KEYNOTE: Driesnote ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/qBlMBw6f_4I/maxresdefault.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: KEYNOTE: Driesnote - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[ai]] [[drupal]] - Summary: KEYNOTE: Driesnote - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBlMBw6f_4I 8 10 9 8 7 5 4 3 2 1 zero. When you start at the source, you have everything you need to flow freely and break through. Introducing Aquia Source, a fully managed CMS that helps teams consolidate into one managed solution, delivering the power of Drupal, combined with the scale and security of Aqua, empowering creators to build fast with AI content generation and increase engagement with an integrated optimization. ation suite. All while reducing risk and lowering costs. The freedom to create once and publish everywhere. It all flows from the source. Aqua source powered by Drupal. All right. Hello everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome back from the break. Hope you all had a nice lunch. Hope you're all ready to buckle up for an exciting afternoon of content. My name is Sean Perro. I'm the VP of brand at Aquia. For those of you who may not know Aquia, we are an open digital experience company that was born out of Drupal. And Aqua exists to help build safer, more accessible, more open digital experiences for everyone. And we are proud to be the number one contributor to Drupal. And as part of that, we have created an exciting new contribution which I'm excited to talk about today, which you might have just seen in the video. And that is aqua source. That is our new AI powered SAS CMS that is a curated version of Drupal CMS and Aquia has made a substantial contribution in order to make this happen and we are really excited about this. This is really good for Drupal and if you'd like to learn more please stop by our booth at the Aqua Source Club and enjoy the Beach Club vibes. Now, let's get on with the show because I think you're all here for a particular reason. And judging by the fact that there's only standing room only in the back, I think we have an exciting keynote coming up next. And rumor has it that the person that's about to come on stage will begin his 43rd Drupal Con. I know. I know. So with that, please join me in giving a warm rockstar welcome to the Aquia co-founder and executive chair and the Drupal founder and project lead. Let's give it up for Dre. Yeah, I've actually lost track of how many Drupal Cons I've been to. Um, but I've never missed a single one of them. So, that's pretty special. And I think I'm the only person now that has been to all the Drupal cons, but maybe there's somebody else. Um, talking about conferences, a couple of weeks ago, I was actually in Boston at an invite only technology conference and um, they had polit politicians like the governor of Massachusetts. They had top entrepreneurs, professors from Harvard and MIT, and I've been fortunately to get to know them a little bit over the years, or at least some of them. Uh, so it's basically a whole bunch of smart people in a room for a day. And surprisingly, the top question that that I would get over and over again was what's going to happen with Drupal in a world full of AI. And so I was a little bit, you know, surprised by that question and how how often people would ask me that question. So on the spot I would say things like, well, I'm glad we're not Wix or Squarespace because, you know, simpler websites are much um more prone to disruption by AI than the typical more complex websites that we build uh with Drupal. And going home, I felt like they're not wrong to ask the question and to wonder, right? Uh and so I've been thinking about that question uh for some time, not just uh since the conference, because um we're in this tremendous time of change where the web that we know, the web that we've known for 30 years might be about to change in a big time. And so today's presentation is really what I wished I could have told the people at this conference in Boston if I had more time. Um so let's get it on. Uh talking about disruption, Vienna obviously where we are today um actually knows a thing or two about things being flipped uh on on their head. U because Vienna was once the capital of several vast empires. Obviously you had the Austrian Empire but before that you had the Holy Roman Empire and it lasted for about a thousand years and it all came to end sort of on a single day. And on that day in 1805 at the battle of Austeritz, Napoleon essentially smashed the Austrian and the Russian armies. And it was a surprise because um Napoleon was actually outnumbered and outgunned, if you will. Yet he was over able to overturn these two big armies. And it was a stunning and unexpected victory. And it sort of sent shock waves across Europe. And the news of Austeritz actually reached England as well. And for them it was a devastating blow because they were trying to you know beat Napoleon. And the English prime minister at the time uh William Pit the younger uh he was so devastated that he went home. And when he came home he saw his niece and his niece was sitting at the table and she had taken down a map a world map from from the wall and put it on the table to study it. And as he walks in and he sees this, he says, "Roll up that map. It will not be wanted for years or for 10 years." And basically what he was saying is that everything had just changed. You know, that the boundaries have changed, that a new era is upon them, and that the old map was now useless and that a new map was needed. And so I find that we find ourselves in a very similar situation right now. You think about it. When Drupal first began in 2001, the internet felt like a frontier. You know, you would go to a search engine like Google, you would type in a few words, you got 10 blue links, and then you began to explore. And we built millions of websites around this concept or around this map, right? However, today that map is being redrawn. We're entering an era where the landscape is being completely reimagined and it's time to roll up our old maps as well. And so in many ways AI is our ouster. It's changing everything. And some days I feel terrified about AI. An hour later maybe I'm like super excited about AI and usually by the evening I'm just tired of hearing about it. Right? But what about all of you in the room? How do you feel about AI? You know, raise your hand. And if you feel optimistic, point your arm to the east. Yeah. If you feel pessimistic, point your arm to the west. Yeah. And if you're like me, wave your arm from left to right. Yeah. Um, but regardless of what we think or what I think, um, big tech is making a huge bet on AI. They're betting their future on AI and they're building out massive AI infrastructure. Couple weeks ago, OpenAI long um, announced that they are building a factory, a factory to produce one gawatt of AI infrastructure every week. And if you don't know what 1 gawatt is, it's basically the output of one large nuclear reactor every week or 20 to 30 large data centers that they want to bring online every week. As I said, it's kind of insane, you know, and of course, it's also a worrisome thing for the environment. But it also means that the AI that we use today is going to be the worst AI that you'll ever use for the rest of your life. Right? The big laps, the big AI laps, they're so convinced that their investment will pay off. And so far, they've been right. Like the more compute data, the more uh data, the more time you throw at this, just the better the LLMs become. Of course, other people are saying the bubble will burst and nobody really knows. Uh, personally, I do think that the commercial or financial bubble will burst, but that AI as a technology will definitely remain much like the original internet bubble maybe. And so, in many many ways, I think AI is here to stay. And so what nobody can deny is that AI is disrupting everything, including our little world. For example, in May of this year, 69% of all of the searches resulted in zero clicks. Why? Because people get their answers directly from Google AI overviews. And that means less traffic to websites. Plus, AI agents, they don't click ads. AI agents, they don't subscribe to newsletters. AI agents, they don't fill out lead forms. And so, the old marketing funnel is starting to collapse. And it's starting