DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026: Canvas, AI, and a Reputation to Win Back

Sylvain Artigaux, Oct 8, 2026

From September 28 to October 1, 2026, DrupalCon Europe brought the Drupal community together in Rotterdam around two topics: AI and Drupal Canvas. Benjamin Garcia and I attended two days of talks there, and here's what we took away from it.

The Driesnote: Drupal is better than its reputation

The message of the Driesnote, held on September 29 by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, came down to one idea: Drupal deserves better than the image people have of it. That poor reputation dates back to a bygone era, while the product has evolved considerably: significantly better performance, Canvas, Drupal CMS. Dries even noted that AI tends to amplify this gap, for no good reason.

He opened his talk by discussing the host city. Rotterdam, rebuilt after the war, didn't try to recreate its past: it turned toward the future and became Europe's leading port. Drupal can do the same.

To close this gap — which Dries presented as the project's foremost challenge — the Drupal Association is launching an "Advocacy" program. It rewards, with contribution credits, actions that help people discover and understand Drupal, favoring those that reach beyond the circle of the already-convinced: a talk given at a non-Drupal event counts for more than one given at a Drupal event. Contributions are to be submitted at drupal.org/advocacy.

On the technical side, the keynote also featured a demo in which an AI agent queries a Drupal site via MCP tools, with MCP support exposed through simple PHP attributes.

Drupal 11.4 and Drupal CMS: faster, more accessible

Drupal 11.4 is noticeably more performant. One talk detailed how the team achieved this: by leveraging PHP's Fibers and closely analyzing, for every change, the additional queries and response time it introduces.

Drupal CMS carries an odd name, since Drupal is already a CMS. It's a version designed for beginners and simple needs: simplified installation, preinstalled modules, all ready to use in the manner of a WordPress, without losing Drupal's power as the project grows more complex. Another effect: the core may become more of a framework than a product, with several modules set to leave the core.

Canvas: a page builder that's come of age

Canvas, Drupal's new page builder, now handles multilingual content. It's a JavaScript interface that lets you place components on a page and see changes in real time. You compose pages very quickly, then turn them into reusable templates. JavaScript code components and headless mode (with Next.js or Astro) further expand the possibilities for front-end developers.

The demo, which started from nothing and ended up with a complete film management site, was impressive. Another demo paired Canvas with an AI chat module: on each part of the page, you could ask the AI what you wanted changed, and the result appeared instantly.

A few reservations for agency use, though:

  • what a client is allowed to modify will need to be carefully controlled;
  • Canvas assumes a theme in SDC format, which we don't currently have on any project;
  • it's also not well suited to multiple environments (staging, production).

From Ajax API to HTMX: simpler interactions

The talk "From Ajax API to HTMX: Evolving Drupal Interactions," led by Ruturaj Chaubey, Vighnesh Sadagopal, and Vidit Vijaykumar Anjaria (QED42), compared two ways of handling dynamic interactions.

Drupal's Ajax API requires creating a handler, proves tedious to maintain, and doesn't lend itself well to automated testing. HTMX does better: a single file, easy to call and testable. HTML attributes alone are enough to target page blocks and trigger the desired functions. The speakers reported response times cut by a factor of three.

HTMX is best suited to simple cases, like loading lists or autocomplete. Good news: it's already been part of the core since Drupal 11.3.

AI on everyone's lips

Migrating in days rather than months. One talk showed a Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 migration carried out with AI in a matter of days instead of months, content included. A few years ago, everything would have been wiped and rebuilt from scratch.

Clean code, for AI too. A very good session on writing clean code with AI: clean code remains essential for humans, but also, in the long run, to avoid the hallucinations and drift that make code hard to maintain.

KPIs that don't lie. One of my favorite talks was about KPIs in the age of AI. Every indicator is green, and yet clients are unhappy: that's Goodhart's Law. The system adapts to improve the KPIs, not to actually improve the code. The remedy: pair each KPI with an objective value, grounded in reality, to understand what's really going on.

Two concrete case studies

Mars: streamlining with AI. On Wednesday morning, a Mars (the confectionery company) representative explained how GDPR made him realize that maintaining so many different sites was a mistake. He rationalized everything under Drupal, with an AI-assisted creation and deployment system for each site in the group.

Union for International Cancer Control: putting AI in its proper place. Instead of yet another AI chatbot, the organisation left that role to humans and used AI to sort through World Cancer Day testimonial forms. The result: the volume of testimonials processed in ten days in 2025 (600) was processed in a single day in 2026.

What we took away

AI is everywhere, but humans remain the sole authority for merging, verifying, and approving.

  • Canvas is very powerful, but still needs to be validated for clients working with staging and production environments.
  • Drupal's performance keeps improving; it's still worth putting automated performance tests in place.
  • KPIs: even when they show extraordinary results, it's necessary to check that they reflect a real benefit for clients, and not just better numbers that have stopped meaning anything.

Accessibility: AI proposes, humans decide

The talk "AI-Augmented Accessibility" by Mike Gifford, given at DrupalCon on September 30 (slides), extends the same observation to a specific area: accessibility.

His starting point: organizations still fail, year after year, at basic automated tests. Periodic scans catch problems only once non-compliant code is already in production, when action should instead target the system rather than page by page.

The speaker ranked sources of truth in decreasing order of authority:

  1. The lived experience of people with disabilities;
  2. Manual audits by experts, grounded in WCAG;
  3. Deterministic DOM scanners, such as axe-core;
  4. Synthetic automation of assistive technologies (Guidepup);
  5. An AI's probabilistic suggestions, at the very bottom.

AI often generates richer image descriptions than an untrained author would, but it has no awareness of editorial context: it doesn't know when an image is purely decorative (alt=""). Passing automated tests doesn't prove a site is accessible, either.

He therefore proposed a five-step remediation pipeline: scan the site (Playwright and axe-core, plus a simulated screen-reader pass), contextualize the violations against WCAG rules, generate guarded fixes, revalidate, then have a human expert review the diffs and approve the pull request.

Takeaways for our projects: build accessibility in from the design stage via the design system ("shift left"), use accessibility statements as a feedback loop, train teams, and identify accessibility champions.

Behind the scenes

  • DrupalCon offers a free Drupal 11 certification, which can be taken on-site during the conference.
  • The next European DrupalCon will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland, from October 25 to 28, 2027.

Sources

The contextual details on the Driesnote (the Advocacy program, MCP, the Rotterdam analogy) and the Edinburgh dates come from the following pages: