DrupalSouth Wellington 2026
Contribution Day @ 93E Cuba St, Te Aro, conference @ Harbourside Function Venue
12th May to 14th May
| Title | Summary | Track |
|---|---|---|
| Back to the Future: A look at web development around the millenium | With a bit of sentiment running through the veins, Alistair is coming armed with a virtualised old school Windows setup. It will be a bit of a look back to how the web once was and an attempt to use some back in the day tools to make and run something locally. Can he still do it by hand? How do some of these older browsers work when connecting to modern websites? Can Alistair make his first computer's hard drive work and recover a previous lifetime or will he have to make a fresh virtual machine to try and replicate that old feeling? Alistair will also background his experience and how he got started. Happy for this to be a 30 or 45 minute session. Happy for this to be under People and Culture or Other too, however you might want to split it. I am flexible. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Let's get quizzical! | An interactive quiz show for 4 lucky crowd participants. We would have buzzers and buttons to pick answers by the contestants. I would consider this one pf those things post break/post lunch to get people back into the groove of things. Seemed to work with those sessions at 2025 DrupalSouth Community Day, Canberra... 30 or 45mins, can make it flexible. Id bring all my relevant hardware and software so other than being able to plug in laptop to screen, no extra hardware from any else would be needed. Id be using the buzz controllers that were from a series of ps2 games - they are usb, 4 controllers on one cable set, you can track the button presses on each and track them via javascript to capture information. So its a bit of tooling but should make a session interactive and hopefully fun. |
Other ... |
| Terraform Upgrade Triage: Rescuing Outdated Stacks Without the Downtime | When hosting hundreds of Drupal sites across a massive multi-tenant operation, your Terraform dependency tree can quickly become a "frozen" liability. One rigid dependency or an outdated provider can block critical upgrades, stalling performance gains and cost-optimization efforts. But what do you do when the infrastructure is too critical to tear down and too complex to update easily? In this session, we’ll deconstruct a real-world "impossible" upgrade of a high-scale Terraform codebase. We will move beyond theory to demonstrate a concrete, scriptable migration path that replaces the state of critical infrastructure without touching the underlying resources. Key Takeaways: - The Anatomy of a Blocker: Identifying the specific friction points in our Drupal-focused Terraform stack that lead to upgrade paralysis. - Zero-Destruction State Migration: A step-by-step walkthrough of a repeatable strategy to "re-parent" existing cloud resources under a modernized codebase. - Automation for Autonomy: Scripting the migration path to ensure the solution is repeatable across different regions and time zones. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Reproducible Drupal Environments The Easy Way: A Hands-On Look At Using Drupal With Nix & NixOS | Take the guesswork out of your CI/CD pipeline with reproducible software builds that result in the exact same environment for everyone, every time-- all without touching containers, udev rules, or virtual environments. Using Nix, a cross-platform functional package manager, it is possible to develop, deploy, and maintain fully reproducible software environments (and even entire operating systems) with a single text file on native hardware. In this talk we'll explore both the technical and practical aspects of using Nix to handle different parts of the CI/CD pipeline including a new way of solving the "well, it works on my machine" problem, building reproducible Drupal environments you can actually share with your colleagues, and running production-grade Drupal websites on the exact same software platform they were built on. We'll cover some common pitfalls of modern solutions like Docker and K8s, as well as some of the benefits (and a few unique challenges) that using Nix presents, such as how to work with immutable file systems, how to build truly reproducible software, and the possible impacts of using functional programming in your systems architecture. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| How Drupal is keeping pace with a changing digital market and how it can benefit your organisation | The past two years have seen major changes in the Drupal market from myriad angles: Budget cuts as clients deal with market uncertainty; Immense competition from hundreds of SAAS and Enterprise CMS products; Broader market disruption from the rapid growth of AI; the list goes on. But Drupal, now in its 26th year as a CMS product, has continued to anticipate where the market is moving and innovate to keep pace. The pace of this change has been rapid, from the launch of Drupal CMS to the enterprise-ready Drupal Core 11.3 and the global Drupal AI Initiative, all while the Drupal Association is investing heavily in product marketing. So how will this benefit your organisation, whether you're a digital agency building sites for clients, or a client currently using Drupal or considering adopting it? This talk will draw on Owen's six years as a Director and Chair of the Drupal Association Board, looking at the bigger picture as to why certain strategic decisions have been made about Drupal and what their implications are for the future. | Keynote |
| Premium Theme + AI - the new standard | Premium Drupal themes have come a long way, but they still require theme knowledge, configuration, customisation, and content to really shine. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how AI tools can shortcut this initial friction - generating structured content, adapting theme components, and even handling configuration decisions. This lets site builders and clients build out brilliant pages and sites at a fraction of the traditional cost and time. I'll walk through using Drupal Canvas AI alongside premium themes to deliver outsized return on even modest budgets. I'll explore how modules like Context AI can give your site genuine awareness of its own content and structure, enabling smarter suggestions and automated workflows. I'll also show how custom AI agents can be configured to handle repetitive tasks - from populating content types to generating SEO metadata - freeing you up to focus on the creative and strategic work that actually moves the needle. This is applicable to all marketers/agencies/drupal enthusiasts, giving practical techniques you can apply immediately. |
User Experience & Content |
| The Adaptive Interface: Designing User-First Front Ends in the Age of AI | The user interface is no longer a fixed screen in the age of AI. Instead, it is a conversation that changes based on the user, the content, and the context. These "adaptive front ends" can change the layout, amount of information, language and help in real time, but they will always be consistent, easy to use, and under the user's control. Adaptive UIs are systems that change their content, presentation, and behavior on the fly to improve the user experience. The design challenge is to make that change feel helpful (not creepy) and to keep users in charge. ScienceDirect The talk connects modern UI design with what the Drupal ecosystem is working on right now: the Drupal AI Initiative (which is built on an already-large AI module ecosystem) and the core "AI" module, which lays the groundwork for integrating language models and automating workflows. Drupal.org+1 People who come will get a plan for the signals to use (and the ones to stay away from), "design system as policy" patterns to control generative UI, controls for transparency and override, and ways to measure efficiency, satisfaction, and trust—not just clicks. | User Experience & Content |
| Content design systems: A whole of government approach to content | Many government jurisdictions face similar challenges in managing complex digital ecosystems made up often of hundreds of websites and services, managed by different teams with varying levels of expertise. When this goes wrong, there is chaos for those managing the sites and worse still, for the users visiting them. Now, as AI tools proliferate, the stakes for this content chaos is higher. How can we help Governments rein in the content chaos by creating structure and consistency for the business and for users and for AI? At Weave, we believe that a whole of government approach and documented content design systems are key to solving these problems. In this talk, we detail the work we completed at Weave Content Strategy and Design to bring clarity, structure and a shared central source of truth to a state government’s digital presence through a Whole of Government content framework, content strategy, proposition, information model and content design system. Session length: 45 minutes including 5 mins of Q&A |
User Experience & Content |
| From Prompt to Pull Request: Human-led, AI-assisted workflows for building Drupal features | AI tools are everywhere - but despite the hype, they are neither autonomous builders nor replacements for experienced developers. In this talk, we’ll look at a realistic, production-tested workflow where developers stay firmly in control, and AI agents act as fast, tireless implementers of clearly defined ideas. Using real examples from consumer-facing Drupal sites, we’ll walk through a feature development lifecycle that starts with human planning and ends with tested, reviewable code. This includes: - Planning features before prompting - Using AI agents (including cloud-based code agents) to implement scoped tasks - Generating tests, wiring integrations, and linking code - without skipping engineering fundamentals - Reviewing, refining, and owning the final outcome as a developer Rather than treating AI as a magic button, this session shows how to use it as a force multiplier: accelerating delivery while preserving code quality, architectural intent, and developer accountability. Attendees will leave with a clear mental model for where AI fits into modern Drupal development - and where it absolutely does not. |