to hit some organizations pretty hard. And so, that of course raises very big and important questions like why build websites at all? Now, I think I have a very good answer for that. Um, and I'll come to that by the end of my presentation. Uh but until then we have to face the reality which is that CMS platforms like Drupal we have to evolve and digital agencies are feeling it too and they too have to evolve because one thing is clear the storm is here and we need to roll up those old maps of how the web worked and we need to figure out how to best navigate this coming storm. Now, storms have been around for millions of years, and nature has figured out ways around these storms. For example, bison, they instinctively run towards a coming storm. Very interesting. Why do they do that? Well, because moving towards the storm means that they pass through it faster. If they were to run away from the storm, they would stay in bad weather longer. And so, I think we can learn something from the bison, you know. I think instead of turning away, we need to accelerate into the storm. We need to embrace AI. We need to experiment as much as we can and as fast as we can. And in many, many ways, that's the interesting irony because AI is a storm, but it's also the way through the storm because there's really no alternative. There's no going back to a pre-AII world. And despite all the uncertainty, despite all of the disruption, Drupal is actually really well positioned because unlike our competitors, we have some really distinct advantages. And just like the Bison, we're going to lean into that storm. And let me show you what that means in practice. Now, making maps um has always been kind of guesswork. I mean, we forget that today because today's maps, they are perfect because of satellites and everything. But hundreds of years ago, people actually had to go out and explore and do their best to draw a map. And then other people would follow and try to make that map better. Actually, if you look carefully, what you see here is a map of very early Europe. And some of you might have already noticed that it's actually upside down. You can spot Italy's booth at the top. And if you look closely, you can even see Vienna uh on the map as well. Now, you wouldn't want to rely on that map today. It would be hard to make your way home probably. Um but as I mentioned, the point is that maps evolve and they improve as navigators help make them better. Now, Drupal has successfully navigated uncharted territory before. Actually every few years I feel like we as a community we set out again exploring new directions adapting reinventing ourselves and you know creating new maps to follow and that's what has kept Drupal alive for almost 25 years you know and not just alive but on the cutting edge of technology as well. So for example 10 years ago I tried to map the future and I wrote a blog post um the big reverse of the web and in that post I noted that the web was shifting from um from pull to push and I wrote even uh we are at the beginning of a massive rearchitecture of the web yada yada yada eventually content will find us that's about 10 years ago and um and if you think about it that's exactly what these AI agents do right now. Um, people are getting their answers faster. They don't have to go off and do a bunch of research or click all of these links. It's pretty much just like I wrote about. But what we didn't know back then and what nobody could have known, I think, is that LLMs would speed up this trend tremendously and maybe even disrupt the web that we've known for 30 years. And so, I've always tried my best to get ready for the future and get Drupal ready for the future. Uh, but sometimes, um, if I'm honest, it's also painful. Um, like maybe raise your hand if you're a member of the Drupal 8 upgrade and if you thought it was painful. All right, it's almost everyone. Now, at the time, I think what's important at the time, we also wanted to futureproof Drupal, right? Um, we wanted to futureproof Drupal by adopting modern software design patterns by improving our APIs. So we did things like improving our um content versioning or we added configuration management and then later we even added configuration versioning and at the time it definitely felt like we're trying to make Drupal stronger, better, more modern and ready for the future. Um, but in fact, it also made us harder to use as you just witnessed uh from the room. Uh, but here's the surprising part. We actually gained an accidental AI advantage. And when is the last time something amazing happened to you by accident? Um, you know, all the hard work that we did back then, the APIs, the versioning, the configuration management, those things actually turn out to be the things that AI needs today. Because when AI agents make mistakes, and they do, you need to be able to roll things back and you have to be able to roll things back very safely. And Drupal is really, really good at that now, thanks to the work that we did in the Drupal 8 days. Um and we also have other great advantages like our content um structuring um our fine grain permissions. These are all things that are very important in this new agentic world. So we kind of find ourselves better prepared than we ever imagined um all these years ago. And in fact I would argue that Drupal has quietly become one of the most AI ready frameworks in the world. Now, I also don't think it was pure luck. You know, while we could not have predicted it, this is what happens when a community keeps looking forward and isn't afraid to make changes even when they hurt. Um, and so, yeah, we've laid the groundwork. We've always tried to make the best maps and the best tools and to be ready uh for the future. And actually, for the past 18 months, we've been going through another transformation. You know, we've been trying to get ready for the future again with Starshot or Drupal CMS. And we've rallied around one clear goal, which is to grow Drupal by empowering sitebuilders, marketers, and creators. And we're doing that for um site builders, marketers, and creators in the midm market and the enterprise. And the launch of Drupal CMS really has sparked something in the community. Just look at this uh graph. Uh this chart shows a number of organizational credits to our strategic initiatives and you can clearly see a big jump because of the start of Starshot. And here's the best part. It's not a one-time spike. Our innovation is growing and our innovation is sustained. It actually, if you look carefully, it doubled compared to 2023. >> Oh, yeah. So what started as this spark has now turned into this sustained um innovation which is pretty awesome. So let's take a look at what we you know this community have built lately because I believe these three tools that you see here will essentially redraw our map and they will keep Drupal strong for many many years to come. So we'll start we'll start with site templates and marketplace. So everything that we're doing in Drupal CMS is about growing adoption of Drupal. And one of the things that we knew we needed to do in order to grow Drupal adoption was to make it easy and fast to build sites. Like getting a site up and running shouldn't be hard, right? And so we started off with recipes. Uh recipes help people go from idea to website in hours instead of days. and they essentially let you in the installer pick the features that you want like multilingual or accessibility tools and then launch. And we didn't stop there and we asked ourselves what else can we do and so that's where site templates come in. Site templates is an idea that we launched seven months ago at Drupalcon Atlanta. And as a reminder, it combines recipes, a theme, sample content, everything that you need to launch a website uh even faster. It's essentially a Drupal site out of the box. Um, and I'm very excited to say that that idea has become a reality. In the last few months, we've built our very first site templates. So, let's take a look at this video. When you install Drupal CMS 2.0, No, a key change you'll notice right away is that instead of features or recipes, your first choice is now a site template. The first site template is called bite and it's perfect for the businessto business website for expense management software we're going to work on today. This site template uses the newly built Mercury theme and design