![Dries on stage, talking about Rotterdam and its history, and the lessons for the Drupal community](/sites/default/files/styles/blog_hero_image_mobile/public/media/image/2026-09/1000009107.jpg?itok=0qztZhxo) Image ![Martin Anderson Clutz](/sites/default/files/styles/post_content_attribution_headshot/public/media/image/2026-09/Blue_0.png?h=07bda73c&itok=idUbO5Km) [Martin Anderson-Clutz](/people/acquians/martin-anderson-clutz) Senior Product Marketing Manager, Drupal Acquia ## Collection [Drupal](/blog/series/drupal) Drupal, Built for What's Next [Explore Drupal](https://www.acquia.com/campaign/drupal-seriously-reimagined) Drupal # Drupal Is Light Years Ahead of Its Reputation. Here Is How We Close the Gap. Published: September 30, 2026 8 minute read [Share this blog post on LinkedIn ](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://www.acquia.com/markdownify/node/61556) [Share this blog post on Twitter ]() [Share this blog post via Email ]() Copy Markdown Key takeaways from the DrupalCon Rotterdam Driesnote: MCP support through PHP attributes, Canvas updates, and a new Drupal advocacy program. ![Dries on stage, talking about Rotterdam and its history, and the lessons for the Drupal community](/sites/default/files/styles/blog_hero_image_mobile/public/media/image/2026-09/1000009107.jpg?itok=0qztZhxo) ## Collection : [Drupal](/blog/series/drupal) Rotterdam has a saying: *niet lullen maar poetsen*. Roughly translated, it means "no blabbing, just scrubbing" — stop talking and start working. Dries Buytaert opened his DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote with it, and it fits the city. Rotterdam rebuilt itself after the Second World War, embraced container shipping before anyone else in Europe, and became the continent's largest port. Dries argued that Drupal shares that instinct to see the future and move toward it. Then he flipped the motto on its head. By the end of the keynote, the message was not "stop talking." It was "start talking louder about what is working." That shift matters because, in his words, the reputation gap is now Drupal's number one challenge. We have all seen the puzzled look when we mention Drupal to someone outside the community: "Is that still a thing?" Search for "is Drupal" and the suggestions are "still relevant" and "dead." Even the audio technician who fitted Dries with his microphone said he loved Drupal (Drupal 7) and had not looked at it since. I was in the room, and I left convinced. Here is what stood out to me, and what I think we should do about it. ## Six months of going where the people are The first half of the keynote was a reminder of how much has shipped since DrupalCon Portland, where Dries launched the Drupal CMS initiative out of concern that Drupal had lost some of its speed. Drupal CMS, recipes, site templates, Drupal Canvas, and Drupal AI are now real, and the strategy behind them is simple: go where the people are instead of waiting for them to come to us. Dries highlighted three ways that is happening. **Multilingual.** Roughly 80% of the world does not speak English as a first or second language. Drupal CMS 2.2 adds a language selector to the installer, a multilingual add-on with a guided checklist, and three levels of configuration, from one-click defaults to full control. Most importantly for many European teams, Canvas now supports translation, with a visual translation preview, review workflows, and optional AI translation. A new multilingual demo site, the Dashi food magazine, shows it all in action. **JavaScript front ends.** Canvas code components treat front-end developers as first-class citizens. One command scaffolds a standalone React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS project. Canvas Workbench previews components without Drupal, and the Canvas CLI syncs components, pages, and templates in both directions. Any npm package is fair game. The new Canvas Headless connects an external front end by URL, with starter templates for frameworks including Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and Angular added in the days leading up to the keynote. Editors keep visual editing; developers keep their stack. Acquia's Bálint Kléri walked through the developer experience in demo videos. **AI.** There is so much happening in Drupal AI that Dries said it would take a whole keynote to demo. Instead, he pointed to a preconfigured demo of a fictional university site at [drupal.org/ai/demo](https://drupal.org/ai/demo). It shows content review against your own standards, on-site answers grounded in your content with sources, guardrails, a central knowledge hub, and full logging. More than 100 people have contributed to the Drupal AI initiative in recent months. ## MCP support with a handful of PHP attributes For module maintainers like me, this was the most important part of the keynote. Dries showed a content editor using ChatGPT to roll back two Dutch pages while leaving the English versions untouched. She never had to know about revisions, moderation states, or permissions. Drupal still enforced all of them, and each change landed as a new revision under her name. The same connection works from Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Microsoft Copilot, Slack, and more. It is available today through a recipe that combines OAuth, the MCP Server module, and the Tool module, which Dries called one of the most important Drupal modules right now. Image ![Dries on stage in Rotterdam speaking about connecting Drupal to AI agents](/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_full_width_desktop/public/media/image/2026-09/1000009124.jpg?h=78bb0bac&itok=g4AvwUup) Then he asked the room a question. Who maintains a Drupal module? Many hands went up. Keep your hand up if an AI assistant can reach your module through MCP. Almost every hand went down — including his own. That is the gap. Connecting a site to an AI assistant does not expose everything Drupal can do. Each capability