The Drop Times: DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 – Attendee Insights: Part Two
The Drop Times: Shifting Gears: Product Mindset Takes Center Stage at the London Drupal Meetup
Drupal.org blog: Update to releases on project pages
We have updated the Releases section of project pages on Drupal.org, like Webform. We are phasing out “recommended by the project’s maintainer.” The green/yellow color scheme which had been based on that is now replaced with blue/grey. Stable releases have a blue background; alpha/beta/rc have a grey background.
This simplification results from Drupal’s move to semantic versioning and Composer. Composer has never used the “recommended” label. Drupal itself phased it out while gaining support for semantically-versioned modules and themes with Drupal 8.1. With semantic versioning, project maintainers “recommend” releases by making them stable.
With this design update, we also had an opportunity to use a little bit of Drupal.org’s new brand identity.
Follow #3509485: Remove “recommended” status for releases? for more details on the underlying changes.
Drupal Association blog: DrupalCon Unveils a Bold New Look in Collaboration with SixEleven
The Drupal community thrives on collaboration and innovation. As DrupalCon evolves as the premier gathering for Drupalists, the Drupal Association recognized the opportunity to rebrand the DrupalCon visual identity to better reflect the energy, ambition, and future of our global community. That’s why we teamed up with SixEleven to reimagine the DrupalCon brand, delivering a new logo, city icon, brand book, and visual identity that will shape the future looks of our flagship events.
Based in Turin, Italy, SixEleven is a digital creative agency, and long time collaborator and design partner for the Drupal Association. For SixEleven, innovation comes first and that is why their methodology is based on a growth hacking approach: they always find new creative, innovative, and analytical ways to hack the system and improve brands. Since 2009, SixEleven has specialized in reimagining brands from hospitality, luxury design, institutional/non-profit, corporate, education, and Public Administration sectors.
The Opportunity for Change
The recent rebranding of DrupalCon was a monumental effort driven by staff and community, resulting in an updated logo, font, and color palette that now define DrupalCon’s visual identity and aligns with the recent Drupal rebranding. This evolution helps make sure our brand reflects not only where we are today but also where we’re headed.
A Thoughtful and Collaborative Process
Our partnership with SixEleven was anchored in a shared commitment to creativity, clarity, and community values. The process began with an in-depth exploration of what DrupalCon represents: an intersection of opportunity, innovation, and connection. Through information-gathering sessions, creative exploration, and collaborative feedback, SixEleven worked closely with our leadership team to develop concepts that better capture the spirit of DrupalCon.
The Outcome
A refreshed DrupalCon identity that balances Drupal’s heritage with a modern, future-focused aesthetic. The new logo and visual identity are designed to be bold, flexible, and instantly recognizable, ensuring that DrupalCon continues to stand out in the open-source and tech conference landscape.
Looking Ahead
The rebrand will be unveiled in future DrupalCon, starting with Vienna 2025 and Nara 2025 with the logo debut and changes in event signage, marketing materials, and digital platforms, providing a unified and engaging experience for attendees, speakers, and sponsors alike.
The Drupal Association remains committed to evolving with our community and ensuring that our brand reflects the passion, innovation, and ambition that drive Drupal forward. We can't wait for you to see the new DrupalCon identity in action!
The Drop Times: A Quick Dive into Driesnote 2025 from DrupalCon Atlanta
Metadrop: VLSuite: web pages in record time
Building a website can be daunting, especially when time is limited or technical knowledge is needed. VLSuite comes to solve these difficulties, providing an easy tool that allows anyone to build quality pages within Drupal. It offers a features that streamline the process of creating web content, whether you are an experienced developer or new to website creation.
What is VLSuite and why will it make your life easier?
Visual Layout Builder (VLSuite) is a low-code tool that greatly improves the way Drupal websites are created.
Without requiring advanced programming skills, you can build professional-looking web pages in just minutes. It's ideal for those who want to focus on content without worrying about advanced technical setups.
The magic of VLSuite
Using VLSuite, each content block is fully customisable, which means that adjusting colours, columns, and layout is…
Specbee: SmartLinker AI for Drupal: An AI-powered internal linking tool for smarter content
Drupal Mountain Camp: Drupal Mountain Camp 2025 Wrap-Up
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
- Crawler rate limit
- Externalizing costs
- AI for U
- MidCamp 2024 session about YaleSites
- Tools
- Element 451
- Builder io
- Deque Axe Devtools
- Descript
- Opus clips
- Kapwing
- HeyGen
- Synthesia
- Text to video
Brian Piper - brianwpiper.com Mike Miles - Mike-miles.com mikemiles86
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Andrew Berry - lullabot.com deviantintegral
MOTW CorrespondentMartin 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