system to compose pages detailing software features, price offerings, resources, and support. A list of recent blog articles, and a form to contact the company. pretty good. Yeah. So, we got the first site templates and literally in three clicks and one minute you can launch a complete website. In this case, it was um a website to promote a SAS software company. Uh obviously, in the future, we'll have many others, but um building this first site template, we had a lot of things to figure out as you can imagine. um not only did we have to build a theme, we had to build a design system with reusable components uh all of these things. So now that we've built one, we can obviously build many more based on those foundations. So I just want to say quick thank you to Elliot from Media Current for working on this as well as um for Pam, Christina, Adam from the Drupal CMS leadership team and many others. So thank you to them. Obviously, as I said, the next step is to create more than one template and to create many of these different uh templates for many different use cases. And so, at Drupalcon Atlanta, you might remember I ended my keynote with this big big question. Should we build a site template marketplace? And since then, under the leadership of Tiffany Ferris and Tim Lennon, uh we have done a lot of work on that. So, let's take a look at what we decided. The potential of site templates is clear. By combining recipes, demo content, and a canvas compatible theme, they make Drupal's power, flexibility, and openness more accessible. That innovation becomes transformative once these templates are easy to find and use via a marketplace on drupal.org. I'm Tiffany Ferris, a Drupal Association board member and CEO of Palunteer.net. Beginning at Drupalcon Atlanta, I convened a marketplace working group to explore whether such a marketplace might work both for and with our Drupal community. Together with volunteers, we led one of Drupal's biggest user engagement efforts ever. Webinars, surveys, Slack prompts, roundts. In just four months, over 500 people shared honest, passionate, and direct feedback. Their message was clear. Yes, we want this marketplace, but only if it delivers highquality, trustworthy site templates with transparent governance and open source values at its core. So, we're starting small and in an agile way. Step one is to launch a marketplace with a curated set of Drupal CMS site templates, both free and paid, from a handful of Drupal certified partners. Each will meet baseline standards for accessibility, security, documentation, and demo content. This is a significant investment even in a time of limited resources. The Drupal Association board voted unanimously to greenlight and fund this from our board vision fund because we see its potential to grow adoption and to create a next generation marketplace that is highquality, fair, and rooted in open source values. That's what our Drupal.org marketplace will offer. still Drupal, still GPL licensed, but curated, configured, and designed in a way that accelerates success, faster to deploy, less expensive to maintain, and easier to use. Now, that's a future we can build together. And with that, let me hand it over to Tim Lennon, the CTO of the Drupal Association to share our roadmap to launch. >> Thanks, Tiffany, and thank you to the rest of the working group. The groundwork for the site template marketplace you laid out has been a masterclass in open-source community engagement. With the approval of the board, the torch has now been passed to the Drupal Association team. We're working very closely with the Drupal CMS leadership team and the Drupal Canvas team to lock down the specification for how site templates should be built. We've been recruiting Drupal certified partners for our pilot. We have several partners who've already committed to join the cause and we're looking for up to 10 more during this pilot period. If you're interested in joining, please reach out to the DA. While the partners are working on these initial templates, the Drupal Association engineering team will be building out the marketplace itself, including the submission process for templates, the listing of templates with quality signals, and the automated and manual review processes we'll be using for quality control. We're going to learn quite a lot in the course of this pilot program and hope to make some good progress by Drupalcon Chicago. Not only did we decide to move forward with the marketplace, but we're off to a great start. Stay tuned for more. >> Yeah. Can I just say I've been so impressed by Tiffany. Like the way she managed this process is just unbelievable. Yeah. And now, of course, I'm very excited that we're going to have, you know, more than 10 extra site templates hopefully soon and that we're actually building uh the Drupal Marketplace MVP. And that actually means we're ahead of what we said we would do. Like we were just going to decide by now, but we're actually already on track. So, um, of course having, um, you know, more site templates is is a good thing, but really the vision should be to get to thousands of site templates and beautiful site templates. And in order to do so, we need to open up the site template creation to designers with no code tools. Today it still requires some development to build these site templates. But we really need to get to these no code tools. Not to replace developers, but to expand our community with designers. Because picture this, a designer can come to Drupal. They can install Drupal and start with a blank site. They can enable features. They can style it, shape it, add some demo content, and then with a single click of a button, they can export a site template for other people to use. So if we can attract design talent like that and we can enable them to create these site templates that easy, I think a whole new world will go up open up for Drupal. Now thanks to Adam Honik, we actually have a proof of concept of that already. It's only a couple days old. Um but you can go check it out based on the QR code and I'm very hopeful that we can uh make this widely successful. So that was a quick update on site templates in the marketplace. Uh talking about um site templates, one of the things that they install are themes, you know, Drupal canvas themes and pages built with Drupal canvas. Um, and I'm saying Drupal canvas here because uh and not experience builder which was the name that you may be familiar with because um a few months ago we learned that there was a trademark issue with the original name and after reviewing it carefully we had to essentially rename the project and we ended up with Drupal Canvas. So um but that a site we've been working really really really hard on Drupal canvas and we hope to release it very soon and I'll talk more about that uh later in this presentation. Uh but we've essentially added a lot of new features uh a lot of new things since the last release note and I want to show you these things first. All right. So um let's start with the first new thing which is that we've started integrating contributed modules into um into Drupal Canvas. So, let's take a look. >> Drupal Canvas enables site builders without Drupal experience to easily theme and build their entire website using only their browser. You begin with structured components such as a hero banner, an image gallery, a testimonial block, or a product card. These predefined and reusable blocks make it easy to create consistent pages. Once you've placed these components, you can now also format text in them by adding links, changing alignment, and more. This experience is powered by the newly integrated CK editor, which makes editing easy and more intuitive. When people share a page on social media or find it in search results, the preview only looks good if the right description and image are set. To make this easy, we integrated the popular metatag module into Drupal Canvas. Marketers can now easily add a description and meta image directly within Drupal Canvas. Contact forms, surveys, and demo request forms are also important tools for a website. We've made the web form module canvas compatible to support this. This allows forms such as this contact form to be used as dynamic components within Canvas, making them easy to add and manage directly in your pages layout. Changes are automatically saved into a workspace. So you review