Drupal Mountain Camp: Drupal Mountain Camp 2025 Wrap-Up

Drupal Mountain Camp 2025 Wrap-Up admin Mon, 03/24/2025 - 08:03

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for Drupal Mountain Camp 2025 in Davos! It was an incredible few days packed with insightful sessions, engaging workshops, and of course, fun social events such as Fondue & Night Walk, Flambé Coffee, Pub Quiz, Snowboarding, and Skiing.

📸 Media Highlights

Catch the full recap by Dan Lemon in this video: 📺 This was Drupal Mountain Camp 2025

Relive the magic through our official event photos:

📊 Event Stats at a Glance

👥 77 Participants

☕ 250+ Coffees Consumed

🧅 64 Fondues Enjoyed at Schatzalp

👣 ~30 Brave Walkers Down from Schatzalp

💰 11 Generous Sponsors

📚 12 Core Org-Team Members

✅ 6 In-Room Volunteers

From insightful sessions to snowy strolls and warm fondue nights, every moment was pure joy!

🙌 A big thanks to our fabulous masters of ceremony:

 

❤️ Heartfelt Thanks to Our MountainCamp Sponsors

Gold Sponsors:

Silver Sponsors:

Social Event Sponsors:

Media Partners:

 

🎙️ Rock Star Speakers

Thank you to our incredible lineup of speakers, who shared knowledge, sparked ideas, and inspired us all:

 

💪 The Dream Team: Core Organizers

This event wouldn’t happen without this brilliant crew:

🤝 Our On-Site Heroes

Hats off to our awesome volunteers who kept things running smoothly:

📣 Got Feedback?

We’d love to hear from you! Please fill out our quick form: Feedback Form

 

Thank you once again for bringing your energy, warmth, and ideas to Drupal Mountain Camp 2025.

Until next time — stay curious, stay connected, and keep drupalin'! 💙

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #494 - AI in EDU

Today we are talking about AI in EDU, how it can provide efficiencies, and how you might start using it today with guests Brian Piper & Mike Miles . We’ll also cover External Entities as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/494

Topics
  • How are you using AI with your team at Rochester
  • How are you using AI with your team at MIT
  • What are the AI policies at your institutions
  • On the ingestion side how do you manage consumption
  • Tips and tricks to incorporate AI into your work
  • Can you talk more about using AI to distribute content outside the web
  • Do you have tips for managers
  • How have you seen EDUs using AI other than as assistive technology
  • What are your favorite tools
  • Have you done adversarial testing
  • How does AI in Drupal impact EDU
  • Where do you see AI in EDU in the future
Resources Guests

Brian Piper - brianwpiper.com Mike Miles - Mike-miles.com mikemiles86

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Andrew Berry - lullabot.com deviantintegral

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to connect your Drupal website to an external data source, to include their datasets into the presentation of your Drupal-managed content? There’s a module for that
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in May 2015 by attiks, though the most recent release is by Colan Schwartz (colan), a fellow Canadian
    • Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta1 and 3.0.0-beta4, the latter of which supports Drupal 10 and 11
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained, latest release was less than a month ago
    • Security coverage (though technically needs a stable release
    • Test coverage
    • Documentation: user guide
    • Number of open issues: 77 open issues, 3 of which are bugs against the 3.x branch, though one is marked fixed now
  • Usage stats:
    • 679 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • The External Entities module lets you map fields from external data sources to fields on a “virtual” entity in Drupal. This allows for external data to be used with Drupal’s powerful features like Views, Entity Queries, or Search API as well as use your local Drupal site’s theme to theme data from an external source
    • The module does provide a time-based caching layer for external entities, but you can also implement a more custom cache expiration logic through custom code
    • External entities can also have annotations, essentially Drupal-managed information that will be associated with the external entity, and accessed as a normal field through all Drupal field operations. This could allow you to have Drupal-based comments on information from a different website, for example
    • There is a sizeable ecosystem of companion modules, to help you connect to different kinds of external storage, as to help you aggregate data from multiple sources
    • In my Drupal career I’ve worked on a number of higher ed websites, and the ability to display externally-managed data is a pretty common requirement, either from an HRIS system to show staff and faculty data, or a courseware solution like Banner. I thought this would be an interesting tangent to today’s topic

Droptica: How to Build an Inclusive Website? Drupal Accessibility Tips and Tricks

Image removed.

An accessible website ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can interact with and benefit from your content, leading to a broader audience reach and improved user experience. However, many websites fail to meet accessibility standards, causing frustration for users and legal risks for businesses. Drupal offers robust accessibility features and best practices, making it easier to build inclusive, compliant, and user-friendly digital experiences.

The Drop Times: AI in CMS: Power Tool, Not Autopilot

If AI can write, design, and optimize content—what’s left for CMS platforms to do?

