drupal

Since the launch of the Drupal CMS earlier this year, we’ve been hard at work documenting everything you need to build and maintain a site using this new, streamlined Drupal experience. Our goal is to make the Drupal CMS User Guide a go-to reference for site builders of all experience levels — especially those coming to Drupal for the first time.

In this post, we'll share an update on the current state of the guide, highlight two new sections we’re especially excited about, and show you how your team or company can help move the project forward.

As users click, scroll, and explore your website, something remarkable happens behind the scenes. A quiet engine hums in the background — not made of metal, but of code.

How partnerships benefit open source projects and their customers

Palantir has been contributing to open source projects for over 25 years, and we’re one of the world's leading contributors to the Drupal project and community. Over the years we’ve channeled our expertise into creating key modules now incorporated into Drupal core and helping organizations across healthcare, government, education, and more with Drupal solutions tailored to their needs.

We’re proud to announce that Palantir was recently accredited as a Top Tier Drupal Certified Partner. There are currently only three other companies in the entire world who have achieved this status based on their contributions to the project and community.

What is a Drupal Certified Partner?

The Certified Partnership program arose within the Drupal community to recognize the efforts of agencies that significantly contribute to the platform. Drupal Certified Partners are service providers that demonstrate three key characteristics:

• A high level of expertise in Drupal
• Commitment to contributing to Drupal core
• Building the Drupal community

The program is overseen by the Drupal Association, which requires firms to demonstrate how they meet these criteria. Organizations looking for Drupal partners can trust Drupal Certified Partnership status to signal that the company leverages best-in-class Drupal expertise.

Organizations that work with Drupal Certified Partners can trust they’re collaborating with experts who not only build with Drupal— they help build Drupal itself. 

What are some of Palantir’s Drupal contributions?

At Palantir, we have a decades-long track record of building, maintaining, extending and promoting Drupal. As a Top Tier Partner, our clients trust us to maximize the platform’s capabilities to deliver best-in-class web applications—learn more about our Drupal consulting services today.

EditTogether

One of our most recent Drupal innovations is EditTogether: a free, multi-user editing solution that allows you to write and edit exactly where you publish. Rather than relying on external tools for collaborative editing, Edit Together allows you to edit, comment, and version control any field on your Drupal site. This eliminates the need for copy-pasting between your editor and publisher, avoids vendor lock-in, and allows you to take advantage of Drupal’s commitment to data sovereignty in your editing workflows.

EditTogether was conceived as part of our client work for a division of a state agency that provides Medicaid services to its residents. Their content workflows were high-friction and inefficient, relying on transferring content between several proprietary tools for writing, editing, and publishing. After auditing the available solutions, we realized there wasn’t a highly customizable, extensible editor in Drupal that could meet our client’s rigorous security requirements—so our team of developers and architects built a rich text editor using ProseMirror tools and connected it to Drupal via the Drupal Text Editor API.

After successfully delivering the EditTogether solution to the client, we’re currently validating EditTogether against other use cases and preparing for wider release back to the community.

Drupal.org modernization

When the Drupal Association needed to modernize their own site, they trusted us to deliver. In 2024, the Promote Drupal team wanted to migrate Drupal.org from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 to show off Drupal’s most recent capabilities. Drupal.org is the online home of the Drupal community—so they needed to balance modernizing the site for new adopters and evaluators with making sure the 12,000 pages of documentation and 50,000 modules on the site remained continuously available for the entire community.

The Drupal Association wanted to work with a firm that not only knew Drupal inside out, but could oversee an incremental development plan to deliver the new content as fast as possible while still maintaining excellent service for the existing community. They chose Palantir.net to tackle the job: we delivered their needed site modernizations, dramatically improved test coverage, and built a new components-based design system to make adding new content a breeze.

We’re continuing to work with the Drupal Association to enhance their development team with added technical expertise and strategic consulting for the next phases of the modernization plan.

Why are partnerships vital to open source projects?

Open source technologies give developers and communities greater levels of transparency, flexibility, and financial accessibility in their digital projects—but maintaining open source projects can be challenging. Funding is frequently tight, and governance organizations are often overwhelmed with support requests. Open source solutions rely on organizations contributing their time, expertise, and money back into the technology to keep the lights on. However, many companies view open source contributions as simply a marketing opportunity or a “nice to have”—and the first thing to get cut when to-do lists start to get unwieldy.

The Drupal project wanted to incentivize more people to become active open source contributors— and this is where Certified Partnerships come in.

Partnerships reward consistent contribution

In exchange for meeting certain requirements (for example, a specified number of code commits, or donating a certain amount of money to the open source foundation), organizations can become certified partners of their communities—and enjoy a range of associated benefits.

