AI has moved from a futuristic idea to a practical tool in many workflows, setting a standard across different industries. Universities aim to offer quicker, more adaptable, and student-focused education. Governments are working to supply safe, custom services on a large scale. New businesses are pushed to be quick and efficient from the start, and brands are competing to stay relevant.

Leaders face the problem of how to create smart, current digital experiences (DXP) that can grow without problems and without losing oversight.

Being a certified Drupal partner and long-time supporter of the Drupal community, we at Factorial understand the responsibility that comes with sponsoring and attending events across the globe. After being awarded the runner-up of the Sustainability Award at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 and, we want to share some of the practices and insights that helped us to reduce our environmental footprint—and hopefully inspire others to do the same.

Why sustainability is important

Setting aside the usual arguments, this topic deserves special attention, as the Drupal community is accustomed to events such as DrupalCon Europe, which take place in a different location each year. This makes it all the more important to consider environmentally friendly ways of travelling, staying and using event-related materials for catering or marketing purposes.

"With an event that changes place and country every year, we as sponsors and members of the Drupal community have a special responsibility when it comes to our climate. We're happy to inspire others to make lower-emission choices so that the CO₂ impact of DrupalCon remains as low as possible."
— Niklas Franke, Marketing & Community Manager at Factorial

How we reduced our ecological footprint

A Modular, Reusable Booth: We developed a modular booth concept that can be reused and resized for any event—from 2 to 10 square meters—without needing new construction. Every element of our booth—from the screws to the frames and printed panels—is reusable, foldable, and easy to transport. This approach helps us minimize waste while staying flexible and cost-efficient.

Sustainable Merchandise: As we welcome and actively promote climate-friendly alternatives, our T-shirts, tote bags, and other branded items are made exclusively from certified organic cotton. We work only with partners who align with our environmental and ethical standards.

Smart and Sustainable Travel: Several team members traveled to DrupalCon via public transportation, including one from the UK who traveled more than 2000 kilometers from Bristol to Barcelona and back. We also booked a hotel, certified for its sustainability efforts, right next to the venue, allowing the team to walk to the conference—eliminating the need for taxis or rideshares.

Work meets Vacation: During our visit to DrupalCon Barcelona, we encouraged our colleagues to combine vacations and private stays with the conference visit. In this way, we were able to reduce additional climate-damaging measures such as flights and contribute to reducing our team's carbon footprint.

Our Tips for Greener Events

As a second-place winner of the Sustainability Award in 2024, here are some practical takeaways for other companies looking to reduce their environmental footprint at events like the DrupalCon Vienna 2025:

• Design for reuse: A modular booth setup can grow or shrink depending on your needs—no waste, no fuss.
• Prioritize sustainable merchandise: Fewer, higher-quality items made with eco-friendly materials go further.
• Support public transport: Encourage slower, greener travel—and make it feasible by offering time or financial support.
• Choose walkable accommodations: Proximity to the venue cuts down on emissions and makes life easier for your team.
• Combine business and leisure travel: One trip, many purposes—less travel, more balance.

We’re honored by the recognition at DrupalCon—and more motivated than ever to keep improving. Sustainability is a shared responsibility, and together we can make our community events smarter, greener, and more future-friendly.

Let’s lead by example. See you at the next DrupalCon—with new ideas, and a lighter footprint.

About Factorial

Factorial is a software agency dedicated to creating state-of-the-art user experiences with open-source technologies. As active contributors to the Drupal community, our team of 50+ experts combines technical excellence with a deep commitment to accessibility, usability, and sustainability. We don’t just build digital ecosystems — we aim to build them responsibly.

Blog Author: Niklas Franke, Marketing and Community Manager at Factorial

Artificial intelligence in content management systems enables the automation of publishing processes that previously required manual verification. By using the appropriate modules in Drupal, you can configure a system that automatically approves or rejects content based on predefined AI criteria. In this article, I will present a complete guide to configuring such a system, along with practical examples. Feel free to read the post or watch an episode of the Modern Drupal series.

Understanding the templates and CSS variables for LocalGov Drupal means you can design at scale, quickly, with no loss of quality.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, the new Contribution Records system is being integrated into our current Drupal.org issues, with the main goal still being the move to GitLab issues.

