7.1.0 “Canis Major” Focuses on Stability and Platform Improvements

Additional developments from across the Drupal ecosystem were published during the week. Readers can follow The Drop Times on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for ongoing updates. The publication is also active on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.

Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The Drop Times

This is part five of a series of articles looking at HTMX in Drupal. If you are interested in reading more then there will be a list of related articles at the end of this article.

When I was thinking about ideas on demonstrating HTMX in Drupal I implemented things like infinite scroll, a tabbed interface, and a cascading select form. I basically recreating some things that I had done in non-Drupal HTMX inside a Drupal module.

I then had an idea to create something that I might actually find useful in my day to day work as a Drupal developer. This was some way of displaying nodes in different view modes.

In this article we will look at creating a simple form that allows users to enter a node ID and a view mode and see the node rendered in that view mode.

All of the code contained in this article can be found in the Drupal HTMX examples project on GitHub, but here we will go through what the code does and what actions it performs to generate content.   

Just like the other articles on HTMX, I'm going to start with the basics and define the route.

The Route

The route we need here just needs to point the path /htmx-examples/display-mode-preview at our form class.

drupal_htmx_examples_display_mode_preview_form: path: "/htmx-examples/display-mode-preview" defaults: _form: '\Drupal\drupal_htmx_examples\Form\DisplayModePreviewForm' _title: "HTMX Display Mode Preview Form" requirements: _permission: "access content"

There isn't anything unusual about this route, it's just a regular form route.

Let's create the form for this route.

The Form

The form class has a couple of injected dependencies, which are as follows:

Read more