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January 2026 was a particularly exciting month for the Drupal community. We hope you enjoy our overview of the top Drupal news & articles from January!
Drupal Turns 25 Today
The most important piece of news in January was the 25th anniversary of the first-ever public release of Drupal. Fittingly, first on our January 2026 overview is a post from the Drupal Association celebrating this important milestone.
On the technical side, Drupal’s core strengths of extendability, customizability, and openness have ensured its continued relevancy. Today, the platform powers the websites of some of the world’s leading companies and organizations, including a number of universities and government organizations.
But, as the Drupal Association’s post also points out, the key factor in Drupal’s long-standing success has been its active global community. Just like Drupal has impacted the people making it and working with it, community members are the ones responsible for making it what it has grown into today.
Read more about Drupal’s 25th birthday
Europa Web Platform "Play to Impact" Drupal AI Hackathon 2026 with the European Commission
Next up, we have a post for the Drupal Starshot Initiative from Paul Johnson announcing the Europa Web Platform “Play to Impact” Drupal AI hackathon, sponsored and hosted by the European Commission. The event took place last week in the EC’s premises in Brussels, bringing together makers from across Europe to innovate with Drupal and AI.
Participants worked together in teams on one of two challenges. The first was geared towards content creators, with a focus on agentic AI automation tools. The second involved innovating with the recently released visual page builder for Drupal, Drupal Canvas. This first-ever Drupal AI hackathon represented a unique opportunity to capitalize on Drupal’s momentum and collaborate with some of the leading minds shaping the platform.
Read more about the first-ever Drupal AI hackathon
The Future of AI-Powered Web Creation Is People-First, Not-Prompt First
Along the same lines, we have another post on the Drupal AI initiative’s blog, this one written by Aidan Foster and talking about the importance of people-first AI-powered web creation. As Aidan argues, genuine human insight is invaluable in a market full of AI-generated content. AI can serve as a useful enhancement, not a replacement for human judgment.
The main section of his article is then dedicated to Drupal Canvas and a powerful feature it offers, the Context Control Center. He includes a short demo of using it to successfully build a landing page, and highlights the importance of a predefined strategy and clear guidelines for getting the best results from the AI features of Drupal Canvas.
Read more about people-first AI creation with Drupal Canvas
When backward compatibility became an advantage
Moving on, we have an interesting post from Dries about backward compatibility and how it became an advantage for Drupal. As he immediately points out, he used to argue that breaking backward compatibility was actually a core value of Drupal’s, but now, 20 years later, he admits that he was wrong about it.
The key change that made backward compatibility viable in Drupal was the introduction of test-driven development in 2008. Five years later, in 2013, Drupal adopted semantic versioning and first committed to backward compatibility. Today, Drupal has excellent test coverage which is likely to continue growing in the future.
Read more about backward compatibility in Drupal
Speed up your testing with Deuteros - Tag1 Insights
The next January article comes from Francesco Placella of Tag1, who presents a new PHP testing library for Drupal, Deuteros. An acronym for “Drupal Entity Unit Test Extensible Replacement Object Scaffolding”, Deuteros enables fast and efficient unit testing of Drupal entities. As Francesco argues, this has historically been a challenge in Drupal.
With Deuteros, test performance is significantly improved compared to Kernel tests. Francesco also includes a short demo showing the necessary steps for leveraging the library’s UnitTestCase. Although it is available as an open source library, Deuteros is currently still mostly used internally by Tag1, but could become the standard for Drupal testing in the future.
Read more about the testing library Deuteros
How an unclosed <em> broke Drupal’s JavaScript
We continue with an article from Mike Herchel, founder and lead developer at Dripyard, and maintainer of the Drupal Olivero theme. In his article, Mike talks about a recent problem he has encountered of JavaScript being completely broken, but only for one particular theme and on one particular page.
The initial process of elimination did not lead him to the root of the problem. But he did discover that an empty drupalSettings path was causing JavaScript not to load. Through further debugging, he found a missing <em> tag and properly closed it to ensure that drupalSettingsLoader.js was able to fetch the script without breaking the DOM.
Read more about how a markup mistake broke Drupal’s JavaScript
AI creates asymmetric pressure on Open Source
We also wanted to highlight another article from Dries, although this one is more related to open source more generally rather than focusing exclusively on Drupal. It exposes an important issue in many open source communities – namely, how AI brings a lot of pressure to open source maintainers, causing them to often stretch themselves too thin.
Dries gives the example of curl, the maintainer of which recently decided to close the project’s bug bounty program due to their security team becoming flooded with low quality submissions which very rarely turned out to be actual bugs.
While Drupal doesn’t have a bug bounty program, it still has certain contribution incentives that may attract low-quality contributions. Dries argues that, by using AI responsibly, we can actually leverage it to empower rather than hinder maintainers.
Read more about AI’s pressure on open source maintainers
Drupal CMS 2.0 is here: Visual building, AI, and site templates transform Drupal
Last but not least, we have the announcement of the release of Drupal CMS 2.0 from Ryan Witcombe. Built on Drupal Core 11.3., which boasts Drupal’s biggest performance improvement in over a decade, Drupal CMS 2.0 is one of the most groundbreaking new releases in the history of Drupal.
One of the main reasons for this is the introduction of the new visual page builder Drupal Canvas as the default editing experience. The newly added Mercury component library also brings a lot of additional flexibility for editors, as do AI features such as admin chatbots that greatly streamline the site building process.