all of your site changes together and publish all of them or only the ones that are ready with a single click. Let's publish our changes on this page while we continue to refine some other pages we're working on. By integrating CK editor, metatag and web form, we've made important marketing tools part of the creative workflow. We think marketers will love it. >> We go. So it's early days but it's yeah it's early days but like you know observing how this has worked it it's really encouraging to see how how well that is going the the effort of making your modules compatible and obviously integrating more modules is actually a key next step for Drupal Canvas uh because each integration with a contributor contributed module makes uh Drupal Canvas uh more capable and more connected ed to uh the Drupal ecosystem. So if you're a maintainer of a contributed module and um you want to try integrating it with Drupal canvas, now is a good time um you can still give feedback to the engineering teams uh as well. And I would encourage you as you migrate your module or port your module to also use it as an opportunity to rethink how you can align with Drupal CMS and the vision that we have with Drupal CMS. there's an opportunity to not just sport it but to actually try and lower the barrier to adoption for Drupal at the same time. All right, so let's keep going. So Drupal canvas isn't just expanding by um you know through these uh integrated modules. We've also been broadening its reach um with a new concept and uh a new feature called uh content templates. And for Drupal experts, uh, it's a little bit like fields UI or display suite. Uh, so let's take a look at that as well. In addition to creating one-off landing pages, Drupal canvas gives you control of the way your content types will be laid out for different view modes. Instead of editing code in a template file, marketers have the power to tweak these layouts directly in the browser. The initial byte site template uses content templates for blog posts. Let's move where the author name is displayed from the top of our template to a new element below the text. When editing a blog layout, you combine values typed directly into canvas with dynamic field values such as the title, author name, or author photo. You display them with the usual canvas components to create a reusable design. Bite uses a heroblog component to format the information at the top of a blog post, but you can also add anything you need from the component library. Drupal canvas allows you to see a live preview of content templates using actual content from your site. You can pick which piece of content to preview with to see how nodes with different information will look in your layout. Changing the template is as simple as dragging around components and updating their properties. With Drupal Canvas, managing the look and feel of your Drupal site can be managed directly in the browser like never before. >> Yeah, another great feature I think. Yeah. And by the way, whenever I look at these demo videos, I often completely forget that we're looking at Drupal. You know, it looks so different and so much better. Um, all right, let's keep going. Um, I think I'm pretty excited about this. you know, for a long time, we've had many different ways to format and present content. And I'm hopeful that uh with, you know, content templates, we have a new way forward and a way that's more simple, more visual, more unified, and that we can all kind of rally behind a single concept. Okay, so I have a lot more to show. Um, the next little video that I have for you is a new way for adding blocks to Drupal Canvas. So, let's jump to that as well. Let's add a listing of recent blog posts to the homepage to promote our thought leadership. Byte includes a couple of dynamic components that show recent blog posts as cards, but we want to show a list and there isn't an existing component for that. So, let's build one in the browser using code components. A preconfigured JSON API client and SWR are built into Canvas, which allow us to display cache dynamic data while it is being updated directly on the page in the background. We want to list the latest blog posts with this component. Canvas even provides debugging information about the response from JSON API. Once we are happy with this component, we can publish it and place it in our page where it was intended. Our front-end developer was able to add this dynamic information to our homepage without learning any Drupalisms. So, it's a new way to create components. Yeah, we call them code components. I think they'll be really powerful and I think one of the really cool things about it is that it will invite JavaScript front-end developers to Drupal and also that they can actually, you know, bring those skills to Drupal without having to do a fully decoupled or headless Drupal website. Um, so that's pretty cool. Now, I have another way that you can build components that I want to show you today. And I I think a lot of you front-end developers will like it because many of you use Figma for your designs, right? But going from a Figma design to a Drupal theme, if you will, can be pretty hard. You typically have to kind of build the whole theme and design from scratch as a Drupal developer. Um, but what if we could basically go from Figma to Drupal in a much faster way? Plus, what if we could link the two so that you when you change something in Drupal, um your theme and your Drupal code also automatically gets updated. That definitely would save a lot of time and would also improve the consistency between the Figma designs and the Drupal site. So, let's take a look at that. Hi everyone. I'm starting here with a standard Drupal Conval setup and this is a pricing table I designed in Figma. Normally turning a design like this into a working Drupal canvas component would take hours of front end work. But with the new Figma MCP server and a little help from Copilot, my GitHub AI assistant, we can now generate this component automatically without writing a single line of code. Here's how it works. I'll create a new component in Convos and call it pricing table. Behind the scenes, Convos generates a YAML file that defines how this component works. Now, Copilot steps in. It connects to the Figma MCP, reads the design, and begins translating that visual structure into Drupal's component language. You can see it update the ML file, add responsive layout settings and map the fields automatically. This part used to take hours of manual coding and trial and error. Now it's handled in seconds. Once Copilot finishes, it reimports the ML file back into Drupal canvas and rebuilds the cache. And that's it. The new pricing table is ready to use, responsive, editable, and directly based on the original Figma design. So, what does that mean in practice? It means faster iteration, easier to go from a design vision to reality. Designers can use Figma and don't have to learn much or any Drupal. Hopefully, that will help us attract more designers to Drupal and make Drupal canvas their tool of choice. It's still an early prototype, so it's not pixel perfect yet, but it already shows the art of the possible. A true design to code workflow for Drupal. And there you go. What do you think? I think this can be very big. This was actually built by Witza. Is Witza here? Oh, there he is in the back. interest. Yeah. What I like about it is like Witza is a student from Belgium. Yeah. Hold on. And he goes to class during the day and works on Drupal at night. And I know somebody else that started that way. And so for weeks, Witza has been messaging me. and honestly at all times of the day 3:00 am 4 am you really really wanted to get this done and in the keynote um and so clearly you're very passionate about having front-end developers love Drupal as much as you uh do so thank you very much for the hard work that was a very nice AI demo but it wasn't Drupal AI it was Figma AI if you will so let's take a look at Drupal's own AI improvements, right? So, uh, but first let me say a few things about the AI initiative that we started. We launched that about five months ago. Um, and the reason we launched it or one of the reasons we launched it is that marketing teams around the world, they're investing heavily in AI tools today. Um, and I think websites and AI are interesting because websites are where uh people and