Drupal is 'light-years ahead of its reputation,' founder says, unveiling AI demo
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert used his DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 DriesNote to argue that Drupal is "now light-years ahead of its reputation" and that closing that gap is the community's number one challenge. He pointed to Drupal CMS, which grew out of the Starshot initiative he launched just over two years earlier and brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI and Drupal Canvas, and he announced a preconfigured Drupal AI demo, Drupal Canvas Headless for JavaScript front-ends such as Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular or Nuxt, and a new advocacy program that lets advocacy work earn contribution credit. Buytaert also described the Tool module and a planned Tool API change developed with Matt Glaman that would expose existing PHP methods as tools using attributes, which he said cut roughly 1,000 lines of integration code in his own album module to about 20 attributes.
Buytaert framed AI assistants as able to take on more execution work while Drupal remains the control layer, enforcing content, permissions and publishing workflows, and said he expects more organizations to manage parts of their sites through AI assistants.
DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 DriesNote presentation.
Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.
Just over two years ago, I launched Drupal Starshot. I did it because I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can.
Starshot became Drupal CMS, which brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI, Drupal Canvas and more to make building websites easier.
Alongside that work, Drupal Core has become a faster and better framework for developers. A stronger Drupal Core helps us build a better Drupal CMS, while building Drupal CMS has driven further improvements in Drupal Core.
Unfortunately, many people outside the Drupal community haven't seen what Drupal can do today. In Rotterdam, I showed how far we have come and where we're going next, and we launched an advocacy program to help more people see how great Drupal has become.
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