Certified partnerships are also advantageous to organizations looking for agencies with proven expertise in a specific open source technology. When you work with a certified partner, you’re working with a company who actively helps to build and maintain the software you need. Partners have an intimate knowledge of the software they contribute to, and how to make the most of its capabilities. This knowledge and expertise also enable them to build custom solutions that work well with the core technology.

What makes the Drupal Certified Partner Program unique?

The Drupal Certified Partnerships program recognizes companies and organizations that have “gone above and beyond to sustain and grow the Drupal program”.

Drupal Certified Partnerships don’t just recognize code contributions—they also reward active community participation and encouraging Drupal adoption. Organizations qualify for Certified Partnership through a number of criteria:

• Contributions and commit credits, weighted towards the aspects of Drupal that are most frequently used and need the most work
• Proven case studies and success stories of delivering Drupal solutions to clients
• Annual financial sponsorship of the Drupal Association
• Event organization, participation, and sponsorship
• Staff acting in contributor roles, such as board members, mentors, or content moderators
• Drupal Association members on staff

The partnership program bolsters the thriving community around Drupal. When organizations are looking to partner with service providers with deep technical expertise, they have a robust marketplace of partners to choose from across regional markets and industries. 

Drupal Certified Partners offer solutions you can trust

Open source software (OSS) offers rigorously maintained, transparent solutions, without the hefty price tags of proprietary software— offering organizations of all sizes many incentives to default to open. According to the MIT Technology Review, “The free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry.” Indeed, the US Digital Services Playbook encourages federal agencies to evaluate open source solutions at every level of their stack.

When organizations decide to partner with external agencies for their digital transformation and modernization projects, there’s good news and bad news. The good news: numerous agencies build with open source solutions. The bad news: numerous agencies build with open source solutions.

Working with Drupal offers you transparency, flexibility, built-in accessibility, and data sovereignty. Working with a Drupal Certified Partner means you’re working with the people who build Drupal—and who are uniquely positioned to make the most of its powerful capabilities. As Drupal Association CEO Tim Doyle puts it, “Drupal Certified Partners are esteemed agencies that exhibit a profound level of expertise in Drupal, representing a select group of contributors crucial to the vitality and future prosperity of the Drupal ecosystem.”

We’ve been trusted by clients across numerous industries—and by the Drupal Association themselves—to build and deliver highly customized, performant Drupal solutions prioritizing user-centered design, accessibility, and turnkey security.

Learn more about our modular approach to custom Drupal development, or get in touch to discover how we can tailor our expertise to your organization’s needs.

A huge joint stable release of AI was made yesterday, where 10 modules were updated to 1.1.0. This is a major milestone in the Drupal AI brings a host of improvements and significant new features. 

Announcement by Marcus Johansson.

Some technical facts of the AI release:

• 105 issues fixed on AI Core, 75 issues fixed on AI Agents and roughly 25 issues on providers.
• 90 unique contributors on AI Core
• 244 files changed, 6500 lines added, 15044 lines removed on AI Core.

The most important update is function calling and a new agent framework, but here is a list of some other new features:

• Custom Operation Types
• Drush command to run AI
• Make the chatbot tell it what its doing, while its doing it
• Make it possible to add autocomplete fields to AI Automator Chains on CKEditor
• AI Content Suggestion can be based on the rendered HTML of the entity
• Normalized Structured Response
• Any many more

Some things directly connected to it:

• Drupal CMS AI agents have been updated and are now 90% effective up from 80%.
• A new test framework has been created so can see their effectiveness more clearly and non developers can create new tests.
• Improvements to AI search making use of function calling means they will more accurately search when you ask it to.
• Over 1000 people in the #ai slack
• An officially funded AI position and a Strategic initiative with multiple companies to make this sustainable
• 4600 installs of AI up from 3000 at Atlanta

Full details of Drupal AI 1.1.0

🚀 Major New Feature: Agentic Framework

The by far largest feature is the new Agentic framework where anyone can build agents without writing a single line of code. They are stored as configurations, meaning that you can build once, export and ship anywhere. And you can trigger them from anywhere you want - Chatbot, CLI, widgets, via an API etc.

Because Drupal is such a flexible and stable CMF, it will be the perfect agent runner. It adheres automatically to your contents permissions, files etc. while also keeping humans in the loop.

With the announcement of the new AI Initiative the future looks bright for Drupal and AI, the announcement is here if you haven't seen it.

🔧 Standards-Based Tooling

We’ve implemented the tooling in a MCP-standardized way, which opens the door for seamless integration with external tools—and makes it easier to share and reuse agents and tools across systems and languages.

🧠 Visual Tools for Everyone

Outside of this we have also added a visual AI Agents Testing Tool where you can setup complex scenarios and retest them over and over, without having to be a developer. An advanced agent tracing tool is also in the pipeline!

And in the 1.1.0 release we also have the possibility to setup the agents via the modeler api and BMPN.io in a graphical way thanks to Jürgen Haas! He also has a visual way of building tools on the way.

The hope is that everything we build, should be possible to use directly from the browser!

🙌 Thank You

I thought I would thank a list of people that have contributed to this, but I checked the unique contributors via git and got 90 people. So I will not try to list everyone, because I will surely forget someone - but special thanks to James Abrahams and FreelyGive Ltd for giving me the opportunity to work with this full time (and more :) )!

It will be really exciting what kind of agents people will build, we have already tried everything from agents that checks configuration diffs for you, to agents that builds components from images. Hopefully your imagination, and not the framework, will be the limit ;)

We have a MR that can be tested for using this within Drupal CMS as well.

For anyone interested in the new agent framework I did a presentation on it at Drupal Days Leuven and also have a longer developers preview. More videos and documentation to follow.

Welcome to the June 2025 DDEV Newsletter
This month: TYPO3 Community Budget Proposal (VOTE NOW), Randy is back from bikepacking, Running Old PHP versions, Vite and DDEV with WordPress, DDEV Architecture, and more.

TYPO3: Your Vote Requested Before June 16!

• Q3 TYPO3 Budget Proposal: Improved GitHub Codespaces and Dev Containers support - We’ve proposed significant enhancements to make DDEV shine in GitHub Codespaces and Dev Containers. This will help TYPO3 and all DDEV users. If you're a TYPO3 member, please cast your vote to help the DDEV proposal using the email you received from the TYPO3 Foundation before June 16. → Read more↗

What’s New

• Randy is back from bikepacking!
  We covered lots of territory out in the state of New Mexico and had a great time. I'll never forget though, laying in my tent when we had some coverage and watching the DDEV community continue on supporting each other so very successfully. And every support answer from Stas was exactly what I would have said. I'm proud and amazed by this wonderful community.
• Using DDEV to Spin Up A Legacy PHP Application
  A guest blog by TYPO3 contributor Garvin Hickling on how to use DDEV to run a (very) old PHP 5.3/MySQL 5.5 application → Read more↗
• Securing DDEV’s Future: Our Commitment to Financial & Community Sustainability Read more↗
• 106 GitHub Sponsors
  We now have 106 GitHub Sponsors! Breaking our aggregation script was a delightful milestone—thank you for believing in DDEV.
• May 2025 Advisory Group Meeting Notes → Read more↗. Join us July 2; ask for a calendar invitation in the DDEV Discord or the contact page.

Community Tutorials

• Integrating Vite and DDEV into WordPress → Read more↗
• AI-generated DDEV Architecture by DeepWiki, pretty impressive! → Read more↗
• Setup an existing WordPress multisite locally with DDEV (with Bonus Pantheon support!) from Kalamuna → Read more↗

Governance & Roadmap

• Apache Foundation-inspired Project Management Committee Exploration
  We’re exploring a governance model inspired by the Apache Foundation and Backdrop CMS to better support long-term sustainability and shared leadership. Take a look and join the conversation about future DDEV governance → Details↗

Sponsorship Status

• Monthly average income up from $7,639 to $7,809 (65% of $12,000 goal, up a percent since early May!). Every contribution helps sustain our work—thank you! → Become a sponsor↗

Stay in the loop—follow us and join the conversation

• Blog↗
• LinkedIn↗
• Mastodon↗
• Bluesky↗
• Discord↗

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

Drupal launches its AI Initiative with more than $100,000 in funding and a dedicated team to build AI tools for website creation and content management.
 

Imagine a marketer opening Drupal and with a clear goal in mind: launch a campaign for an upcoming event.

They start by uploading a brand kit to Drupal CMS: logos, fonts, and color palette. They define the campaign's audience as mid-sized business owners interested in digital transformation. Then they create a creative guide that outlines the event's goals, key messages, and tone.

With this in place, AI agents within Drupal step in to assist. Drawing from existing content and media, the agents help generate landing pages, each optimized for a specific audience segment. They suggest headlines, refine copy based on the creative guide, create components based on the brand kit, insert a sign-up form, and assemble everything into cohesive, production-ready pages.

Using Drupal's built-in support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the AI agents connect to analytics tools and monitor performance. If a page is not converting well, the system makes overnight updates. It might adjust layout, improve clarity, or refine the calls to action.

Every change is tracked. The marketer can review, approve, revert, or adjust anything. They stay in control, even as the system takes on more of the routine work.

Why it matters

AI is changing how websites are built and managed faster than most people expected. The digital experience space is shifting from manual workflows to outcome-driven orchestration. Instead of building everything from scratch, users will set goals, and AI will help deliver results.

