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We’re bringing you our monthly overview of top Drupal articles and news. We hope you enjoy the October selection!
State of Drupal presentation (October 2025)
In October, the Drupal community gathered in Vienna for the annual DrupalCon Europe, which featured the traditional State of Drupal keynote from Dries Buytaert. This time, the focus of his Driesnote was on the impact of AI and how Drupal is adapting to it.
The specific sections he talked about were Site Templates, Drupal Canvas (formerly Experience Builder), the Drupal AI Initiative, the accidental AI advantage of the architectural decisions behind Drupal 8, and orchestration as a way for agencies to adapt to the impact of AI.
As usual, a recording as well as the slides of the presentation are available for anyone who couldn’t attend or would like to revisit Dries’s keynote.
Read more about the State of Drupal in October 2025
International Splash Awards Spotlight Excellence in Drupal Innovation at DrupalCon Vienna 2025
One of the events included in DrupalCon Vienna was the awards ceremony of the 2025 International Splash Awards. The yearly Splash Awards are intended to recognize companies for Drupal excellence across a number of categories such as commerce, non-profits, and government & public services / healthcare.
With a record number of submissions, this year’s edition of the Splash Awards highlights a selection of 14 projects, a winner and a runner-up for 7 different categories. Congratulations to the companies that got recognized this time around!
Read more about the 2025 International Splash Awards
State of Drupal Open University
Next on this month’s list, we have an update from Jean-Paul Vosmeer about the state of a more recent community initiative, the Drupal Open University Initiative. Its mission is to introduce Drupal into academic / education environments in order to bring it closer to younger generations of developers and tech enthusiasts.
The initiative rests on four key pillars: Courses and Teachers; Universities and Schools; Community; and alignment of Drupal Open University with broader goals of the Drupal community. The roadmap is still in progress, so those who want to get involved can start participating at this early stage and help contribute to the future of Drupal.
Read more about Drupal Open University
Drupal: The CMS for Responsible AI
Moving on, we have an article by Bálint Pekker of Cheppers about why Drupal is the perfect fit for a responsible implementation of AI. As he highlights, the three main benefits that Drupal brings are freedom, structure, and community support.
The article breaks down the specific Drupal patterns that make it such a good fit for AI. These are: editorial acceleration, metadata and SEO, taxonomy and tagging, accessibility, multilingual publishing, search and discovery, and site-aware assistance.
Still, as Bálint points out, keeping people in charge remains key for making the best use of AI. According to him, the best results come through mutual review.
Read more about Drupal as the CMS for responsible AI
Customizing Drupal Paragraph types with Style options
Next up, we have an article about customizing Drupal Paragraph types with the style_options module, written by Mario Hernandez. The module provides a developer-focused alternative to creating dynamic components via the UI, as it stores all configuration options in a YAML file.
In the article, Mario focuses on one of the three plugins that Style Options provides – the CSS Class plugin used for attaching custom CSS classes to components, and he breaks down all the different available style options. It’s important to note that, since Drupal tracks options selected by users through the options index value, altering their order is likely to result in functionality issues.
Read more about the Drupal Style Options module
Drupal to Enhance Security and Developer Tools thanks to Sovereign Tech Fund Investment
We continue with an announcement from the Drupal Association about receiving €201,000 in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, a program by Sovereign Tech Agency that aims to support open digital infrastructure. This investment is intended to improve Drupal's GitLab infrastructure, with a particular focus on security, testing efficiency, and design tools.
The specific areas of improvement this will enable are migrating security issue management to GitLab, optimizing CI/CD testing, improving tools for UX & design contributors, and sharing the DA’s CI strategy with other open source projects.
Read more about the funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund
1 million dollars raised to accelerate innovation in Drupal AI
The next piece of news from October also concerns successful funding of another key Drupal initiative. Namely, Paul Johnson announced a $1 million investment into the Drupal AI Initiative from new Makers. As Dries also stated in his DrupalCon Vienna keynote, this represents the largest fundraising effort in the entire history of Drupal.
Six new organizations have joined the initiative: Pronovix, Pantheon, OpenSense Labs, Vardot, Foster Interactive, and Esinergia. This brings the total number of Maker organizations to 22. Paul’s article also features a short interview with Dominique De Cooman who leads the fundraising effort for the Drupal AI Initative.
Read more about the $1 million investment in Drupal AI
The Orchestration Shift
Last but not least, we have another article from Dries, this one about a phenomenon that he calls “the Orchestration Shift”. In his words, this means that “the tools we use to connect systems are becoming as important as the systems themselves.”
This is the reason why he decided to invest in the open source orchestration platform ActivePieces, resulting in a Drupal integration and an orchestration module for Drupal which both shipped right before DrupalCon Vienna.
The shift that he describes could have a substantial impact on Drupal, making it evolve into a key node in the broader orchestration network.