Drupal Development |
| Drupal CMS, site templates and beyond | Drupal CMS 2.0 launched in January, complete with Drupal Canvas and site templates! What does this mean for building Drupal sites? And what's next? Some topics I may cover: * How we're using Canvas and what it offers * Features and areas we're working on now * Plans for future versions ongoing * What we're looking for from contributors * How we defined the strategy and scope * Using the strategy to define the roadmap and what it looks like now * Highlights from the development of Drupal CMS 2.0 and what we learned |
Drupal Development |
| It Worked in the Demo: Web Components, SDC, and What Happened Next | Web Components and Single Directory Components (SDC) are often shown through demos and proof-of-concepts. That’s useful - but their real value only becomes clear when we start dealing with design systems, long-term maintainability, and evolving platform capabilities. This talk reflects on a Shoelace + Web Components + Drupal SDC experiment that started as a demo, and what changed once real-world concerns came into play. Once the demo phase is over, practical concerns like editor experience, accessibility, governance, and long-term maintenance quickly become more important than the initial excitement around the technology. Using the idea of “smart” interfaces - such as enhanced search fields, automatic suggestions, and field-level assistance - as concrete examples, the session explores how Web Components can work as stable UI contracts, while Drupal continues to own content, workflows, and governance. The focus is on practical architecture decisions: what belongs in Web Components, what should stay in Drupal, and how “smart” behaviour can be added as progressive enhancement rather than embedded complexity. Attendees will leave with a clearer way to reason about where Web Components fit in a Drupal architecture, including where they add value, where they don’t, and how this approach can support design-system thinking without creating fragile or over-engineered solutions. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Speed Up Your Site's Frontend With PartyTown | In this talk, we'll explore a frontend performance tool called PartyTown: a JavaScript library made by Quik that enables you to run selected JS scripts in a separate thread through the use of a service worker. Traditionally, web browsers render all of the parts of your webpage using a single CPU thread. If you have a lot of third-party scripts, for instance, that can delay when your first-party scripts are executed. With PartyTown, you can tap into some considerable performance savings using multi-threaded computation to process all of your site assets at the same time, all without having to tear apart your frontend in order to do it. We'll cover some of the technical considerations for using this library, some general performance impacts, and how to get this library integrated into Drupal using a new contributed module. We'll also take a look at which types of projects are good candidates for use with PartyTown, and discuss the trade-offs of running only parts of your website in an isolated service worker context. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| An introduction to DDev and then how extend it with a mix of technologies | You might have done a Drupal tutorial that uses DDev, but do you know to reuse it in your other projects that have specific requirements? For example, how do you set the PHP version or add in SOLR ? Well, this session is for you! We will cover: - What is DDev? Why use it? What problem is it trying to solve? - What is the file structure, how do I commit the configuration? - How does it compare to Lando? - What are the DDev commands and how add more custom cli commands - How to change the software versions of the service like PHP, switch between nginx and Apache web server and MySQL and MariaDB - How to add extra custom services like SOLR for search, or NodeJS - How to add custom SSL certificates like Zscaler to the docker containers - How to add additional programs like PV (PV is a pipe viewer program, to show file transfer progress - especially great if you want to speed up database import and by importing directly and thereby skipping drush) - Linked resources will include pygmy integration & GovCMS replication as well, time permitting. Presentation and resources: https://github.com/silverham/Presentation-DDev-intro Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamjoshua |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Workshops that actually work: Turning discovery into delivery | Discovery workshops are an essential starting point for Drupal projects, but too often they generate good discussion without clearly influencing what gets built. This session focuses on how to run discovery workshops that directly inform development decisions, content and UI - not just high-level ideas. It explores how well-designed workshops help teams make clearer choices early, from technical approach and scope to content structure, interface patterns and delivery priorities. Drawing on real project experience, Emily will show how to plan and facilitate discovery sessions so they move beyond conversation and instead produce clear, build-ready outcomes. She’ll demonstrate practical ways to translate workshop insights into decisions that stick, helping teams avoid rework, late-stage debate and misalignment across streams. This practical, delivery-focused session shares clear workshop structures, example activities and simple techniques for turning discovery outputs into actionable inputs for your next Drupal project. |
Other ... |
| Drupal as an ERP backend to Shopify | Most Shopify apps follow a familiar shape: a React UI, some API calls, and a small service behind the scenes. That works well for isolated features. But if you’re already running Drupal, adding more services and stacks can feel unnecessary - what if you just used Drupal? This talk looks at using Drupal as the operational backend behind Shopify. Shopify handles the storefront, checkout, and payments, shipping, fulfillment. Drupal fills the gaps where you would normally be paying monthly fees through the Shopify app store. At The Diggers Club, we’re replacing heavily invest in Shopify, however we have some unique processes which are not supported out of the box. Examples include a customized Pickrun/Quarantine process, and custom label generation for seed packets. Rather than building multiple custom Shopify apps with separate React frontends and Node backends, we keep the logic in one place and treat Drupal as the “private backend” for operations. The result is fewer moving parts, less duplicated code, and a stack the team already understands. The session will cover the strategy for embedding a Drupal ERP solution into Shopify. How to make the experience as seemless as possible for users while taking advantage of your existing Drupal capabilities. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Rethinking the JavaScript Reflex | CSS is no longer just about layout and styling, it’s becoming a powerful tool for interaction and behaviour. Container queries, :has(), view transitions, scroll-driven animations, anchor positioning and more are changing what’s possible without touching JavaScript. This talk explores the newest CSS capabilities and demonstrates how they can replace many JavaScript-driven UI patterns. Through practical examples, you’ll see how modern CSS can simplify your frontend architecture and change how you approach building interfaces. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Designing encapsulated content | Links are great: they’re what makes the web a connected network, rather than just a bunch of documents. But sometimes, our users aren’t looking for connections. They don’t want to ‘see also’ or ‘read more’ or go down a rabbit hole. They just want an answer to a question or help with a task. This talk is about the ways in which good intentions – our desire to offer choice and avoid the appearance of a dead end – can actually harm users’ confidence that they’ve reached their destination. We’ll get some practice spotting moments of uncertainty and frustration, and we’ll talk about how to fix them by designing encapsulated content – content that conveys a sense of clarity, containment and completeness. |
User Experience & Content |
| Being in the Room Is the Strategy - How Drupal, proximity, and rapid prototyping unlock real Government agility | To realise the true cost and time benefits of agile delivery, Government leaders need to move beyond traditional procurement and delivery silos and be willing to work closely with development teams - often literally in the same room - solving problems together in real time. Equally, developers must be comfortable collaborating directly with non-technical leaders, rapidly testing ideas, assumptions, and solution pathways through hands-on experimentation. Many of the well-known failure modes of waterfall projects stem from separation: between business cases, clients, project managers, developers, and expectations, with an over-reliance on documentation to bridge those gaps. As GovTech leaders continue to shift internal culture toward agile, this talk is aimed at both decision-makers and the teams delivering for them. Alex will unpack the practical success patterns behind modern digital transformation, drawing on real-world case studies from the past 12 months that show how New Zealand Government agencies are “walking the talk.” These examples demonstrate how taking the right risks, embracing rapid prototyping, and working collaboratively unlocks the full potential of speed, cost effectiveness, and flexibility that the Government wants and needs. The session explores why in-person, cross-disciplinary collaboration remains the “killer app” of agile - and why making it work requires a learned, often uncomfortable skillset. It also highlights how Drupal 11, as the world's most enterprise-ready, API-first open-source platform, is enabling ambitious government digital systems that go far beyond traditional websites. Practical examples include: - HQSC’s Health Measures Library - Department of Conservation’s Smart Weed Alert Tool - Proof-of-concept and rapid prototyping initiatives reshaping large, traditionally waterfall government programmes |
People & Culture |
| Stranger Things in UX: Designing interfaces in a post-prompt world | AI is introducing a quiet shift in how digital interfaces behave. On the surface, everything still looks familiar. In the Upside Down, systems are beginning to anticipate intent, adapt content, and guide users before they ask. This session explores how AI is changing UX design for Drupal, where it might go next, and how you can design AI-assisted experiences that remain clear, trustworthy and accessible for users. We will share real examples of how AI is already influencing experience patterns, and practical advice on how to advance your skills and knowledge in this area as the AI 'Mind Flayer' spreads its influence. This talk is for designers, developers and product teams who want to understand what's changing in the field of user interface design, and what's coming next. |
User Experience & Content |
| Practical Performance Testing | "Performance testing is a powerful way to build confidence in how systems behave under real-world conditions. This talk introduces what performance testing is, why it matters, and the core principles behind it, including understanding system behaviour under load, uncovering bottlenecks early, and treating performance as an ongoing part of delivery rather than a last-minute concern. The session then shares how PreviousNext approaches performance testing in practice. It looks at how we execute performance testing across projects and introduces k6 as our primary tool, covering how easy it is to get started and how we use it throughout local development, CI pipelines, and production-like environments to continuously validate performance. Finally, the talk focuses on turning performance insights into action. It explores common open source tools and techniques that developers and system administrators can use to debug and diagnose performance issues across the stack, from local development profiling to infrastructure, platform-level monitoring, and observability. Attendees leave with practical approaches they can take back to their own teams." |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Drupal Recipes in Practice: Streamlining Multi-Site Development with Reusable Configuration Patterns | Every Drupal developer has faced this: building a new site and manually recreating the same content types, views, workflows, and configurations you built last month. Or inheriting a project where configuration is scattered across Features, custom modules, and installation profiles, making it nearly impossible to understand what's actually configured. Drupal Recipes were introduced to solve these problems, but adoption has been slow. Why? Because most resources explain WHAT Recipes are, not WHEN to use them or HOW they fit into real-world workflows. After three years working with Drupal across various client projects, I've seen teams struggle with configuration management repeatedly. Recipes offer a solution, but only if we understand their practical application. This session addresses the gap between theory and implementation. I will share lessons learned from using Recipes in production, including mistakes made and solutions discovered along the way. This session is for developers and architects tired of rebuilding the same configurations repeatedly or maintaining complex Feature sets that break during updates. You'll leave with working examples and clear strategies. |
Drupal Development |
| The Pinto module - efficient theming for front and back end developers | Addressing the inefficiencies of traditional Drupal theming—where logic, markup, and styling are fragmented—the Pinto module by PreviousNext provides an entirely new theming paradigm for Drupal by enabling the reuse of design system components across the entire site using predictable, object-oriented patterns. It’s a component-first approach that incorporates modern concepts like props and slots with complete type safety for fast and efficient theming. Pinto components consist of a PHP object definition, CSS, JS and Twig. They can then be rendered anywhere in Drupal. For both frontenders and backenders, this talk will cover Pinto’s simple setup, how to write a Pinto component, rendering, unit testing, best practices and integration with Storybook. We will also showcase how Pinto objects can be used directly as Drupal Canvas components, without requiring a Single Directory Component (SDC). |
Drupal Development |
| What can Drupal learn from a new CMS? | Launching in 2022, Payload is a Next.js native CMS and app framework that describes itself as “the backend to build the modern web.” But how does it compare to a long-lived, mature platform like Drupal, and what lessons can be learned from each? This session compares and contrasts Drupal with a new kid on the CMS block, examining out-of-the-box functionality, content modelling and templating, developer experience, security, performance, and extensibility. Payload’s code-first approach enables highly efficient content modelling with strong type safety, and an automated admin UI. By contrast, Drupal excels at the site builder experience, allowing content models and relationships to be created and evolved through the UI with minimal developer involvement. Attendees will come away with a clearer understanding of where each platform shines, where they fall short, and which kinds of projects they are best suited for. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Keywords to Context: Semantic Search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation with OpenSearch | Keyword-based search has served us well for years, but it often falls short when users ask natural language or exploratory questions. Semantic search improves relevance by understanding intent, meaning and context, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) goes a step further by transforming search results into clear, human friendly answers. This talk will explore how OpenSearch and Skpr enable semantic search by understanding the meaning behind content and queries, rather than just matching keywords, with the RAG processor layering generative AI on top of retrieved results. We’ll walk through a practical end-to-end flow: indexing and chunking content, generating the embeddings for semantic search, retrieving the most relevant search results, and using RAG to produce concise summaries and answers grounded directly in search results. Along with answering questions, RAG can be also be used to summarise multiple documents, highlight key themes, and reduce information overload, while staying grounded in the indexed content without AI hallucinations. By the end of the session, you’ll understand when semantic search is a better fit than traditional search, how OpenSearch’s RAG processor enables summarised, clear and contextual responses, and how these approaches can deliver faster access to accurate information, increase user engagement, and create search experiences that go beyond a simple list of links. |
Drupal Development |
| Bursting the Bubble: Why Code Alone Won’t Save the Open Web | We built it. We optimized it. We secured it. But outside of our issue queues and Slack channels, does the wider tech world know—or care? For years, the Drupal community has suffered from a "build it and they will come" mentality. We have created one of the most robust platforms on the web, yet we often find ourselves preaching to the converted in a comfortable, self-referential bubble. In this session, Alejandro Moreno Lopez (Drupal Association Board Member) shares the uncomfortable reality of taking Drupal to massive generalist tech events like Web Summit Lisbon—where "Drupal" was just another booth in a sea of venture-backed startups. This isn't just a talk about marketing; it’s a talk about survival. We will explore how our technical decisions—from Developer Experience (DX) to adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—either reinforce our isolation or help us burst the bubble. You will learn how the Drupal AI Summit in Paris succeeded by pivoting the message from "website building" to Data Sovereignty and AI Orchestration, a shift that is critical for the future of the Open Web in the APAC region and beyond. Outline The Bubble: Data on the contrast between internal community enthusiasm and broader market indifference. A Tale of Two Summits: Comparing the struggle for visibility at Web Summit Lisbon vs. the breakthrough at FOST Paris. The Tragedy of the Commons: How to fund the "intangible" work of making Drupal an AI leader. The Developer’s Role: Why choosing API-first architectures and AI-ready stacks are actually "marketing" decisions for the project's future. Q&A: How to use the "Sovereignty" argument to advocate for Drupal in your local organization. |
Keynote |
| AI assisted Code Review PoC | Code review is a key part of Drupal projects, especially in government and enterprise environments where security, performance, and maintainability matter. In practice, however, a large amount of review time is spent on catching basic issues such as coding standard violations, missing dependency injection, unsafe patterns, or common caching mistakes. These checks are necessary, but they also slow teams down. This session presents a small and practical proof of concept that uses AI to assist with Drupal code reviews. The aim is not to replace human reviewers, but to reduce repetitive work and help developers focus on more meaningful feedback. The proof of concept takes a code diff from a pull request or a local git diff, sends it to an AI model, and produces structured review comments that highlight potential problems and suggest improvements. The review focuses on areas that frequently cause issues in Drupal projects. These include Drupal coding standards, service container usage, security concerns such as XSS and access checks, caching metadata like cache tags, contexts, and max age, and general code maintainability. The output is designed to be clear, constructive, and similar in tone to comments from an experienced developer. Two implementation options are discussed. One is a GitHub pull request review bot that runs via GitHub Actions and posts comments automatically. The other, which is used for the demo, is a local command line tool that developers can run before opening a pull request. This approach keeps control local, limits data exposure, and works well in restricted environments. The session also covers limitations and risks, including AI hallucinations, code privacy, data sovereignty, cost, and the need for human validation. Attendees will leave with a realistic understanding of where AI assisted code review can help today, and how it can be safely introduced into existing Drupal workflows. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| A Journey into AI: Exploring an AI Assisted GovCMS Site Builder | This session shares a personal and practical journey of learning AI through a GovCMS focused proof of concept. It is not a talk about Drupal AI features or official integrations, but an exploration of how AI can be used as an assistant when working with the GovCMS profile and its common patterns and constraints. The session is based on a small PoC that experiments with using natural language to help scaffold a GovCMS site. The idea is to describe requirements, talk through decisions, and use AI generated commands and configuration to build a site that follows GovCMS conventions. The resulting site can be run locally and reviewed using standard Drupal and GovCMS workflows. A key aspect of this work is that it comes from the perspective of someone new to AI. The process involved trial and error, unclear prompts, false assumptions, and several dead ends. The session deliberately includes what went wrong, what did not scale, and what required manual correction, rather than presenting a polished or guaranteed solution. The PoC focuses on common GovCMS building blocks such as content types, fields, views, roles, permissions, and basic configuration. AI is used to assist with setup and repetition, not to make architectural decisions or bypass governance. Human review and existing GovCMS practices remain central throughout the process. Attendees will leave with a grounded understanding of how AI can support GovCMS development as a learning and productivity tool, as well as a clear picture of its current limits. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Recipes, Site Templates and the future of Drupal distributions | For many years agencies and organisations have tackled the problem of packaging a "standard" Drupal distribution and installing it across multiple sites. We've seen GovCMS in Australian government, custom university distributions, and global community projects like Lightning and Commerce Kickstart. Traditional distributions promised faster launches, reduced decision fatigue, and consistent user experience through opinionated defaults, but often resulted in rigid architectures, difficult upgrades, and awkward long-term maintenance. Drupal is now entering a new phase with Recipes and Site Templates, offering a modular and composable approach where teams can intentionally layer functionality, reuse proven patterns, and evolve sites over time without starting from scratch. In this session we'll explore what it actually means to build and use recipes and site templates in practice. We'll cover how recipes are structured, how configuration and dependencies are packaged and applied, and how site templates fit into modern Composer-based workflows. We'll also examine the architectural decisions teams need to make to avoid recreating the limitations of traditional distributions. This talk is aimed at developers, solution architects, and technical decision-makers who want to understand where Drupal site building is heading, and how to take advantage of it without repeating the mistakes of the past. |
Drupal Development |
| Drupal CMS2: What's in the box? | A lightning talk to explore the new Drupal CMS 2.0 (if no one else is doing it). We'll go through the install process, show the new "Site Templates" and then see what's turned on in there. Main features include: - Playing with Canvas: Using the Drag & drop Library, adding components. - Looking at the available AI assistants, tools and the other cool features in CKEditor. - Ask the AI Builder agent to make a Canvas layout. Really just a very quick exposé for those who haven't tried it yet. |
Drupal Development |
| CWACking on with it: New Zealand Government's open source accessibility testing software programme | The Centralised Web Accessibility Checker, or CWAC, is open-source software created by the New Zealand Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO). It scans websites for accessibility issues to help ensure that government web content can be used by disabled people. CWAC tests several things, but primarily checks for failures to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, something that government agencies continue to find challenging. Being open source, we didn’t need to procure any IT and the project required minimal budget. CWAC is open to developer contributions from the community, and is free and available for government agencies and others to use. Results from the CWAC scans of NZ Government websites are openly published as open data on Data.govt.nz. The greatest challenge has been presenting and translating the results into action for agencies that often outsource the bulk of their IT needs. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Pacific Dataviz Challenge: Telling the Story of the Pacific Through Visualised Open Data | The Pacific Dataviz Challenge is an initiative designed to raise awareness of social, economic, and environmental issues across Pacific communities through open data and impactful data visualisations. In this presentation, our team will demonstrate how Drupal served as the foundation for a platform that supports organizers, participants, and judges while promoting data literacy throughout the Pacific region. We will present the development of a fully custom Tailwind CSS Drupal theme focused on clarity, performance, and responsiveness. A major architectural focus was balancing reusable content types with adaptable templates, enabling content editors to build varied layouts for each content section. The submission system, built using Webform, is another central element. We will outline how we implemented structured data collection for datasets, narrative descriptions, and visual assets, along with careful attention to validation and user experience to ensure smooth submissions for participants of all skill levels. For the judging process, the team developed a dedicated evaluation application built with Views, Voting API, and complementary modules to streamline scoring, feedback, and review states. Judge-specific dashboards and secure permission handling help maintain fairness, transparency, and efficiency throughout the evaluation cycle. We will conclude by reflecting on an earlier prototype built using a decoupled Next.js architecture. While the approach offered advantages such as improved rendering and UI flexibility, it also introduced significant complexity in workflows, form handling, and content synchronisation. These lessons informed our decision to return to a more cohesive Drupal-based architecture for the final solution. |
Drupal Development |
| Security on Autopilot: Low-Touch Automated Security for Drupal Projects | Security doesn't have to mean you trade time against deliverables; and if you have an incident, automated security might just save you time, money and reputation. This talk focuses on building automated security workflows that require an upfront investment but then run quietly in the background, alerting you only when something genuinely needs attention. It starts by explaining the core concepts of Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and Static Application Security Testing (SAST) — what they are, what problems they solve, and where they fit in a modern Drupal delivery pipeline. From there, it explores real-world tools such as OWASP ZAP, Trivy and dependency analysis, with an emphasis on how they complement rather than replace each other. The talk is deliberately practical for Drupal developers and SysOps engineers. It walks through how these tools can be wired into GitHub Actions so they run automatically on pull requests and on a scheduled basis, without slowing developers down. You'll see how to configure Trivy to scan source code, dependencies, and container images; how to automate ZAP scans against deployed environments; and how to use Dependabot or Renovate to keep Drupal core, contrib modules, and container dependencies up to date with minimal noise. |
Other ... |
| What your content stakeholders are worried about in the age of AI - and why it matters for developers | How do we structure content so it’s found by AI? How do we measure success with citations replace clicks? Do we even need a CMS anymore? Your content stakeholders are navigating a fundamental shift in how content works. They're being told to restructure everything for ‘machine readability’, chase GEO metrics they don’t fully understand, and prepare for ‘content warehouses’ that may or may not replace their current systems. Behind the AI jargon, they're wrestling with new tensions on top of their existing workload. They need your technical insight to move forward. This session explores what content teams are actually thinking about and why it’s time for content and engineers to become each other’s biggest supporters. On producing content for AI: The world of digital content has been turned upside down. Content creators are wondering: Where do I get started on structuring content? If our CMS becomes an ‘edge system’, what’s the centre? How do we balance ‘optimising for AI’ with creating content humans actually want to read? On content operations: Content teams are hearing conflicting advice about AI: “It can speed up content production” versus “All AI content is rubbish”. They want to know where they can include AI in their content ops to bring value to their business, great content to their customers and joy to their team. Why this matters for developers: Content stakeholders are making decisions right now, about what to structure, what to rebuild, and where to invest, often without fully understanding the technical implications. When you understand what they're actually concerned about you can guide better architecture decisions, speed up time to release, and help future-proof technical choices to support content ambitions. We’ll explore real-world examples of what content teams and decision-makers working with large content sets are grappling with, so you can use your knowledge to support them, increase your influence and drive better decisions. |
User Experience & Content |
| Using GA4 to Improve Content and UX in Drupal-Powered Sites | Digital teams put huge effort into designing flexible content models, accessible templates, and scalable platforms - but how do we know what’s actually working for users? Google Analytics 4 can help teams understand audience needs, prioritise improvements, and make better decisions with limited time and budget. But GA4 data can be hard to interpret, and even harder to turn into action. This talk focuses on how to use GA4 and other insight tools to improve website content and user experience. We’ll look at how AI-driven search (including Google’s AI Overviews) is changing how users discover content, and what that means for measurement. You’ll learn how to move beyond page-level metrics to understand journeys, content performance at scale, and real user needs. Drawing on real-world examples from large, content-heavy organisations, Lana will show how analytics has informed content strategy, information architecture, and UX decisions - leading to measurable improvements, not just better reports. Topics include: What data is actually useful for digital teams AI-driven discovery Site-wide vs page-level performance Using audience insight to inform content decisions What’s next for digital analytics |
User Experience & Content |
| Including Disabled Peoples' Voice in Consultation, Service Design and Building Services that provide accessibility that digital teams should know | Leo has worked in a range of roles in disability health, equity, and communications. Leo is Chief Advisor Disability at Health New Zealand, working across the organisation to improve the design and delivery of health services so that they work better for disabled people. This talk will introduce a range of perspectives on disability communities and equity that digital teams should understand when embarking on service design, user-centred design, digital development projects. Leo will talk to their experiences in a number of digital projects, and talk to the understanding and insights that they have gained ensuring disability is catered to. These include: - accessible information and translation to alternative formats - the value in disability-led research and insights to reflect the voices of disabled New Zealanders - addressing gaps in disability data and progress on the issue - experiences working alongside a range of digital web and product teams |
User Experience & Content |
| When good enough is not good enough - a short story about performance tuning for Valkey | Redis/Valkey can really improve your site's responsiveness by holding recently used cache object in-memory. Join Max as he recounts an adventure in squeezing the best performance possible out of this technology for a large Drupal platform. We'll talk through the combination of factors which led to the need to make improvements - particularly the distributed nature of containerised deployments, the failed attempts, and finally the key improvement which you can also use to wring that last drop of performance out of your in-memory cache. |
Drupal Development |
| Drupal as the Digital Backbone: Transforming Government Digital Services at Scale | Governments across Australia and New Zealand are under increasing pressure to deliver reliable, secure, and citizen‑centred digital services—often with shrinking budgets and rising expectations. Drupal has become a strategic enabler for many of these platforms, but genuine success depends on more than technology. It requires clear vision, strong governance, disciplined delivery practices, and the ability to align digital platforms with policy and organisational outcomes. In this session, I’ll share perspectives from leading large‑scale government digital programs—what creates sustainable success, what commonly derails it, and how to build platforms that support long‑term service transformation. We’ll look at operating models, multisite and content governance approaches, risk and security considerations, and the organisational capabilities required to get value from Drupal at enterprise scale. Whether you’re a digital leader, program manager, strategist, architect or advisor, you’ll leave with practical insights to strengthen your digital agenda and translate platform investments into meaningful business outcomes. |
People & Culture |
| Getting started with Drupal Observability using OpenTelemetry and Grafana | Drupal can be a complex codebase and issues can be challenging to diagnose. Fortunately, tooling for Observability (o11y) is available, to give you greater insight into application behaviour. We've been exploring observability using OpenTelemetry (OT) and Grafana to expose Drupal metrics, logs, and traces. This talk introduces observability concepts, outlines how OpenTelemetry can be implemented in Drupal, and how Grafana can aggregate logs and display key application metrics and traces. We'll show how to generate custom metrics, parse logs, and gain new understanding of what is happening "under the hood". | Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Building a Template for the Marketplace: Challenges and opportunities | The Drupal Marketplace is a new initiative where Drupal agencies are able to showcase site “Templates” which wrap up best practice patterns for enhanced site building. Templates encapsulate many of the new directions in Drupal: Drupal CMS, Canvas, Recipes and SDCs. Being part of Drupal CMS they also touch on areas such as Artificial Intelligence, enhanced editor workflows and advanced component driven designs. The Marketplace and Templates are a showcase of what is coming in Drupal and points to new skills and approaches which will need to be adopted. The Drupal community as a whole needs to adapt to these new ways of working. In a sense it is similar to the changes we saw from moving to Drupal 8. New patterns and ways of working will need to be learnt. There is a lot to take in. The presentation aims to bring site builders and developers up to speed with the main changes and gotchas along the way. Aims Get agencies and developers up to speed with what is coming Identify the challenges and opportunities ahead. The presentation will cover Overview of the Marketplace and the moving parts Requirements of the Marketplace and Templates Single Directory Components - The basics Canvas - A new way of thinking Finding the middle ground between Canvas and Paragraphs Mental model adjustments for design and build. The presentation will draw some conclusions on: The positioning of Drupal in the wider marketplace The competing drivers of contents vs presentation The presentation has been listed in the Development track, as there will be helpful introductory material for devs getting up to speed. There will be value for agency owners and clients who would like to get their head around the bigger picture. |
Drupal Development |
| Platform-First AI: How We Built a Secure AI Infrastructure and Showcased It Through Drupal | Most organizations approach AI integration by starting with use cases and then scrambling to find infrastructure that meets their security and compliance needs. We took the opposite approach: we built a comprehensive AI platform first, then developed a suite of Drupal-based tools and modules to demonstrate its capabilities. This talk will explore how amazee.ai created (and open-sourced) an AI infrastructure, designed around LiteLLM, to support multiple AI providers while maintaining complete data sovereignty. We'll discuss the key architectural decisions that went into building a platform that handles authentication, vector databases, and multi-region deployment - all while ensuring no data is stored or used for model training. Then, we'll showcase how we leveraged this platform to develop practical Drupal integrations, including: * A custom Drupal AI Provider module that enables one-click setup without managing API keys * Default integration with Drupal CMS 2.0 and the Drupal AI module ecosystem for content generation, accessibility improvements, and multilingual support * Real-world implementations solving challenges like batch alt-text generation for 10k+ product catalogs, interactive chatbots powered by vector databases and more! * And we’ll even cover how (and why!) we used Drupal as the base for our private AI Assistant Attendees will learn why choosing and building infrastructure first - rather than bolting it on later - supports more flexible, secure, and scalable AI solutions. We'll share lessons learned from our platform-first approach, including technical decisions around user management & reporting, regional compliance, and provider-agnostic architecture. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| The Open Source Vulnerability (OSV) Scanner Releases Support for Drupal Security Advisories - project showcase | This session tells the story of how Ackama’s open source contributions to OSV Scanner on open source vulnerability detection evolved and the 2025 collaboration with OSV (a Google supported project) and Drupal Security Team. The project was an open source contribution from Gareth Jones that developed into a proud Ackama partnership with OSV. We will cover: -The launch of OSV - what problems does the project address and why did Ackama recognise the value of the tool. -Demonstration of the OSV service -Why OSV detector has value beyond the existing Drupal Security Advisories approach -Collaboration & Community: Working with the Drupal Security Team to develop a proposal and gain buy-in -Real-world Impact: How you can use OSV-based tools today to automate security monitoring -Happier CISO and security auditors -Better automation in the future. Tools that already support OSV advisories could eventually use this new database to do automatic security updates of Drupal packages. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| From Ticket to PR: How AI Automation Gave Our Team 1000+ Hours Back | The Problem: Every agency knows the pain. Developer picks up a ticket, spends 30-60 minutes understanding context, exploring the codebase, writing what's often a straightforward fix. Support tickets bounce between teams. Clients wait longer than necessary. New projects take 3-4 weeks to scaffold. We were losing thousands of hours annually to repetitive setup work—and that cost gets passed on. Our Solution: We built AI-powered automation systems using the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—the open standard from Anthropic now adopted by OpenAI and Google. Feature Build AI (live demo): When a Jira ticket moves to "Ready for Development", AI automatically analyses the problem, generates a preliminary code solution, and creates a pull request for human review. Developers review and refine in 15-20 minutes instead of building from scratch. Website Build AI (overview): When we win a tender and designs are ready, AI generates overnight scaffolds—themes, configurations, fleshed-out tickets. What took 3-4 weeks now takes 2 days. The Catch: This isn't autonomous AI. Every solution requires human approval. We learned that gentle automation with human review outperforms aggressive full automation. What You'll Learn: The business case: faster turnaround, happier clients, freed-up developer time for complex work How we integrated AI into existing Drupal agency workflows Confidence scoring and when AI should bail out to humans Honest metrics: what worked, what didn't, ROI reality check How to start small and prove value before scaling Who This Is For: Agency owners, tech leads, and developers curious about practical AI integration that delivers client value—not hype, but working systems we're using today. |
Drupal Development |
| Drush Generate : You don’t need AI to scaffold that module | Before AI, there was Drush. Its built-in tooling can scaffold custom modules and extend existing ones, removing much of the repetitive setup work that slows development. With Drush Generate, you can automate the boilerplate and get to meaningful development faster. In this session, I will walk through creating a new module that includes a content entity, a block plugin, and a controller. We will explore how these pieces fit together and how you can apply the same patterns in your own projects. Attendees are welcome to bring a laptop with an IDE and local development environment for an optional, hands-on walkthrough. |
Drupal Development |
| Drupal AI Views Agent | In this session, we'll discuss: - What are AI Agents? - Why use AI Agents? - What are Drupal AI Agents? - What existing Drupal AI Agents are there? - How to set up a Drupal AI Agent on the site? - What is Drupal AI Views Agent? - Why build Drupal AI Views Agent? - What are the use cases of Drupal AI Views Agent? - What are the next steps? See the magic of converting a prompt like this into a views page: Create an entity type node listing view with the default display, title field with label Title, sort in descending order by created date, filter by published status 1, and filter by type article. Grant 'access content' permission. Create a page display with URL 'content-listing'. We'll also answer related questions, engage in discussions, and share insights. |
Drupal Development |
| Navigating the Dual Frontier: Securing Drupal Against Malicious Bots while Optimizing for AEO | Synopsis: The web is undergoing a seismic shift. While automated AI traffic surges—straining server performance and increasing infrastructure costs—human direct traffic is declining as users turn to AI "Answer Engines." Drupal sites are caught in the crossfire. This session provides a dual-strategy framework: how to identify and mitigate aggressive, resource-draining AI crawlers while simultaneously optimizing your Drupal architecture for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) to capture high-intent referral traffic and grow revenue. Description: Modern Drupal sites, particularly those leveraging Views and Facets, are primary targets for aggressive AI crawlers. These bots often trigger "denial-of-service" style loads by following every possible query parameter combination. However, blocking all AI traffic is no longer a viable business strategy. This session dives into the technical and strategic "balancing act" required for 2026. The Bot Surge & Mitigation:: Why faceted search and arbitrary query strings are majorly crawled? Drupal-native solutions like the Facet Bot Blocker and strategic robots.txt configurations. Implementing edge-layer defense using WAF (Web Application Firewall), rate-limiting and parameter count rules. WAF rules to identify, categorize the bots and block, recommended WAF Settings and Bot Management Winning the "Answer War" (AEO): Transitioning from SEO to AEO Leveraging the llms.txt standard to provide a "GPS" for legitimate AI agents. Implementing "Answer-First" architecture Using Schema.org Metatag and Blueprints and Markdownify to serve LLM-friendly content. Create dedicated AI-Summary fields on critical content types schema Performance : Why DOM-readiness and BigPipe are critical for AI ingestion depth? Closing the "Content Gap": Technical foundations aren't enough if the content itself is thin. You need to audit content strategies and ensure the content is optimised to win the "Answer War". |
Drupal Development |
| How whole-of-government Drupal programs are reshaping digital innovation while delivering cost savings | Many governments are trapped by vendor lock-in, escalating licensing costs and duplicated effort across agencies. This presentation introduces a proven model for enormous efficiencies: whole-of-government Drupal. Governments around the world are embracing Drupal. One exemplar is the highly successful adoption of Drupal within the Australian government. Four of nine Australian jurisdictions use Drupal-centred programs, including the successful GovCMS program. A potential blueprint for digital transformation for NZ and global governments, GovCMS has delivered efficiency, security and a unified citizen experience. However, there’s always more than one way to skin a CMS. Salsa’s involvement in multiple whole-of-government digital programs gives us a deep insight into these initiatives. Find out how the different Australian jurisdictions have implemented distinctly unique flavours of their own consolidated Drupal government programs, ranging from the federal GovCMS program, to state implementations for WA, NSW (OneCX), and VIC (Single Digital Presence). We’ll show governments like New Zealand how to achieve similar results—by focusing on three executive-level pillars: * Financial impact & ROI: Eliminate expensive vendor lock-in and cut licensing fees to deliver tangible, sustainable cost avoidance and reduced duplication across your portfolio of digital assets. * Accelerated digital maturity: Leverage the international Drupal community for rapid innovation, enabling faster site builds, immediate access to 'best-of-breed' features (e.g. multilingual, accessibility), and a future-ready platform. * Unified service delivery: Ensure consistent, citizen-centred user experiences backed by proven, government-grade security, moving away from fragmented, costly digital operations. Learn how to make digital services cheaper, easier and faster to build, while improving outcomes for citizens. The blueprint for NZ government success starts here. |
Other ... |
| Say hello to Agent 00—AI: your newest website persona | Websites have evolved significantly from the early days of static HTML pages. But are websites keeping up with the AI-driven world? We design for humans, but bots and now AI do all our searching…and they don’t browse like regular humans. AI agents are efficient and clinically extract, interpret and summarise data to deliver to their users. In this presentation, Akhil and Julia will explore how to optimise your website for AI agents visiting your Drupal site. They’ll cover key strategies, including: The AI agent as a new key persona Importance of structured data such as Schema.org The role of design systems for efficient navigation and logical information flows From SEO to GEO - how search engines have changed This session will get your Drupal website ready for the new wave of AI users already visiting your Drupal site! |
User Experience & Content |
| Supercharge your site with Drupal AI: demos and real-world magic | Drupal AI has the power to supercharge your Drupal website. But what is it? What can you actually do with it? And how will it benefit you and your website? In this presentation, Suchi will provide a brief introduction to the Drupal AI initiative, covering its history, progress to date and roadmap. She’ll then dive into a series of demonstrations, showing attendees Drupal AI in action, including: * The AI search feature * The Context Control Center Module * AI content summarisation * AI-generated ALT text * Page Builder with Canvas and CivicTheme Finally, she’ll look at the benefits Drupal AI can deliver for developers and users: * Faster content workflows * More accessible websites (quickly and easily) via ALT text and reading age checks * AI-generated pages with a few mouse clicks Learning objectives At the end of this session, attendees will be able to: * Make informed choices about which Drupal AI tools will be able to super charge their website * Get started with Drupal AI on their website |