technology meet and websites have a lot of content. they have some data and you can do very interesting interesting things with AI on websites. Not to mention that it's relatively easy to add AI capabilities to websites, especially if you've already have a Drupal website. So, I think there's a huge opportunity for Drupal here. Um, and also a huge opportunity for agencies because a lot of these end users, they actually need help adopting uh AI and Drupal AI to um to do some pretty cool things. And so we created the AI initiative. Um, and today, five months after creating the initiative, we basically raised $1 million. Uh, which is like just an amazing uh feature. And we Yeah. And it's about 200 plus,000 in cash and about $800,000 in FTE hours like you know resources that each of these 22 incredible partners contribute. So every partner was asked to contribute either a full-time FTE or a half-time FTE depending on their size. So the combined value is about uh $1 million. And so by far this is the biggest and most success successful fundraising effort that we've ever done in the history of Drupal. Um and I think these companies are investing because they know they want to evolve their agencies. They want to go after that AI opportunity that I just uh talked about and being part of this initiative allows them to upskill their talent and to transform their businesses from the inside out. you know, it allows them to become really good at this. Um, and together, these 22 partners, uh, together, we're basically investing in new AI capabilities and bringing, um, more AI innovation, uh, into Drupal. And, uh, to me, it perfectly captures what I mean when I said we have to accelerate into the storm, you know, and so, if you're interested in joining, it's not too late. We have a forum. Dominic is here as well. Um, Dominic has done a lot of the fundraising. So, if you want to join, please come talk to Dominic. Here he is. That is where is Waldo? I'm not sure if that translates in Europe. It's a big American thing. Um, all right. Dominic is more than happy to sell you a sponsorship, right? All right. So, seven months ago at Drupal Con Atlanta also showed another way to create components. You might remember, but I demonstrated an early prototype of Drupal AI generating a single component inside of Drupal Convas. So you do you remember that demo? Yeah, most many of you do. And then obviously today I showed two more ways of creating a component. One is creating it manual uh with JavaScript inside of Drupal canvas. And then obviously we just showed Witz's um you know Figma uh approach for creating component as well. So, that's at least three ways to create components and and obviously there's other ways as well. Uh, but what if instead of a single component, Drupal AI could build an entire page made up of dozens of components. So, let's take a look at that as well. Our B2B marketing team is launching ads for a fictitious SAS product we'll call Finrop. They want to create three different ads. One offers a free guide, another promotes a webinar, and the third invites people to book a demo. Here's the challenge. Each ad needs to link to its own landing page. When someone clicks on an ad to register for an event, they expect to land on a page about the event, not the homepage. The page must match what the ad promised or people will leave immediately. For developers, this means creating three similar but slightly different pages. Marketing needs them fast to start their campaign, but each requires custom design, copy, and forms. Tomorrow, they'll want to test different headlines. Next week, they'll need versions for a new campaign. This constant need for landing page variations is exactly what our AI agents can solve. Instead of weeks of development, marketers get their pages in minutes. AI should be great at this. So, let's try with a prompt that marketing helped create to make one of the pages. The prompt is simple and direct. We ask the AI to create a landing page based on our ad campaign, including the ad copy to ensure it captures essential details like the event name, date, and key attendance benefits. Once we enter the prompt into Drupal Canvas AI, behind the scenes, it's handed to an orchestration agent that plans the work to be completed and decides what agents it will need to create our landing page. Most of the work will be done by a canvas template agent. It uses the prompt to decide which components to use, generates content, and searches for relevant images. This agent also has its own access to another agent for a document media search, which can go and verify information you might need from documents like PDFs in addition to the provided context. With all the agents working together, our page is assembled. As the response comes back, notice that the Canvas AI is building out the layout one component at a time and populating with information relevant to our prompt. The result is a fully structured page that is ready to review, edit, and publish. As shown in the sidebar, the page is composed of Drupal Canvas components that the AI agents recognized and used. The marketer can use Drupal Canvas to edit or fine-tune each part of the page before publishing. Not just the text, but also the layout and components. It's a great example of how site builders and AI agents can work together and how Drupal keeps a human in the loop. With some simple instructions, Drupal Canvas can use its own understanding of the site structure, media, and component library to assemble an entire page populated with draft content. that saves a marketer dozens of clicks and significantly reduces the need to learn Drupal's technical concepts. It's a major accelerator that makes the power of Drupal easier to adopt than ever before. All right. I honestly think this demo is a pretty big deal. Um that we can now generate a whole page. And I also think this is the kind of innovation that will keep Drupal uh futurep proof. And uh what's so great about it, I think, is it that it makes Drupal easier easier for so many people while uh keeping Drupal powerful because it's still Drupal, right? As you saw, AI uses all of the components available in Drupal Canvas, uh, without losing what makes Drupal special. So, now, if we're honest and we look at this page more closely, it's also not perfect. You know, there's a lot of things that could be better. And so, in many ways, this is a good starting point and an important accelerator, but it would still take a marketer or a site builder, a bunch of manual work, I guess, to get it across the finish line. uh for example, it may not have picked up our uh our brand voice or some of our key messaging, may not really know what we're selling or what images to use. And so someone would have to fix that as I said. So we basically decided to fix that by building uh a context control center and it's essentially a place where you can tell AI who we are, who you're targeting, you know, key facts, what messages you want to emphasize. And so if you've ever used things like um cloud code, it's like your um cloud MD file or agents MD file except obviously we do it right in the Drupal UI so that marketers and site builders can uh change it there. So let's see let's see if it makes a difference. Let's start by taking a look at the new AI context control center. You can see there are already some context set up. Let's add one more explaining who our target audience is. All the AI agents in Drupal have access to this context. So with that in place, let's generate our page again and see if we get a better result. We paste in the actual LinkedIn ad copy. Then add a few bullets about what we want, the webinar date, key sections like feature cards, and a note to include a section about who should attend. That's it. Notice we're not specifying our target persona and brand voice. These are already provided from the context control center automatically. So the AI already has access to the information it needs to create audience focused content for our campaign landing page. The AI is now combining our prompt with the brand guidelines, selecting components, choosing images from our library and generating appropriate copy based on our product information. Look at this. It's assembled the hero section with our messaging, creating feature cards that match our product capabilities, building a who should attend section, and maintaining perfect brand consistency throughout. Every decision follows our design system and brand rules. The page looks great. Perfect. Simple. Now, here's the real power. We can use the same approach for our other two ads, too. With a context already set, each additional page takes just minutes. Three campaigns, three landing pages, 10 minutes. Your ads go live today, not next week. And I honestly haven't seen any other CMS do this kind of thing. So pretty pretty innovative. And this is how I think we're going to extend our lead um in AI now. All right. So, so far all of the I AI demos have shown um essentially show AI agents starting to do work when you ask them like when you prompt them kind of like a smart helper, right? But the future we're going to move from these helpers to like teammates, if you will. What I mean by that is sort of autonomous Drupal agents, you know, background agents, if you will. Agents that don't wait for that prompt that just go and do things. um maybe working quietly in the background, maybe doing things while we're all asleep. Um and as I say this, I already see some like people's faces like being really worried. Uh but don't worry, we're not going to let the robots uh take over. And uh of course, as I'll show you, features like this, they come with audit trails and review systems and all of these things so that we always keep uh a human in the loop. So let's take a look. Since Finindrop launched, the marketing team has been proudly toing some impressive numbers. Thanks to some recent updates, those numbers are even better. That kind of good news usually means a lot of extra work for the marketing team. But Drupal knows where it's used those numbers to generate content. We start the process by going back to the context control center. Let's update the information there and see what happens next. With the updates done, Drupal kicks off a task in the background to help us make sure the relevant content is updated wherever the source context was used. Once that's done, we'll find an email in our inbox saying draft page updates are awaiting. So, let's check what did the AI do for us. We land on a listing page where all key updates are listed. So, we can check which pages need changing and review the prepared draft updates. Note that even on the page where the wording is a little different, our AI found the changes needed and made the updates. This is one way Drupal AI can work in the background while we sleep and help improve our web presence for better marketing results. All right. Yeah, that was a lot. I think it's actually the most little demo videos I've shown in any D note. And I think each of them was um I think pretty substantial in terms of innovations. And this is why that chart that I showed you earlier is going up and to the right. There's just so much cool innovation happening. And I also believe that the combined impact of these innovations, the thing that you see on the screen could really change the trajectory of Drupal. They all kind of compound and together they'll make uh Drupal better. Um, and I think these tools will help us navigate the storm, if you will, from end users to digital agencies to um, end users in the mid-market and enterprise. Um, I have no doubt that this will help grow Drupal's adoption. Um, and I'm pretty excited about that and I really think that we have a shot at being the gold standard in um, in sort of the AI era as we set out in our mission statement. Now, let's talk a little bit about when all of this will be available, right? And so first of all, I'm thrilled to share that we have a first release candidate of Drupal Canvas. It's available right now and that the full Yeah. And that the full release is coming in just one month. In November, we'll have uh Drupal Canvas 1.0 released. And this is a big deal because this is the moment that so many of you have been waiting for. I I remember talking in a zoom uh with all of the um certified partners of the Drupal association and we would survey them, pull them and the thing I asked what what is the thing that you need the most the most important thing and it was Drupal canvas and they need it for them but also for their customers. So it's almost here it's so close and I think it's going to be uh pretty awesome. Now, once we have Drupal Canvas released, we need about a month to get Drupal CMS 2.0 finalized. It takes a little bit of work to incorporate Drupal Canvas into it. And obviously, we don't want to do that in the holidays. We don't want to do a release in the holidays. So, we're thinking that Drupal CMS Studo will be released in early January, maybe on Drupal's 25th milestone birth birthday. We'll see. Um, and I think that's a big deal, too, because it means that Canvas will ship with the default version of Drupal. And so, let that sink in for a second. It means that every new Drupal site that people start building uh will start by default with Canvas as the default experience. And as at least for me, that feels kind of like the start of a new era for Drupal, you know? So, pretty exciting. Um, we're going to market the heck out of this. We're going to shout it from the rooftops. But yeah, um, that was a marketing team. Um, but not just in January yet. Um, we're going to celebrate it sort of internally with a community celebration in January and then we're going to do a much bigger um, public marketing push in March. And that just gives us more time to get organized, aligned, and ready to make some real noise. So, that is pretty exciting. And then after the CMS 2.0 uh release, um we're going to focus and double down on site templates marketplace and some of these other things that I've shown and that are in progress. And that will essentially become a major focus for the Drupal CMS leadership team as well as the Drupal association uh throughout 2026. All right, so stay tuned for more. So, just want to take a moment to say thank you. Uh, thank you to everybody here, everybody watching online, everybody contributing for being such an incredible part um of this journey. I'm like really really proud of what we're building together, you know. So, give it up to everybody that contributed to this. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your passion, your ideas, your courage, uh for making all these big bold changes. Now before I wrap up, um I have one more product update that I want to talk about. Uh it's it's a section uh in the keynote as well. Um and I think there's a important trend right now that I think could fundamentally change how we all drive in this world. Um and I think the trend is going to be particularly relevant for also agencies and larger end users. Uh so let me talk about that uh for a bit. So a while back I wrote a blog post. I think I just heard somebody shout bingo. Um a while back I wrote a blog post called the great digital agency unbundling. And it was me thinking out loud about how the agencies in our community need to evolve in a world where AI is reshaping web development. And I wrote that post because I really care about the agencies. Um, and I care about the agencies because uh they're the source of so much innovation in Drupal. If you were to look at the data, it's like 70 plus percent of all of the innovation in Drupal comes from employees at these agencies as well as uh other uh Drupal companies like hosting companies. Um and so the challenge for these agencies is that a lot of what they used to do can now be automated um or accelerated with AI and you know things like building forms, building simple lang land landing pages like I just showed and even writing you know basic code and so agencies need to refocus you know they need to refocus on things that can be as automated and they need to focus on things that are unique to their customers. So, um, I've kept thinking about this since writing that blog post and and today I wanted to come back to that and share a couple um, new ideas and they're not the answer. Let me be very clear. They're they're not the answer. They're just sort of possibilities. So, lately I noticed, you know, two things that kind of uh, sparked my interest and that I think are worth paying attention to and they're actually very related, part of a bigger trend that's happening uh, in the world. And I'll come to that in a second. But the first one is actually inside of Drupal itself. And and many of you are already familiar with ECA. In fact, ECA