Sessions

Co-presenter - Tobias Zimmermann (tstoeckler)

This session explores AI beyond the hype:

• What role can AI realistically play in our tech stack (including Drupal)?
• What hidden costs (like environmental impact of large-scale computing) should we be aware of?
• Are AI-driven layoffs and manager expectations reshaping the role of developers?
• Is this just another “must have” trend or a true paradigm shift?

Join us for a candid, thought provoking discussion on where AI is taking us, what trade offs we’re making along the way, and how to navigate the opportunities and risks of this technology wave.

Co-presenter - Tobias Zimmermann (tstoeckler)

In this session, we’ll take a step back and ask the hard questions:

Why are organizations really going headless, is it performance, scalability, or just following a trend?What does it actually take to set up and maintain a decoupled system? How do teams handle search, caching, and deployment across separate stacks? And most importantly, is the return on investment worth the extra effort?

This is not an anti-headless talk, but a practical discussion about trade offs. This is more of a discussion than a presentation. 

We are planning to have different people presenting different, short fails in 5-10 minutes each. If you have something you can add to this topic, drop Nicolai a note.

Currently planned:

• Nicolai Schwarz: Backend developers hate this trick
• Jan Stöckler: TBA
• …

At DrupalDevDays 2025 I gave a talk about why dates can be complicated. The focus is on the backend, and date standards. I'll be happy to reprise some of the most pertinent points.

But what about the front end? What problems, and solutions, do people have?

The first part of this session, the back-end, can be a presentation, the rest requires your input, so can be held as a discussion.

Over the course of a Drupal website's existence, you may find it necessary to reorganize content. For example, clients / site owners might rethink the arrangement of content during a 'website refresh,' which could involve converting a referenced node into a paragraph, turning a taxonomy vocabulary into a node type, or moving data to a different field type. You may also want to update the machine names of existing fields or entities if they contain spelling errors, are poorly named, or have incorrect translations.

How should you approach these changes when the site already has hundreds of content items? 

Do you create custom scripts? Export, edit, and reinsert database tables? Open numerous browser tabs to copy and paste content? If you consider any of these solutions then you should also look into the Drupal Migrate module.

While the Migrate module is primarily recognized for importing data from external sources into Drupal, it can also facilitate moving data within the site itself. It provides the necessary tools to accomplish this in a predictable, repeatable, and reliable manner.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate how to use the Migrate module to rearrange Drupal content. I will showcase examples and outline the essential and optional tools that can assist you in this process. Lastly, I will address potential pitfalls and drawbacks associated with using this method.

This presentation has been selected for Drupaljam 2025 

We'll explore the dynamics of the TYPO3 community and uncover the key factors behind its popularity in Germany, where Drupal has yet to make a similar impact.

Discover what each system can learn from the other. Ingo Schmitt, a seasoned TYPO3 expert (https://my.typo3.org/u/ischmittis), and Peter Majmesku (https://www.drupal.org/u/jepster_), a veteran Drupal specialist, will come together to present the unique approaches and strengths of both systems. Don't miss this opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of these powerful CMS platforms and their communities.

We we'll talk about the following topics:

• Community: Explore how each community fosters connections and collaboration. Examine the methods for sharing knowledge and code within each community.
• Configuration management: Compare how both systems handle configuration settings. Strategies for versioning configurations and deploying them across systems.
• User permissions: Analyze how permissions are managed and assigned in both systems.
• Theming and frontend: Approaches to setting up the frontend technology stack
• Extension development: Investigate how backend development is approached for implementing custom functionality through modules or extensions.
• Caching: Delve into the caching strategies employed by both systems to maintain website performance
• Deployment and application management: How are updates communicated and managed? The processes for deploying updates and managing applications effectively.

Drupal Core still provides a very rudimentary API for sending transactional emails. Most projects, including Drupal CMS rely on several contrib modules in order to provide an acceptable UX for both site builders and site users.
 

Work is underway to modernize the APIs around transactional email in Drupal Core. The first step was to introduce the Symfony Mailer component as a core dependency. Since then, people have been busy hashing out the transport layer by introducing the necessary components into the dependency injection container. The work on the transport layer is done and may ship with Drupal 11.3. It is now time to focus on how transactional mails should be built and rendered in future versions of Drupal.
 

This session will be a very brief overview of the state of core and contrib mail APIs, followed by a (hopefully) long Q&A where the audience is encouraged to bring in their PoV regarding the future of transactional email. The results of this session will ideally lead to a clear and widely accepted plan for how Drupal core transactional email will be modernized in future releases.

How deeply any given topic will be discussed very much depends on the attendees, but topics could be:

• Forward revisions
• Revisioning Translations
• Computed Fields
• Query Access
• Validation Constraints

The complex path to get to an amazing, full-fledged, all-encompassing automated test suite often stands in the way of having any form of CI at all.

Using Gitlab CI and the infrastructure around it it is possible to get you up and running with something as your automated testing story really quickly and without much hassle or prior knowledge. That's why this session really is for everyone! Will it be everything you ever wanted? Nope, but it will be better than nothing and you can always go from there to improve.

Having a country-specific Drupal information page is a key element in increasing the visibility of Drupal on a nationwide level. For a long time, however, the German website had fallen behind – outdated content and a lack of attention left it trailing other official Drupal sites across Europe.

At the start of 2025, the site was finally relaunched — but a new look alone doesn’t tell the full story. In this session, I’ll take you behind the scenes to explore the collaborative community efforts that made this relaunch possible. You'll learn how volunteers came together, what challenges we faced, and how we’re continuing to build momentum.

Beyond the relaunch, I’ll also share insights into ongoing community-driven initiatives in Germany aimed at strengthening Drupal’s presence and visibility — online and beyond.

Imagine a button that renames your uploaded image file based on what’s actually visible in the image. Or a way to trigger an ECA action using the context of the field you just filled out.

Meet the Field Widget Actions module, a new submodule introduced in AI Core 1.2.0. It’s a simple yet flexible framework that lets you attach custom functionality to any field in your Drupal site. Using a clean UI, you can link multiple actions to a single field widget. Each action shows up as a button next to the form element, right where editors need it.

In this session, I’ll show how the module works, walk through real-world examples, and explain how you can create and attach your own custom plugins to bring useful tools closer to your content editors.

Implementing designs in Drupal has often been a challenge due to outdated workflows, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistent results. With tools like Single-Directory Components, Storybook, Vite, and the new Display Builder, developers now have the power to streamline their workflow and deliver faster, higher-quality themes.

This session will introduce a modern, component-based approach to theming that bridges the gap between design and development. By sharing best practices and practical techniques, I will help developers to improve their frontend stack, enhance maintainability and boost efficiency.

Create better Drupal themes with less effort!

This will be an updated version of the session I gave at Drupal Dev Days this year in Leuven.

By now we all know how to implement the basic needs for accessibility: use semantic HTML, have alt-texts for images, add styles for focus states, test with keyboard, etc. That might be enough for a small website.

Bigger sites have more complicated components like: sliders; info cards that turn 180 degrees; navigation elements with more content; and lightboxes. We will have a look at some of those elements for the website of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

At the end of last year, we had an external accessibility expert check the site. He had a lot to say about those components and made a few suggestions to improve the accessibility. In this session, we will have a detailed look at the problems he found and the steps we took to improve the components.

I will add some smaller problems in surprising places, and some problems that Drupal or screenreaders add to the mix. Like that one incredibly annoying “feature” in CKEditor.