This future is not about replacing people. It is about empowering them. It is about freeing up time for creative and strategic work while AI handles the rest. AI will take care of routine tasks, suggest improvements, and respond to real-time feedback. People will remain in control, but supported by powerful new tools that make their work easier and faster.

The path forward won't be perfect. Change is never easy, and there are still many lessons to learn, but standing still isn't an option. If we want AI to head in the right direction, we have to help steer it. We are excited to move fast, but just as committed to doing it thoughtfully and with purpose.

The question is not whether AI will change how we build websites, but how we as a community will shape that change.

A coordinated push forward

Drupal already has a head start in AI. At DrupalCon Barcelona 2024, I showed how Drupal's AI tools help a site creator market wine tours. Since then, we have seen a growing ecosystem of AI modules, active integrations, and a vibrant community pushing boundaries. Today, about 1,000 people are sharing ideas and collaborating in the #ai channel on Drupal Slack.

At DrupalCon Atlanta in March 2025, I shared our latest AI progress. We also brought together key contributors working on AI in Drupal. Our goal was simple: get organized and accelerate progress. After the event, the group committed to align on a shared vision and move forward together.

Since then, this team has been meeting regularly, almost every day. I've been working with the team to help guide the direction. With a lot of hard work behind us, I'm excited to introduce the Drupal AI Initiative.

The Drupal AI Initiative builds on the momentum in our community by bringing structure and shared direction to the work already in progress. By aligning around a common strategy, we can accelerate innovation.

What we're launching today

The Drupal AI Initiative is closely aligned with the broader Drupal CMS strategy, particularly in its focus on making site building both faster and easier. At the same time, this work is not limited to Drupal CMS. It is also intended to benefit people building custom solutions on Drupal Core, as well as those working with alternative distributions of Drupal.

To support this initiative, we are announcing:

• A clear strategy to guide Drupal's AI vision and priorities (PDF mirror).
• A Drupal AI leadership team to drive product direction, fundraising, and collaboration across work tracks.
• A funded delivery team focused on execution, with the equivalent of several full-time roles already committed, including technical leads, UX and project managers, and release coordination.
• Active work tracks covering areas like AI Core, AI Products, AI Marketing, and AI UX.
• USD $100,000 in operational funding, contributed by the initiative's founding companies.

For more details, read the full announcement on the Drupal AI Initiative page on Drupal.org.

Founding members and early support

Some of the founding members of the Drupal AI initiative during our launch call on Google Hangouts.

Over the past few months, we've invested hundreds of hours shaping our AI strategy, defining structure, and taking first steps.

I want to thank the founding members of the Drupal AI Initiative. These individuals and organizations played a key role in getting things off the ground. The list is ordered alphabetically by last name to recognize all contributors equally:

• Jamie Abrahams (FreelyGive) – Innovation and AI architecture
• Baddý Breidert (1xINTERNET) – Governance, funding, and coordination
• Christoph Breidert (1xINTERNET) – Product direction and roadmap
• Dries Buytaert (Acquia / Drupal) – Strategic oversight and direction
• Dominique De Cooman (Dropsolid) – Fundraising and business alignment
• Marcus Johansson (FreelyGive) – Technical leadership
• Paul Johnson (1xINTERNET) – Marketing and outreach
• Kristen Pol (Salsa Digital) – Cross-team alignment and contributor engagement
• Lauri Timmanee (Acquia) – Experience Builder AI integration
• Frederik Wouters (Dropsolid) – Communications and outreach

These individuals, along with the companies supporting them, have already contributed significant time, energy, and funding. I am grateful for their early commitment.

I also want to thank the staff at the Drupal Association and the Drupal CMS leadership team for their support and collaboration.

What comes next

I'm glad the Drupal AI Initiative is now underway. The Drupal AI strategy is published, the structure is in place, and multiple work tracks are open and moving forward. We'll share more details and updates in the coming weeks.

With every large initiative, we are evolving how we organize, align, and collaborate. The Drupal AI Initiative builds on that progress. As part of that, we are also exploring more ways to recognize and reward meaningful contributions.

We are creating ways for more of you to get involved with Drupal AI. Whether you are a developer, designer, strategist, or sponsor, there is a place for you in this work. If you're part of an agency, we encourage you to step forward and become a Maker. The more agencies that contribute, the more momentum we build.

Update: In addition to the initiative's founding members, Amazee.io already stepped forward with another commitment of USD $20,000 and one full-time contributor. Thank you! This brings the total operating budget to USD $120,000. Please consider joining as well.

AI is changing how websites and digital experiences are built. This is our moment to be part of the change and help define what comes next.

Join us in the #ai-initiative channel on Drupal Slack to get started.

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