ships with Drupal CMS. And for those who aren't familiar, it's a way of orchestrating workflows in Drupal. And it allows people to use a graphical UI to, you know, drag and drop things together. And I'll give some examples in a minute. But the point I want to make first is that it has created some real buzz in the community and personally I'm very excited about its potential because it's like super aligned with our vision for Drupal CMS which is to um you know enable people to build more powerful digital experiences in a no code way. And so, you know, the problem though, I think, and um is that ECA is pretty hard to use and I've tried it myself and I've been doing Drupal for a little while and it was hard for me to use ECA. And so, that's something that um I've been talking about a lot with um ECA's creator, Jurgen H. We've been talking almost every week for for months. Um and um and as a result, I think he's been thinking deeply about how we can make ECA easier to use and by doing so, how it could maybe unlock tremendous potential for the Drupal community. So um unfortunately Jurgen can't be here uh today, but I asked him to share a few thoughts. So let's hear it from Jurgen. >> Hey, my name is Jurgen and I started ECA four years ago. ECA is the no code solution that empowers you to orchestrate your Drupal site. Its real power is to expose all APIs from Drupal and to build workflows in a graphical interface. ECA only requires Drupal core as a dependency, but almost 100 contri modules extend ECA's functionality. Over 13,000 sites are using ECA and they are supported by comprehensive documentation with tutorials, videos, and sample workflows. Let me give you some examples. ECA allows you to define individual redirect rules to send notifications on workflow state changes, to validate content before saving, to assign tags based on rules, to define custom chronops, to query the database and send reminder emails, and so much more. Defining workflows in a graphical UI is doing many things at once. building functionality, documenting itself, explaining it to customers, and reducing the number of required modules. While this is an amazing success, let's face it, ECA comes with a learning curve. New users are sometimes struggling, but we are going to change that. Our vision is to turn ECA into the go-to solution for all Drupal users by improving the UI from the ground up. Adding new intuitive widgets, skill level adjustments, testing, logging, debugging, and replay tools. Altogether, the next generation of ECA. This will be another game changer for Drupal to empower users, agencies, freelancers, and organizations of all sizes to achieve more than ever before. while remaining fully open source and free to use. This is an exciting project. Come and join us on that journey. Ping me directly or find us on Drupal Slack. Thank you. >> Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. I really do think like ECA has to be has a potential to be like views and if you're a longer term Drupal user, you know exactly what I mean. uh but it has to be easier to use I think and so I'm very very excited that Jurgen is going to focus on that and that hopefully um that can give another big boost uh to Drupal. Um now it's it's not the only orchestration tool that I'm excited about and I recently came across another interesting project also focused on orchestration uh but from a slightly different angle. So imagine something like Zapier or NADN uh except this time open source actually open source uh and with a much slicker interface and that project is called active pieces and essentially it's like naden uh and these other tools and allows you to connect uh with all of these different uh pieces of software. of like 450 integrations. And in full disclosure, I I was actually so impressed uh that I ended up becoming a small angel investor in active pieces. Um but just like ECA, um you know, it's it's re it's it's it's like ECA except it's focused on external actions like ECA is more internal inside of Drupal. Active Pieces is more outside of Drupal. And I really do think that like ECA, it has the potential to transform how we work. So I recorded a quick demo myself. So let's take a quick look at that. All right, let's start with the simplest possible flow in Active Pieces. This one essentially takes content from a WordPress website using RSS and stores it in Drupal. Now, I don't actually have a WordPress site myself, but I know a guy that does. Essentially, B Matt Mullenovix's RSS feed, and I can test that this feed works by clicking this retest button. And you can see here that active pieces returns a nice clean JSON object. Then we can take that JSON object and we can use it to create content in Drupal. Let me show you that. First, we have to connect to the Drupal site. This by the way uses basic a which is a standard feature that ships with Drupal core and then it uses JSON API to automatically discover the schema and all of the available field definitions that are defined in your Drupal site and you can see that here. Uh and also for example we know through JSON API that the blog entity type has a title and a body and you can see how we can map the output of the RSS feed to the body. It's very simple. We select a body format. In this case, let's go with full HTML. And we set it to published. And that's it. Done. We're now migrating content from WordPress to Drupal. All right. So, that was my first demo. Of course, it's a pretty simple example. And I'm sure some of you are thinking, well, you could do that with the feeds module or what have you. So, let's uh do one more demo that shows something a little bit more complex. All right, let's do something that is harder to do in Drupal alone. And that shows why combining Drupal with these external orchestration platforms can actually be so powerful. So first, instead of just migrating the content as is, let's transform it. So we're going to ask Chat GPT to druplify Matt's WordPress content. And that means turning words like plugins into modules, widgets into blocks, and making a few other tweaks. Now, in a more realistic scenario, you would use this approach to simplify complex language, to fix broken links, you know, you name it. Now, mixing these deterministic flows with AI steps is where things actually get pretty interesting because instead of relying entirely on AI, this hybrid approach makes your workflows more predictable, more reliable, and often less expensive to run. Let's add a little bit more complexity because maybe we don't want to migrate all content. Maybe we only want to migrate the posts that are actually relevant to Drupal users. So we can ask Chacht to analyze each post and then decide whether it's relevant and if it's relevant we will publish it to Drupal and log it in a in a Google sheet and if it's not relevant we will set the status to needs review and log that too. And by the way we have another flow that listens for changes in Google Sheets. So let me show you when somebody marks an item as approved in Google Sheets it automatically publishes the content to Drupal. Think about that. It gives us new ways to edit and review content at scale. You can create similar integrations with tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, ticketing systems, project management tools, etc. Active Pieces has almost 450 integrations. Okay, so here's where things get even more interesting. That needs review action actually triggers an ECA model inside of Drupal. So, let me switch over to the admin section of my Drupal site for a second. What you're seeing here is that ECA model, and it actually has two tools or flows. The one at the top is called blog needs review, and it sets the state of a blog post to, you guessed it, needs review. Under the hood, it uses Drupal's content moderation and workflow modules. And when we switch back to active pieces, you can see that the ECA tool is exposed directly in active pieces. You can also see that all of Drupal's agents are available to active pieces, which is pretty cool because now we can build very advanced ECA models that leverage Drupal's internal capabilities and we can use our specialized AI agents and make them available to these external orchestration tools. And you can do some crazy stuff with that. maybe even build landing pages from these tools. My example just scratches the surface. But the point here is that