Drupal future

Drupal AI is moving from experimental functionality to a cohesive, strategy-driven ecosystem. Discover the roadmap for 2026, explore how the new AI Starterkit built on Drupal CMS simplifies production-ready AI, and learn how we are organizing a massive community effort to build world class AI functionality.

Drupal CMS launched  to much fanfare... to existing Drupal developers and customers.  Now, Drupal comes with AI agents, visual page builders, one-click Recipes. It's genuinely impressive tech. So why don't students or developers care?

AI is already transforming Drupal projects. This session shows practical AI integrations in Drupal from editor assistants and accessibility tools in CKEditor 5 to automated workflows with ECA while respecting privacy, performance, and Open Web principles.

AI builders deliver sites in minutes. Headless platforms offer modern DX. And for many, Drupal is stuck with "outdated" perception. Time to talk about what's really going on, and how to fix the story.

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Drupal’s front stack is actually under exciting modernization. Pierre, a Core’s provisional front-end manager, will show how those changes and additions can help us build modern UI and revolutionize the display building experience.

Drupal CMS began from an ambition to place the power of Drupal in the hands of non-technical audiences, in other words to engineer features powerful enough for developers yet accessible enough for marketers. Drupal CMS 2.0 tackled this head-on, with innovative technical solutions to real user problems without compromise. 

This session takes you behind the scenes of Drupal CMS's most ambitious features giving insight into the research that’s driven and guided technical development so far, and highlighting the milestones still to be achieved on the roadmap to making Drupal CMS the number one choice for marketers and non-technical site builders. I’ll break down techniques used to learn what marketers want (spoiler – it’s not always what they say they want), explain how we gathered evidence to guide the direction of new features and talk through ways to use UX insight as a catalyst for working innovatively. 

For 25 years, Drupal has provided the velocity builders need. However, trying to serve every audience with a single tool often meant compromise. The recent strategic distinction between Drupal Core and Drupal CMS has unlocked a new path: parallel improvements that embrace the specific ways different builders work.

With the arrival of Drupal CMS 2, the introduction of Drupal Canvas and Site Templates fundamentally changes the game. These tools shift the focus to visual, component-based building, allowing users to launch new sites with best-practice features already configured.

But what does this shift mean for the future of Drupal Core and the wider ecosystem? For those not using Drupal CMS (yet)—and for critical use cases like headless architectures, social platforms, and e-commerce—what is the path forward? What can developers and architects expect as we look toward Drupal 12?

Join us to discuss how catering to these distinct needs will shape the broader ecosystem and what the long-term implications are for the community.

Components written using React and Tailwind CSS. You might be thinking this is a decoupled talk. It's not. Unless you want it to be. Learn what you can do with Code Components in Drupal Canvas today using the in-browser code editor or any development environment.