Build a reliable local Drupal environment with DDEV. Follow the steps to start a new site, import an existing project, and export the code, database, and uploaded files needed to recreate it elsewhere.

Working with AI, developer Brandon Thomas says he has recreated seven Adobe applications as open-source alternatives through ArtCraft. His pitch promises familiar tools without subscriptions, with code people can inspect, modify and keep. For users frustrated by proprietary terms, the attraction is a credible alternative they can make their own.

Credibility takes time to establish. PhotoCraft’s documentation describes an early alpha that is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. Its future usefulness will depend on continuing improvements, compatibility and support, alongside the freedom its licence provides.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert explains that distinction in his essay on licence-only and stewarded open source. Both are open source, but stewardship adds an ongoing commitment to the software and the people who depend on it. Maintainers fix failures, coordinate releases and respond to security issues, while organisations help fund the infrastructure and continuity that adoption requires.

Drupal illustrates why that continuing care matters. Its community and supporting organisations sustain a shared platform that users can retain while choosing different providers to host, extend or support it. The opportunity for new AI-built alternatives is to develop comparable continuity around their code. Established projects, including Drupal, must keep demonstrating that their stewardship delivers dependable software and meaningful choice.

A plausible outcome is more freely available alternatives, with lasting adoption concentrated around projects that sustain that care. Proprietary vendors may respond through better services or greater dependence on hosted features, while open projects can offer independence backed by accountable maintenance. Funding security, compatibility, documentation and long-term support would help make those alternatives viable. The strongest challenge to proprietary control could come from communities that give people both the freedom to leave and confidence in what comes next.

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Allen Jason wrote and curated this issue of Editor’s Pick.

Website teams can generate new pages faster than they can govern them. Pantheon's P1 beta tests a different approach to sharing that responsibility.

The image above shows me holding a plant that represents a small piece of code or an idea I want to share with someone else. To me, sharing code feels like planting something in someone else's garden. The analogy of open-source code and projects as plants and gardens appeals to me because plants are organic and essential to sustaining life, and the gardens we plant require significant planning and care. Open-source contributions come in all shapes and sizes, like gardens and the plants they hold, and both need maintenance. Some gardens require more maintenance than others.

My past two posts/tales focused on building and maintaining a Drupal module using AI, and now I want to discuss contributing to a module using AI. To continue my garden analogy, the projects I maintain are like my personal gardens.

Personal garden

By building and maintaining a Drupal module, I have control over my personal garden, but it exists within a community of gardens. I can decide which code/plants stay or go. Ultimately, I am responsible for the health of the project/garden. My project/garden is part of the Drupal gardens community (pun/irony intended). I am hyper-aware of the Drupal community where my Drupal garden lives.

Early on, when I took over building and maintaining the Webform module, I realized I was responsible for more than code; I was responsible for the entire experience of building Webforms for site builders and for supporting the module's extensibility for developers. To assist site builders and developers, I continually created videos and code examples as I built out the module. My blog explored and shared all aspects of the Webform module, including Read More

An AI-generated video that looks real has to be declared to the people watching it, and on a site the declaration has to be both on the page and inside the file. Here I follow how AI Disclosure, the module I created on drupal.org within the Drupal AI Initiative, does it. Images have an article of their own, and so does audio. A video needs a label when it is a deep fake: when it credibly shows a person, a place, an object or an event that exists or could exist, and whoever watches it would take it as real. A synthetic avatar presenting a company's results falls within it, if the viewer mistakes it for a real person. A cartoon or a clearly fictional video keeps the label in a lighter form, next to the video rather than on it. The obligation falls on the publisher, under Article 50(4) of the AI Act, and it applies from 2 August 2026.