Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation

In a keynote at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 Dries Buytaert argues that Drupal is now far ahead of its reputation and that closing that perception gap is the community's top challenge. He traces progress from Drupal Starshot to the new Drupal CMS, which bundles Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI and Drupal Canvas, and notes mutual improvements between a faster Drupal Core and the CMS layer. Technical highlights include multilingual support for Canvas, React-based Canvas components designed for mainstream JS developer workflows, and Canvas Headless that lets teams use front-end frameworks like Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular or Nuxt while preserving visual editing and exact previews. Drupal AI is presented as a preconfigured demo and an "AI harness" that grounds answers in site content, audits and translates content, classifies items, builds pages and React components, and connects AI models to structured content with permissions, guardrails, observability and metering.

He also unveils a push to expose Drupal capabilities to AI and other software via the Tool module and a proposed Tool API update that lets developers annotate existing PHP methods with attributes - reducing integration boilerplate from roughly 1,000 lines to about 20 in one example. Those tools can be invoked by AI assistants over MCP, by HTTP clients, or by workflow engines, and already speed real tasks like managing 10,000 photos. To change perception externally, a Drupal Advocacy Program will award contribution credit for advocacy work - encouraging talks, articles, demos and customer stories (Blue Drop Labs is cited as a model) - with a clear call to "talk louder" about what Drupal can do today.