Drupal Development |
| Brilliant but doubting: imposter syndrome and the experience of women in tech | Despite increasing participation of women in the technology sector, many continue to grapple with imposter syndrome, a psychological pattern marked by persistent self-doubt and a fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evident competence and achievements. This session explores the impact of imposter syndrome especially for women in tech. Drawing on research, lived experiences and industry data, the session identifies the different factors that contribute to imposter syndrome and explores strategies to foster inclusive environments that support confidence, belonging and professional growth. By addressing imposter syndrome for those grappling with it and especially for women in tech, not as a personal failure but as a cultural and structural issue, this work aims to contribute to more inclusive and psychologically safe workplaces in the tech industry as a whole. |
People & Culture |
| From 'Meh' to Meaningful: Driving compliant, on-brand AI with context | AI can generate text, designs and interfaces at lightning speed — but without the right context, results are often off-brand, non-compliant, or just plain 'meh'. Context is the difference between “AI that guesses” and “AI that gets it,” turning outputs into authentic, on-voice, and intentional meaningful results. Drupal’s Context Control Center Module provides a single hub to capture and manage your organisation’s rules, policies and guidelines, then map them directly to AI features. Need government compliance, brand consistency or a specific tone? Context Control Center ensures every AI output aligns with your requirements. Imagine being able to say: “Every article summary must be 3 sentences under 300 characters.” “Never use these restricted words.X, Y, Z ” “Match accessibility standards WCAG X.XX automatically.” “Keep all content at an 8th-grade reading level.” “Always use our brand colours and typography.” Instead of scattered style guides, briefs or prompts, Context Center centralises these rules so AI results are consistent, compliant and compelling. In this session, we’ll explore why context is the missing ingredient for meaningful AI, which types of context have the biggest impact, real-world use cases, and how Drupal’s Context Control Center makes it simple to manage and deliver. You’ll leave with practical insights and a clear path to elevating your AI from “meh” to meaningful. Learning objectives At the end of this session, attendees will be able to: * Apply context engineering principles to make AI outputs more authentic, consistent and aligned with their organisation’s goals * Identify and categorise different types of context that improve AI performance in real-world Drupal use cases * Use Drupal’s Context Control Center to organise and deliver context to specific AI agents for improved results |
Drupal Development |
| Member sites on GovCMS: Working within the constraints | GovCMS is well known for delivering important information to a wide, unauthorised audience. Generally, content is consumed by anonymous users with no need to log in. There are other ways to set up a Drupal site for GovCMS SaaS. This presentation will show how basic membership and protected content sites can be delivered with a little imagination. Amber Henry is a Project Manager at Morpht who has delivered membership sites for three separate government agencies on GovCMS SaaS. The presentation will draw on practical experiences in delivering protected content. The session will cover: • The common use cases for protected content • The technical capabilities and constraints of GovCMS • Technical approaches and workarounds • Smooth user experiences • Security considerations and limitations • Conclusions on the efficacy of the approach. The talk will be suitable for site owners who may be considering expanding the services they are able to offer on their GovCMS SaaS site. It will also be beneficial for implementers to learn a few tips and tricks for solving common problems. |
User Experience & Content |
| Behind the Canvas: Roadmap, Community, and What’s Next | Curious about Drupal Canvas and where it’s headed? Want a peek behind the curtain of how a major Drupal community initiative actually works? This talk gives you an update on Canvas, what it is, what’s coming next on the roadmap, and what it’s like coordinating a community initiative of this scale. As someone involved in community liaison for Canvas, I’ll share the real picture of how contributors, vendors, and volunteers collaborate to build Drupal’s next generation site building experience. I’ll cover: - Canvas fundamentals: What it is and why it mattersCurrent roadmap and upcoming features - A behind-the-scenes look at coordinating community contributors - The challenges (and wins) of aligning diverse stakeholders - How you can get involved if you’re interested Whether you’re evaluating Canvas for your projects, thinking about contributing, or just interested in how Drupal initiatives come together, you’ll leave with practical insights and a clear picture of where Canvas is going. |
People & Culture |
| Redis, Caching, and Reality: Running Fast Drupal Sites Without Guesswork | Redis is one of the most common performance recommendations for Drupal - and one of the most misunderstood. This talk takes a practical, production-focused look at using Redis with Drupal, moving beyond “turn it on and hope” toward understanding what Redis is actually doing, how to observe it, and how to make informed architectural decisions. We’ll start with a clear mental model of Redis and how Drupal uses it, then walk through real Drupal integration patterns, including cache bins, locking, and configuration trade-offs. From there, we’ll dig into Redis metrics that actually matter, how to read them, and what they tell you about site behaviour under load. The second half of the talk tackles deployment reality: * When running Redis in a container is a good idea * When a managed service like AWS ElastiCache is the safer choice * Operational risks, costs, and failure modes of each approach Finally, we’ll look at Valkey, the Redis-compatible fork, why it exists, and what Drupal teams need to know today - without hype or fear. This session is aimed at developers and platform engineers who want Redis to be a tool they understand, not a black box they’re afraid to touch. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Eventa: The Drupal based ticketing platform that you used to get here | Learn all about Eventa, a Drupal commerce based ticketing platform with support for complex seated events and fast check-ins, I'll take you through a tour of all our favorite features, from biometric check-ins, to advanced seating plans and fast check-ins, and show you how we made it and share stories of some of our biggest challenges including scaling for thousands of ticket sales and check-ins fo the World-press photo exhibit and meeting complex needs across a variety of event clients. Whether you want to know more about the ways Drupal can meet commerce and ticketing needs, or interested in hearing a story success overcoming on-the-ground challenges with event ticketing, or, if you just want to make sense of the process in which you purchased your own conference ticket, this talk is for you! |
Other ... |
| Delivering Quality Drupal | Quality isn’t something we tack on at the end of a Drupal project - it’s built into our approach from the very start. In this talk, we’ll explore how getting testers involved early helps us avoid misunderstandings, reduce rework, and keep the whole team aligned. We’ll share how our developers and testers work together - walking through features, asking the tricky “what if…?” questions, and keeping communication open so issues get sorted quickly. We’ll take you behind the scenes of real Drupal projects we’ve tested - no deep technical rabbit holes, just practical insights, real world examples, and lessons that shaped our process. Plus, you’ll get a look at the tools that help us stay organised and thorough: Zephyr for test management, BrowserStack for checking all the browsers (yes, even that one), and the collaborative practices that help us deliver stable, reliable, quality Drupal. If you want to deliver better Drupal, strengthen teamwork, and avoid those 5pm Friday bug discoveries - this session is for you. |
Other ... |
| Drupal as an API for fun things | Drupal can be used as a database for games, apps and multimedia experiences. In my long history of both Games and Drupal, I've been part of a number of projects and prototypes where we have utilized Drupal to manage user accounts and data storage served over API to games and apps. I've picked out 4 of my favourites I've been involved in that each have unique approaches THE {} AND - A personal connection questions game / mobile app, with firebase and Drupal stored data Monomaly - A yet to be announced procedural trading card game repository Pavé - User management for a digital version of a tabletop game Eventa - Biometric and QR check-ins for a Drupal ticketing platform In this talk I share my personal experiences working on these projects and how they work with Drupal as an API |
Other ... |