That’s the question Dries Buytaert tackled in How AI could reshape CMS platforms. As the founder of Drupal, he knows how content systems evolve—and he believes AI won’t replace CMS platforms but will become a core layer within them.

“I believe the future of CMS platforms is not about replacing humans, but about augmenting them with intelligent capabilities.” 

In platforms like Drupal, these changes are already taking shape. The OpenAI module allows editors to generate summaries, titles, and full paragraphs right inside the CMS, speeding up content creation. AI models are also being used to scan content and generate metadata—like taxonomy terms, alt text, or suggested categories—automating tasks that once took manual effort. Large language models are beginning to improve search by understanding context, not just keywords. AI-powered personalization is helping tailor content based on user behaviour, similar to how recommendation engines work on streaming platforms.

These are powerful tools. But here’s the catch: most of these tasks can be done by humans—just not as quickly.

And sometimes, speed isn’t the point.

An AI can write a product description or suggest metadata, but it might miss nuance, voice, or the context behind a piece of content. That’s where human editors still hold the line—especially when it comes to brand consistency, editorial judgment, and ethical decision-making.

Joshua Mitchell echoed this balance in his response post, Some Thoughts About How AI Could Reshape CMS Platforms:

“AI and human editors will increasingly work in parallel, requiring more sophisticated versioning for both content and configuration.”

This is a real technical concern. If AI is generating drafts or modifying layouts, we need version control systems that treat AI edits like any other pull request: trackable, reversible, and reviewed.

Stephen Reny, President and CEO of Acquia, pointed out that the pace of this shift is fast:

“Much of this change will happen in a timeframe that will seem like warp speed compared to prior evolutions. The future is now...”

Michael Anello added another layer: governance.

“Drupal should work to position itself as a leader in AI governance. I’m only comfortable offering AI functionality to clients that keeps a human in the loop (before any 'save' happens.)”

That’s where I agree most. AI is essential—it can handle routine, repetitive tasks in a CMS. But leaning too hard on it means risking quality, trust, and control. We shouldn’t treat AI as a shortcut to replace thinking. Instead, treat it as a power tool: use it with care, skill, and oversight.

Some tasks—like idea generation, auto-tagging, or suggesting layouts—are ideal for AI support. But final content approval, editorial tone, ethical considerations, and big-picture planning? Still best left to humans.

With that, let's move on to the important stories from the past week.

Interview

Discover Drupal

Events

Drupal Community

Organization News

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor, The DropTimes. 

Wim Leers: XB at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025

I’ll be at DrupalCon Atlanta, where my primary goal is to connect and talk to all of you in the Drupal community who have questions about Experience Builder: hopes, concerns, aspirations, ideas, insights, anything!

I won’t be talking at DrupalCon this time, but:

XB is a vast undertaking. We don’t yet have detailed plans for most things. We don’t yet have designs for most things.
We do have Lauri’s mind for the vision. The dozen or so of us working in its code depths know there are countless unfinished parts. That pains us, but it’s necessary to get to painting the vision for all of you, which you’ll see during the DriesNote.

Chances are talking to you will reveal some missed parts.

Which is why this is the perfect time to talk to me: we’re currently planning Q2 and Q3. In my role as Tech Lead, I want to hear your steepest challenges, to make sure we have a high degree of confidence of (eventually) being able to meet those challenges 😊

I’ll distill everything discussed during DrupalCon in a future blog post. About to leave for the airport now, see you there! 🛫

P.S.: the weekly blog posts are lagging, by months. Urgent things keep getting in the way from me catching up. But rest assured, what Dries will show, is way, way further than what you’ve seen on this blog!

Electric Citizen: AI and Alt Text

Image removed.

New AI-powered tools and techniques make it easier than ever to manage content in your CMS.

While they’re not necessarily the most “earth-shattering” advances in technology, for anyone in charge of managing website content and media, there have been a series of incremental improvements to the editorial experience.

One small but very useful new tool now available in Drupal is the AI Image Alt Text module. 

Based on the new suite of AI modules now available in Drupal, this tool is able to visually analyze images loaded to the website by editors, and automatically suggest a text description (alt-text) for each one. It does so by connecting your CMS to an AI-provider such as Open AI or Anthropic–they supply the image analysis capabilities while Drupal handles the image uploads and text editing.

The Drop Times: Aten Design Group Gears Up for DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 with Talks, Tools, and Community Spirit

Aten Design Group is bringing big energy to DrupalCon Atlanta 2025! Expect insightful sessions, live demos, creative giveaways—and a sneak peek at tools like Mercury Editor and Layout Paragraphs. Don’t miss their booth or the buzz around their one-of-a-kind sketchbook drop!
Subscribe to