The work that just happens: the DA Insider for September 2026

This post is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox each month.

October 2026 Drupal for Nonprofits Chat

Join us THURSDAY, October 15 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

We don't have anything specific on the agenda this month, so we'll have plenty of time to discuss anything that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits. Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google document at https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone.

Leading the Open AI Conversation: Drupal at Digital Leaders' AI Week 2026

The narrative around enterprise AI is changing. Digital leaders — from CMOs looking for campaign velocity to CISOs managing vendor risk — are no longer just asking for new AI features. They are asking for AI infrastructure they can actually trust. They want to know how to maintain brand sovereignty, ensure content provenance, and scale AI operations without creating unmanageable compliance risks.

This shift in the market perfectly aligns with the mission of the Drupal AI Initiative: to establish Drupal as the premier open-source AI platform for digital experiences.

This October, the conversation takes a national stage at Digital Leaders' AI Week 2026, the UK's largest online festival of AI learning. And the Drupal community is front and center.

While Drupal AI is fundamentally a technology initiative, its real-world impact comes from the thought leadership of the people building it. At AI Week, members of the Drupal ecosystem will share strategies that go far beyond the CMS, showing how open-source principles are solving the hardest challenges in enterprise AI adoption.

Here is a look at two key sessions you won't want to miss.

Optimizing Drupal Core CI

This is a cross-post of a blog by Nathaniel Catchpole, Senior Performance Engineer and Technical Lead at Tag1

State of Drupal presentation (September 226)

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

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.

Welcoming Four New Full Members to the Drupal Security Team

The Drupal Security Team is pleased to announce that four provisional members have been added as full members of the team: Pierre Rudloff (prudloff), Joseph Zhao (pandaski), Bram Driesen (bramdriesen), and Swan Kalata (akalata).

Speed, Safety, and Smarter Journeys: What Drupal AI 1.5 Means for Digital Marketing Leaders

Author: Will Huggins

In enterprise digital experience, the conversation around generative AI has shifted dramatically. Digital leaders are no longer asking whether AI can write a paragraph or spin up a page. They are asking: 

  • Can our AI deliver seamless customer journeys?
  • Can it scale without diluting our brand voice?
  • Will our IT and compliance teams actually approve it?

The release of Drupal AI 1.5 directly answers those questions.

Drupal AI after the DriesNote Rotterdam: what you can use today and what comes next

At DrupalCon Rotterdam on September 29, 2026, Dries Buytaert used his keynote to show how far Drupal has come and who it can reach next. Dries framed the keynote around three pillars that bring Drupal's strengths to more people: multilingual (reach people in more languages), JavaScript and headless (bring more developers and applications to Drupal), and AI (give people new ways to work with Drupal).

Dries Buytaert

Introducing the Drupal AI Demo

Author: Christoph Breidert, Product Lead, Drupal AI

Earlier this year, the Drupal AI Initiative set itself a clear goal: at DrupalCon Rotterdam, show one Drupal site where AI search, content review, chat-driven editing, and AI translation all work together on real content. Today we are delivering on that promise. The Drupal AI Demo is live, and Dries revealed it in the Driesnote.

Proof, not promises. Watch the six demos from the DriesNote Rotterdam

The DriesNote at DrupalCon Rotterdam made one argument above all: Drupal is light-years ahead of its reputation. The strongest evidence was on screen. These six demos show a platform that speaks more languages, welcomes JavaScript developers as first-class citizens, and treats AI assistants as another interface to Drupal, with governance built in.

Everything here is open source and available today. Here are the demos, with the story behind each one.

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