the concept of internal and external orchestration working together is very very powerful. All right, that yeah, that was a slightly more complex demo, but like if you look online, people are doing like things that are 10, 20, 30, 40 times more complex. And uh Jurgen and I, we actually work together on this integration and we also work together on the demos uh because we both believe actually that these platforms um you know can and should work together and that together they can do some pretty interesting things. And so, yeah, I wanted to take a little minute, I guess, out of the keynote, uh, precious time out of the keynote to talk about this because I really do think it could change, um, how we integrate Drupal in the marketing technology stack and also how agencies might uh, evolve their business because if you think about it, there's so many user experiences on the web that could be made better, that could be made smarter and orchestration could be a great way uh, to do that. Um, and personally, uh, I think it can not only change how we built digital experiences, but if I think about it, it could redefine, uh, the concept of a DXP. In my mind, this could be the kernel of a DXP2.0 kind of, uh, platform, the combination. And again, as I said, could be an important toolbox um, in the or important tool in the toolbox of digital agencies uh, to build, manage, and operate these flows. Uh and so you know Jurgen and I we would love uh for you to join us in this exploration. So consider this an invitation and there's many different ways you can help. You can um obviously test the newly launched orchestration module uh that we built but you can also integrate more and different of these external automation tools like NAD. You have lang flow flow wise gum loop. I mean there's a long list of these tools that we could integrate with. Um, or it could help bring uh Jurgen's vision uh for a simpler, more powerful ECA inside of Drupal to life as well. And I think there's a lot of interesting concepts and I don't have the time to get into it, but um like even this notion of connecting inputs and outputs that quickly and easily something that maybe we can bring into Drupal's architecture as well. And so if this idea proves valuable, if people are excited about exploring with us, we'll probably return at Drupalcon Chicago, then the next sort of um you know, Japan is just a little bit too close. Uh but in Drupalon Chicago, we can um basically share what we've learned. So um all right. So to wrap up, I will say that I'm so excited actually about this new um brave new world that is ahead of us and that is coming. Um and I would also say that I'm actually optimistic about the open web. And that might sound a little strange to you, but if I think about it, the current map of the web is actually taking us to places that aren't always nice. You know, there's a lot of like um sloppy content online. And there's a lot of organizations playing to trying to play SEO tricks or rewarding clickbait or rage clicks. And honestly, how many people love all the advertising on the web? So, you know, call me naive if you want. Um, but I do think that the future, this new map could actually hopefully potentially take us to a better place as well, you know, where maybe we'll have higher quality content, fewer ads, uh, better customer experiences, like faster answers, and and maybe we even find ways to properly reward all of the creators uh, on the web. Now I also believe strongly believe that the world um is still going to need good websites. You know even as AI um evolves how people interact with the web the website is still where the trust and the ownership and the identity live. You know when you visit a website you're you're not just consuming the text on a website or the content on a website. You're actually uh experiencing the brand. you know, you you can hear the voice of the website. You can hear and see the identity and the personality of that website and you can feel its values and I think that's really important and I think that's not something that an AI agent or chatbot um you know will replace you know that easily. And so a website if you think about it it's it's kind of the one digital space an organization or an individual can truly own you know starting to end. It's kind of like the one place where you can fully express yourself uh in your own words, your own design, your own brand. And again, that's not something that an agent won't um be able to replicate that easily. And so that's why agencies still matter and and probably more than ever to be quite honest because agencies are the ones that make that trust, that brand, and that identity real. You know, they architect the systems, design the experiences and and make everything work together. And we're always going to need people who can translate sort of ambition into architecture or or vision into code. And we'll always need builders, you know, builders who can turn ideas into systems. We'll always need people that take responsibility and accountability for outcomes and results. And and that's what agencies do best. And uh that's why we need to care for agencies and help agencies be successful. And honestly, it's what keeps the web human and it's what keeps the web reliable as well. And so here's the way I see it. I guess I think of AI as a new channel and um AI will always rely on websites and and for that reason websites will always exist. You know, agents learn from websites that site websites. They send people to websites. And so the website is and and and will remain the source of truth or the system of record. And so, you know, when AI expands, it's it's actually expanding the need for what Drupal does best, which is content management and website management. And so, that brings me to Drupal. Um, you know, AI isn't just changing um what we built. It's it's actually changing who can build. And I think it's it's kind of a big difference um because it's making Drupal easier and more accessible to millions more people than what we have today. You saw it earlier in our demos. you know, AI generating full pages uh inside of Drupal canvas. Um, and so actually that perfectly aligns with our goals for Drupal CMS, which is to attract many more people to Drupal uh organizations, creators, marketers, all the people. And uh I think that's why AI is the way through the storm as I said and in an interesting way AI compensates for our weaknesses like our technical you know UI and our steep learning curve and and actually amplifies on top of that our strengths like our structured content and versioning permissions all the things and so if we succeed and I think we will um that means more projects more innovation and and more opportunity for all of us. Um so so yes I think it's the future is a little bit unclear and we have a lot of uncharted uh territory ahead of us but it's also not our first rodeo uh so to speak and I hope that you saw that we've you know have an incredible head start actually like we have a lot of features that our competitors don't have and along with that I feel like we have a strong moral compass that will guide us along the way and do all of these things Right. So, you know, and let's not forget that I think we are drawing this new map. You know, we're not just here to adapt to the change, do what is done to us. We're here to help shape what comes next. And so, we need more navigators. We need more people. And uh there's many ways that you can help. Like, we need navigators to contribute to Drupal CMS. We need navigators to build site templates. We need navigators to port modules to Drupal canvas. We need navigators to push the boundaries with Drupal AI and we need navigators to help explore this orchestration con um you know concept and and make sure that we're part of that as well. Now navigating this new world will require the right tools and people and fortunately we have both in our community. So thank you Vienna. Um thank you for having me. Thank you. Before you go, the next is our group photo. And we're all going to, if you want to, we're going to go to the group photo, which there will be people outside guiding you, but it's essentially up. We have to go up a floor. I don't know exactly how you get there, but there will be people people guiding you there. So, I'll see you upstairs. Thank you., KEYNOTE: Driesnote, YouTube, 01k9ytj6hfmjg4qcks79av7jvf.