| Bots, Scrapers, and Proxies: Defending Drupal Sites in an Automated Internet | Automated traffic on the internet has evolved well beyond simple crawlers and brute-force attacks. Modern bots use headless browsers, residential proxy networks, and AI-driven scraping that deliberately mimic real users, making traditional IP blocking and rate limiting increasingly ineffective. This session explores how Drupal teams can respond to this new reality using pragmatic, layered defences. In addition to Drupal modules such as Perimeter, CrowdSec, AbuseIPDB, and Facet Bot Blocker, the talk demonstrates how to place Anubis in front of a Drupal site to selectively protect high-cost or high-risk endpoints such as forms, search, pagination, and authenticated flows. Rather than attempting to block all bots, this talk focuses on reducing abuse where it hurts most, understanding trade-offs, and integrating modern bot controls without breaking accessibility, SEO, or legitimate users. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| The 10-Minute Handover: From Lovable AI Prompt to Drupal Canvas Component and launch-ready webpage | The traditional workflow from design to Drupal gets lost between Designs, React builds, and Twig templates. But what if you could prompt an idea into existence, refine it with AI that understands your specific architecture, and deploy it to your CMS in minutes? In this session, we will demonstrate a cutting-edge workflow that leverages Lovable AI to bypass the "blank page" problem. We'll show how we fed a conceptual idea into Lovable, which generated a beautiful, functional page layout in a matter of minutes. We’ll dive into the technical configuration required to teach Lovable AI about the Drupal Canvas Components schema. You will see: Contextual Training: How to provide the AI with the specific JSON schemas and property requirements of your Drupal setup. The Export-Import Loop: The process of exporting AI-generated React components and seamlessly importing them into Drupal Canvas using an NPM-based workflow. The Result: A fully functional, production-ready page assembled in record time. However, a pretty page isn't enough for a Drupal site. Editor Empowerment Efficiency shouldn't come at the cost of flexibility. We will showcase how these AI-generated components remain highly configurable. Within the Drupal interface, editors maintain full control over: Granular style adjustments. Typography and font management. Layout variations Looking Ahead: Eliminating the manual export/import steps and automating the sync from Lovable to Drupal Canvas Key Takeaways: How to "train" AI tools to understand specific Drupal component architectures. Techniques for importing React-based AI components into Drupal Canvas via NPM. Strategies for maintaining editor-friendly configurations |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Scale Your DevRel: How We Can Cut Tutorial Production Time by 75% using AI | Scaling community content often leads to burnout. As DevRel practitioners, we want to educate more users, but high-quality video production—scripting, recording, editing, and localizing—is historically time-consuming and expensive. In this session, I will demonstrate how I engineered a solution: a content pipeline that reduced my video production time from 2 hours to just 30 minutes per episode, achieving a 75% efficiency gain for my channel, "Professor Beluga's Drupal Classroom." (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE3HbMjs0JVPHffVwQ_3MYA) This is not just about using ChatGPT to write a script. I will break down a systematic, "code-first" architecture that combines Google Gemini (scripting), Voicevox/GPT SoVITS (TTS), and Remotion (React-based rendering). What You Will Learn: - The Architecture: How to decouple content, audio, and visuals to create a language-agnostic video engine. - Live Demo: Watch a live demonstration where I generate a tutorial draft from a Drupal module concept in real-time. - Quality Control via "Video as Code": I will show how I manage video scripts as source code in a Git repository. By treating content like software, we can use Pull Requests to update tutorials when Drupal modules change. This ensures your video content remains as version-controlled and accurate as your codebase. Why This Matters for DevRel: For DevRel professionals, this workflow is a game-changer. It allows you to shift your focus from the manual grind of video editing to high-value community strategy. By adopting this pipeline, you can sustain a consistent stream of localized, up-to-date content that grows with your community—without burning out your team. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Docker Images, Vulnerability Management, and the Reality of "ZeroCVE" | Think "ZeroCVE" and “Hardened” images are the silver bullet for container security? Think again. While enterprise compliance teams chase the dream of vulnerability-free Docker images, they're often sacrificing the very tools developers need to actually build and debug web applications. In this talk, we'll pull back the curtain on Lagoon's monthly image release process, dive into the reality of vulnerability management at scale, and explore why that pristine vulnerability scan from three months ago means absolutely nothing if you're not deploying continuously. We'll walk through real examples from our image ecosystem—including that glorious moment when a single golang update cleaned up 50% of our critical CVEs—and discuss why hardened, distroless images might look great on paper but fall apart the moment you need to run a Composer install or debug a production issue at 2 AM. Whether you're a developer tired of explaining why you can't use that "secure" image, or a decision-maker wondering if ZeroCVE is worth the engineering overhead, this talk will give you the practical insights to make informed security choices that don't break your deployment pipeline. We'll also explore our comprehensive testing methodology—combining validation across real-world templates with a purpose-built test harness that ensures reliability at scale. You'll see how this structured testing framework catches issues before they reach production. |
Web Tools & Complementary Technologies |
| Secure and quality content - Automating moderation tests with Cypress | The quality and security of content on government sites is of paramount importance. Content is required to flow through a number of checks and balances before it is published to the wider public. Website owners and senior stakeholders have a very strong interest in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of published content. In a CMS such as Drupal, Content Moderation is the technical approach taken to enforce workflows between editors and approvers. It can be complex to set up as a number of different roles, states, transitions and access levels need to be coordinated. It is possibly the biggest area of misconfiguration on government sites and also the one with the most serious consequences. Ensuring a robust workflow is therefore attractive for ensuring trust and reputation. This presentation will illustrate how automated tests using the Cypress framework can be configured to handle the complex checks which need to take place. This includes handing logged in user sessions, progressing content through a flow and validating access levels across a number of different user roles. Marji will demonstrate a simple library, open sourced by Morpht, that helps with simplifying the rule writing process. End to end tests will show how simple config errors can be easily caught for remediation. This presentation will cover: * The top level concepts of peer review * The information security requires for government agencies * The basic content moderation setup in Drupal * Common problematic areas: technical and social * Brief introduction to Cypress testing framework * Introducing the open source helper library * Demonstration of the tests running * Ideas for the future on how Cypress can help in other areas. The presentation will be of interest to site and platform owners who are interested in maximising accuracy of content. Developers with an interest in testing will also find it of interest. |
Drupal Development |
| AI Can Do My Job Now (Sort Of) (Not Really) (It's Complicated): A user researcher's complicated relationship with AI | I've been doing user research for about 15 years now, across government, health, disability, education, all sorts of domains. For most of that time, research has been a discipline that was expensive, time-consuming, and gated behind a lot of process and methodological rigour, which was there for good reasons but also meant that a lot of teams just couldn't do it, or couldn't do enough of it. AI is changing that pretty fast. I've been using AI tools in my research practice over the past couple of years and some of it has been really useful. Things like synthesis, first-pass analysis, and drafting that used to take days can happen in hours now. Research that would have been too expensive for certain projects is suddenly possible, and I think that's worth being excited about. But I've also seen AI get things confidently wrong in ways that are hard to spot if you don't already know what good research looks like, and I think that's the tension worth talking about. If AI makes research accessible to teams who couldn't afford it before, but they don't have the experience to know when the output is rubbish, are we actually better off? I'll share the tools I've been using and where I think they're great, the things I'm still worried about (especially around false confidence and the appearance of rigour), and the parts of research I'm not willing to hand over, like the actual conversations with people, the judgment calls about what matters versus what's noise, and the "so what" of turning findings into something useful. This is a bit of a commentary on where the research discipline is heading and what we need to hold onto as things get faster and cheaper. What people will take away: - AI tools and approaches that are actually working well for research right now - Where AI falls over and how to spot it - What parts of research still need a human, and why - Some questions about the future of the discipline that are worth sitting with |
User Experience & Content |