Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation
Drupal: Bridging the Gap Between Reality and Reputation
Based on the "State of Drupal" presentation delivered by Dries Buytaert at DrupalCon Rotterdam (September 2026).
The central theme of my recent keynote in Rotterdam was clear: Drupal's actual capabilities are now light-years ahead of how the world perceives it. Our primary objective moving forward is to close this perception gap.
Initially, I harbored doubts about whether we could maintain our historical pace of innovation. However, the evolution of Starshot into the Drupal CMS has proven otherwise. This new ecosystem integrates several key pillars:
- Site Templates & Recipes
- Drupal AI
- Drupal Canvas
There is a symbiotic relationship at play here: a more robust Drupal Core enables a superior Drupal CMS, and the requirements of the CMS, in turn, drive the evolution of the Core framework.
🚀 Expanding Our Reach
The first half of the keynote focused on technical leaps in accessibility and flexibility. While Drupal has always been a leader in multilingual support, our new page builder, Drupal Canvas, initially lagged behind. We have since corrected this, making the setup of multilingual sites more intuitive than ever.
The Developer Experience (DX)
Drupal Canvas components are built using React. By aligning the DX with modern JavaScript patterns, we've ensured that front-end developers can utilize their existing toolsets—including AI-driven coding assistants—without needing to master Drupal-specific idiosyncrasies.
Decoupling without Sacrifice
We introduced Drupal Canvas Headless, removing the traditional trade-off between a modern JS stack and a visual editing experience.
| Front-end Framework | Visual Authoring | Content Management |
|---|---|---|
| Next.js | ✅ | Drupal |
| Astro | ✅ | Drupal |
| TanStack | ✅ | Drupal |
| Angular | ✅ | Drupal |
| Nuxt | ✅ | Drupal |
This allows editors to maintain a "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) experience while developers deploy cutting-edge architectures.
🤖 The AI Revolution
Drupal AI is evolving so rapidly that it deserves its own presentation. To showcase this, we've released a preconfigured Drupal AI demo for users and prospective clients to explore.
Capabilities of the AI Harness
Drupal doesn't just "use" AI; it acts as an AI harness. This means organizations can leverage LLMs while maintaining strict governance.
Current AI-driven tasks include:
- Grounded Q&A based on site content
- Brand guideline auditing
- Automated content translation and classification
- Generation of pages and
Reactcomponents - External integration via MCP (Model Context Protocol)
🛠️ Software Interoperability & The Tool Module
The second part of the keynote explored how AI assistants can redefine the user interface. Imagine an editor simply telling an assistant to "unpublish this page."
The assistant handles the execution, but the AI is in charge Drupal remains the authority. The system still verifies permissions and moderation workflows before the action is finalized.
The Power of the Tool Module
This functionality is powered by the Tool module, which I consider essential for modern Drupal development. It provides a standardized way to expose Drupal's internal capabilities to external software.
"AI can take on the heavy lifting of execution, while Drupal serves as the critical control layer for structure and governance."
The Challenge of Implementation: Currently, exposing these tools can be verbose. For example, adding AI capabilities to my own album module required approximately lines of additional code.
Despite the initial effort, the payoff is immense. I can now manage thousands of images with precision and speed via an AI assistant, while Drupal ensures the underlying data integrity.
Looking Ahead
To lower the barrier for the thousands of module developers who will want to adopt this, I am collaborating with Matt Glaman. We are refining the Tool API to make exposing existing functionality significantly easier, reducing the amount of boilerplate code required.