in core, contrib, and custom code still has to be described as a tool. Dries did this for the photo album module on his own site so his family could ask things like "Do you have that photo of Oma in her sunglasses?" It worked, but it took about 1,000 lines of code for a simple module. Working with Matt Glaman and Michael Lander, the author of the Tool module, he prototyped a better way. Instead of writing adapter code, you add PHP attributes to the functions and classes you already have: - Describe what a method does, such as "search photos by name, alt text, or caption." - Describe each parameter and give example values. - Mark return values as plain text, HTML, or a URL, rather than just "string." - Let the Tool module read the rest from existing docblocks. The result: roughly 20 attributes instead of 1,000 lines. The syntax is still a prototype, but the direction is clear. What excites me most is that this is not only about AI. Describe a capability once and it becomes available to MCP clients, workflow tools such as ECA, FlowDrop, and Maestro, generated OpenAPI schemas, and front-end tooling. A FlowDrop demo called the same tools from a simple form with no AI at all, then let an agent choose among them. Dries calls this Drupal's "accidental AI advantage": workflows, revisions, translation, and access control are already there. Attributes solve the last mile. ## A Rosetta sprint, and homework for maintainers The Tool module builds on years of work across the community, including Typed Data by Wolfgang Ziegler (fago) and configuration validation. Dries noticed that many people have been circling the same problem from different angles, sometimes speaking what feel like different languages. His proposal is a "Rosetta sprint": a week-long gathering of the people working on these APIs to align on a shared approach, address technical debt, and ideally shape improvements to Drupal core. Nothing is scheduled yet, and anyone who wants to take part can email him. In the meantime, he gave maintainers a clear ask: 1. Take one of your modules and make it available as tools, through MCP or a workflow. 2. Keep notes on the friction you hit. 3. Contribute fixes and feedback upstream where you can. If enough of us do this, Dries hopes to demo real, end-to-end AI translation of content, configuration, and interface strings at DrupalCon Orlando. I plan to try this with my own modules, and I would encourage every maintainer reading this to do the same. Image ![Dries on stage in Rotterdam, holding up two fingers](/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_full_width_desktop/public/media/image/2026-09/1000009118-cropped.jpg?h=0b38113b&itok=0VPv_-iv) ## Advocacy is now a recognized form of contribution The second big announcement was a new Drupal advocacy program, led by the Drupal Association. Dries was candid that he has been guilty of magical thinking: assuming great software explains itself to the market. It does not. And AI makes it worse, because AI assistants repeat and amplify whatever story is out there. If we do not tell a better one, outdated perceptions of Drupal will keep spreading. This is not a call to become salespeople or cheerleaders. As Dries put it, Drupal does not need hype. It needs a better public record. The program will: - **Award contribution credits for advocacy.** Talks, blog posts, tutorials, videos, podcasts, translations, and amplifying other people's work all count. - **Weight credits by reach.** A talk at a non-Drupal event, or an article in a major developer publication, will earn more than the same work inside our own bubble. (The exact values are still being defined.) - **Reduce friction.** Submission starts with a simple form today, with automation and APIs planned later. Because credits influence how organizations appear in the Drupal marketplace, this also gives agencies and vendors a business reason to invest in advocacy. You can start submitting work now at [drupal.org/advocacy](https://www.drupal.org/advocacy), where you will also find guidelines on what qualifies. One point from Dries really resonated with me. Speakers spend weeks on a DrupalCon talk, deliver it once, and go home. Any other organization would turn that talk into clips, tutorials, interviews, and short posts for months. We have hundreds of session recordings coming out of Rotterdam. Clip them. Write about one good idea from a talk. Just credit the original presenter. ## Start talking louder about what is working Dries closed by rewriting Rotterdam's motto for the Drupal community: "Start talking louder about what is working." Drupal is, as he said, light years ahead of its own reputation. That is a good problem to have, but it is still a problem, and no one else is going to solve it for us. Consider this post my first submission. If you are a Drupal developer, marketer, agency owner, or end user, here is my ask: 1. **Pick one thing from DrupalCon Rotterdam** that excited you and share it outside the Drupal community — with a colleague, on LinkedIn, or in a short video. 2. **Submit your advocacy work** at [drupal.org/advocacy](https://www.drupal.org/advocacy) so it earns the credit it deserves. 3. **If you maintain a module, tool-enable it** and share what you learn, so that by DrupalCon Orlando more of our hands stay up. At Acquia, we are proud to contribute to Drupal CMS, Canvas, and Drupal AI alongside so many others in the community. We will be doing our part to talk louder, too. I hope you will join us. Image ![Martin Anderson Clutz](/sites/default/files/styles/post_content_attribution_headshot/public/media/image/2026-09/Blue_0.png?h=07bda73c&itok=idUbO5Km) [Martin Anderson-Clutz](/people/acquians/martin-anderson-clutz) Senior Product Marketing Manager, Drupal Acquia [Share this blog post on LinkedIn ](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://www.acquia.com/markdownify/node/61556) [Share this blog post on Twitter ]() [Share this blog post via Email ]() Copy Markdown