We have had for a few weeks view-only links pointing to the new system. The moment to start editing that information in the new system, and therefore no longer in the Drupal.org issue itself, is the next step.

When we do the switch, all credit information will be managed in the new system. Maintainers will be able to assign credits, and contributors will be able to set their organization attributions (as employer and/or customer), and save their default values for future attributions.

All issue participants are brought automatically from the Drupal.org issue to the Contribution Record, so you won't need to add contributors twice.

As a maintainer, you'll only need to decide who you give credit to.

And as a contributor, you'll only need to review your attribution. 

If you want to report bugs or give feedback you can do it via the issue queue for the Contribution Records module.

Hey Golems` readers, and welcome! CI/CD is such a fantastic tool for software development. If you've ever dealt with microservices, you already know how painful a slow or bloated CI/CD pipeline can be. When working with microservices, every second spent compiling and adding steps to the pipeline just crushes productivity and increases technical debt. 

Now imagine that there are not one or two such services, but a few dozen. Each service runs independently, but they all need to sync up and work as one seamless mechanism! And let’s be real—without a well-optimized CI/CD pipeline, that’s just not going to happen. Microservices are freedom from one side and quite a challenge from the other, right? 

Governments around the world increasingly rely on Open Source software to power digital services that millions of people depend on every day. From national websites to public health systems, much of this infrastructure is built on tools that are freely available yet maintained by a small number of contributors with limited support. As Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, argues in his recent blog post, this growing dependency makes it urgent for governments to move from passive use to active contribution. The idea is not to replace the open, volunteer-driven nature of these projects but to ensure they are resilient, well-maintained, and able to serve the public reliably over time.

Dries outlines a compelling evolution of Open Source: starting with volunteers, expanding with commercial sponsorship, and now entering a phase where government stewardship is necessary. He points to examples like Denmark's national plan to adopt Open Source and Germany's investment through its Sovereign Tech Fund as signs of progress. Yet most governments still contribute very little, even when their digital infrastructure depends heavily on these projects. This imbalance leaves essential services vulnerable and places too much pressure on a small group of maintainers. The sustainability of the software that supports the public sector cannot be left to goodwill alone.

What is needed now is a shift in mindset and policy. Governments already invest in roads, schools, and utilities as part of their public mandate. Digital infrastructure should be treated the same way. Dries’s call to action is timely and clear: fund the people and projects that hold up the systems we rely on. Open Source has become public infrastructure in everything but name. It is time we support it with the seriousness and structure that public infrastructure requires.

INTERVIEW

• Colan Schwartz on Open Source and the Realities of Scaling with Drupal

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Drupal AI Initiative Reaches $175,000 with 10 New Supporting Makers
• CiviCRM Now Offered on DrupalForge.org for Instant Site Deployment
• Drupal Association Invites Participation in 2025 Business Survey
• MCP Drupal Module 1.2.0-alpha1 Released: Brings Low-Code LLM Integration to Drupal
• Drupal AI Initiative Secures $300K and Announces 15 Makers to Drive AI Development
• Dries Buytaert Urges Governments to Fund Open Source as Essential Digital Infrastructure

EVENTS

• DrupalCamp Burkina Faso 2026 Scheduled for April in Ouagadougou
• Drupalers Association Pune Launches Fundraiser to Support DrupalCamp Pune 2025
• Booth Sponsorships Open for DrupalCon Vienna 2025
• Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2025 Session Schedule Released

ORGANISATION NEWS

• Acquia Announces Chris Tranquill as Chief Executive Officer

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, Bluesky, and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely,
Alka Elizabeth, 
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

One of the first things I was taught when I started working with Drupal was "Never hack Core!" and this adage still holds in Drupal 11 as much as it did back in Drupal 7. This tutorial will will explain the correct way to apply as-yet unreleased bugfixes and features to Drupal core or a contrib module.

Prior knowledge

For the this article I will assume that you are familiar with:

• Composer and how to run its commands
• The concept of a patch and how to create or obtain one

Introduction

The package that enables patching is called Composer Patches (see cweagans/composer-patches). The best description of this packagecomes from the documentation:

A simple plugin for Composer that allows you to apply patches to your dependencies.

Installation

The Composer Patches package is installed in the same way as a Drupal module, the command is: composer require cweagans/composer-patches:^2.0

Define patches

Details of all required patches are described in the "extra" section of composer.json, e.g.: