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We’re bringing you our latest monthly overview of top Drupal articles and news. We hope you enjoy this month’s selection!
Inside Drupal CMS 2.0: Q&A with Product Owner Pam Barone
First up on our overview for January is an interview with Pamela Barone, Product Owner of Drupal CMS, posted by Ryan Witcombe. As Pamela states in the interview, the first release of Drupal CMS was more of a proof of concept. Version 2.0 is a more user-focused release, with two big new concepts: the Drupal Canvas page builder, and site templates.
Drupal Canvas gives more power to marketers and editors, providing a user-friendly approach to creating better experiences for end users. Site templates serve as near-feature-complete starting points that cover common use cases for Drupal websites, enabling smoother and faster launching.
Read more about Drupal CMS 2.0
Drupal's AI roadmap for 2026
Next up, we have Dries’s post outlining and explaining Drupal’s AI roadmap for 2026. This roadmap focuses on eight key capabilities: page generation, context management, background agents, design system integration, content creation and discovery, advanced governance, intelligent website improvements, and multichannel campaigns.
Of course, community contributions beyond the scope of these eight capabilities are always welcome and valued. For the main roadmap, 28 organizations that support the Drupal AI Initiative have provided more than 50 individual contributors dedicated to this. Two of the organizations are responsible for coordinating the work, with QED42 focusing on innovation and 1xINTERNET on productization.
Read more about Drupal’s AI roadmap for 2026
Faster than Ever: Drupal’s Latest Performance Boost
We continue with an article from Nadiia Nykolaichuk of ImageX about the significant performance boost coming with the latest release of Drupal, version 11.3. When it comes to performance, Drupal already has a solid foundation, with features such as its robust caching system and the BigPipe module.
Drupal 11.3 introduces even more performance optimizations. The just mentioned BigPipe is now built with the lighter HTMX. Other improvements include smarter page rendering with PHP Fibers, and data-driven refinements.
The results speak for themselves: cold cache requests now only use about a third of the database queries and cache operations, while the number of database queries for partially warmed caches dropped by almost half.
Read more about the performance boost of Drupal 11.3
The Algorithmic Bias Against Drupal Community Values
Next up, we have an interesting article from Théodore Biadala who documented his experiment of using an LLM to assign Drupal contribution credits. One of his key findings is that these tools tend to have an inherent bias toward favoring code contributions above all other types of contributions. There are no significant differences between commercial and open source tools here.
Even through further fine tuning with Claude Code and Mistral, performance improves for easy to credit issues, but not for selective issues, where either accuracy and/or recall remain low. Théodore argues that relying on this kind of approach for assigning contribution credit would undermine the community and people-centered values of Drupal.
Read more about using LLMs to assign Drupal contribution credit
Contributing to Drupal’s Future
The next February article comes from Tag1’s CEO Jeremy Andrews, who recapped his experience from the Drupal Pivot unconference which took place in Belgium at the end of January.
In his article, Jeremy shares his main takeaways from the event. One of the most important ones is the business model problem, which many Drupal companies are facing – namely, how to adapt to the impact of AI on traditional agency economics.
Another important current question is how to market Drupal in a landscape where AI can easily create non-complex marketing websites. For EU institutions, digital sovereignty is becoming an increasingly important consideration, and Drupal’s open source nature makes it a great fit here.
GitLab issue migration: how to use the new workflow
In the next article, Fran Garcia-Linares breaks down the new GitLab issue migration workflow. The process for creating issues remains fairly simple, but what’s new compared to drupal.org issues is issue metadata in the form of labels. Only users with sufficient privileges can assign labels, with maintainers being able to grant someone the status of a reporter to help with this metadata.
The main part of the workflow that the team is focusing on right now is how exactly to mark an issue as "Reviewed and Tested by the Community" (RTBC). Already usable features also include automated messages for easier fork management, and easy crosslinking between drupal.org and GitLab issues.
Read more about the GitLab issue workflow updates
Release more code: the technical stuff
Moving on, we have an article by Joachim Noreiko about a similar topic that Dries also recently wrote about: releasing custom code used on specific projects as contrib modules, so the community can make use of it too by adapting it to their own use cases.
One of the key issues that Joachim identifies is how exactly to draw the line between contrib and custom code. He then breaks down different approaches for adapting custom code to turn it into a contrib module – namely, plugins, Twig templates, altering forms, overriding config, and APIs.
If you’re short on time and/or resources, you can also choose to skimp on UI, features, or both, releasing the module as incomplete while still allowing others to make use of it.
Read more about releasing custom code as contrib modules
Drupal4Gov EU 2026: How Drupal Powers European Institutions and National Governments
We conclude this month’s overview with a recap of the first-ever Drupal Drupal4Gov conference, taking place in January during the EU Open Source Week in Brussels. Drunomics’ Wolfgang Ziegler, the author of the article, shared his highlights from the event, starting with the keynote speech by Sachiko Muto, Chair of OpenForum Europe and Board Member of the Drupal Association.
Wolfgang’s other highlights include the session from the European Commission’s Sandro D'Orazio and Massimiliano Molinari about Europa Web Publishing Platform (EWPP), as well as other Drupal cases from European institutions and national governments. He also highlights the session about LocalGov Drupal, the Drupal distribution for UK and Ireland councils.
