Proposed sessions

What happens when you teach Drupal Site Building to the people who aren't developers?

At CivicActions, we did just that; over three cohorts, we brought designers, project managers, and accessibility engineers together to work through the Acquia Drupal Site Builder curriculum and prepare for the certification. The result was much more than a certification: designers and accessibility engineers gained a better understanding of the system they were designing for. Project managers developed the vocabulary and technical context to have more productive conversations with engineers and stakeholders. Across disciplines, participants developed a shared language for talking about Drupal.

In this session, we'll share how CivicActions created and ran three Drupal Site Builder cohorts specifically for non-developers, what we learned along the way, and give our resources, tips, and best practices. You'll leave with ideas for creating your own Drupal learning program and a different way of thinking about who on your team should understand Drupal. Because you don't have to write code to benefit from knowing how Drupal works. 

The Drupal AI ecosystem has exploded over the past year, but most of the attention goes to a handful of headline modules. Meanwhile, a growing collection of smaller, focused AI modules is quietly solving real problems for site-builders and many people don't even know they exist.

This session is a guided tour of AI modules you've probably never heard of. We'll start with the practical question of how to actually find AI-related modules on Drupal.org and evaluate which ones are worth your time. Then we'll dive into live demos of at least five different modules, including AI Metering for tracking AI usage and costs across providers, and AI Browser Provider for working with browser-based AI directly from Drupal.

Everything in this session is aimed at site-builders. No code, just configuration, live demos, and a practical look at what each module does and when you'd reach for it. You'll leave with a list of tools to try on your next project and a better sense of how to keep up with the rapidly expanding AI module landscape in Drupal.

Live demos throughout.

Have you been writing JavaScript to do things on the web and wondered if there was a better way? Fear not, CSS and HTML are here to ease your JavaScript woes! I'll go over a few new and upcoming CSS and HTML attributes, elements, and APIs that eliminate the need for JavaScript, such as:

• The Invoker Commands API
• The Popover API
• Anchor positioning
• Interest invokers
• View transitions
• and more!

Learn how to use the newest HTML and CSS techniques to replace excessive JavaScript and improve performance using the latest web native technologies.

I began my career as a developer, where building websites for clients and learning development best practices were my primary responsibilities. As I became a team leader and manager, I quickly learned that my job now had a very different set of objectives, priorities, and keys to success. Instead of solving technical problems with code, the most important parts of my days became addressing more ambiguous "people problems" and coaching my team members toward growth.

This session will cover how I shifted from a front-end development role into management, and the lessons I've learned that can help other developers thinking of making a similar move. I'll detail how delegation was my biggest struggle and greatest help, the importance of clear communication and expectations, and how to support my team while building their skills, not just my own. I'll also touch on the differences in feedback loops between development and management problem-solving, along with how to stay technical while spending less time directly working on code.

(This proposal was previously accepted to Florida DrupalCamp 2026, but I had to bow out due to a family emergency. I appreciate the reconsideration!)

Remember when Drupal 8 came out and everything had to become a class, and we all said we'd get around to it? Hooks were the one thing that got to stay the same. That's ending. Hooks are classes now, the #[Hook] attribute is how you write them, and every .module file you've been maintaining for the last decade has probably started throwing deprecation warnings about it.

Good news, everybody! You don't have to convert everything at once, and you probably shouldn't. This talk walks through migrating a custom module one hook at a time. We'll start by reading the deprecation notices and sorting out which ones matter, then convert a few hooks by hand so you can see what the attribute does and how discovery changed. From there we'll cover keeping the module working on pre- and post-attribute versions during the transition, where hook ordering behaves differently and how to check it, and what to do with hooks that were doing three unrelated jobs and should have been split years ago, not that any of us have ever done that.

Learning objectives:

• Convert a procedural hook implementation to an attribute-based hook class and verify it fires correctly
• Keep a module working across Drupal 11, 12, and 13 while converting it incrementally
• Identify which hooks in a legacy module should be converted, split, or removed

Improve your teams' peer code review process, your code maintainability, and your Drupal contributions. Learn from a Drupal core release manager how to give an efficient and effective peer code review.

Peer code reviews are essential, improving maintainability, increasing productivity, and reducing costs. They can also reduce the rate of defects (bugs) introduced into a codebase by as much as 90 percent. Most importantly, they build a shared understanding of the application within a team and are an opportunity for developers to mentor each other.

Drupal core's peer code review process has two phases:
1. An initial peer code review cycle with one or more other contributors
2. A final stage of code review by a Drupal core committer (one of the few like xjm who can accept changes into Drupal core's production codebase).

As a result, the core committers are exposed to all the peer review (good and not-so-good) throughout the Drupal core issue queue. This makes committers ideal mentors and subject matter experts on both best practices and pitfalls to avoid.

In this session, you will also discover research and psychological principles on effective code review. You will learn how structuring your change sets for the reviewer can improve the whole team's code and maintainability. Finally, you will learn about automation and tooling that can help reviewers focus on what's most important -- including how, and more importantly how not, to use LLMs in your code reviews.

AI coding tools can produce implementation faster than most teams can review it. That raises a practical question: do we need limits on how much AI-generated code we accept?

This session explores the risks of high-velocity AI-assisted development in Drupal teams: oversized changes, weak architectural understanding, shallow review, and “vibe coding.” We’ll look at whether AI-code percentage is actually a useful metric, what better guardrails might exist, and how practices like POCs, small tickets, focused merge requests, testing, static analysis can help.

The goal is not to ban AI or slow teams down for its own sake, but to use it without letting implementation velocity outrun human understanding.

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, I will share the uncomfortable reality of taking the Drupal Association to Web Summit Lisbon, a massive, generalist tech event where "Drupal" was just another booth in a sea of startups. I will share the messy details of what happens when you step out of the "Drupal Island" and face the market head-on.

But this is not a talk about marketing; it is a talk about survival. And it is not a talk about Drupal. It's about open source.

As developers, we have a responsibility that goes beyond code quality. We need to confront the "Tragedy of the Commons" that threatens open source projects: everyone relies on the ecosystem, but few invest in its external visibility. I will explore how our technical decisions, from DX to API design, either reinforce our isolation or help us burst the bubble.

Alex Moreno has presented this session at multiple Drupal events in Europe - he is graciously allowing me to present it here. This session is a strategic roadmap for how we, as a community, can export our excellence and reach outside our comfort zones.

Government agencies want to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, yet many still fund custom code to solve problems the Drupal community has already solved. How do you convince clients that investing in reusable, community-driven software creates greater long-term value?
This session equips project managers, technical leads, and delivery teams with practical strategies, messaging, and business cases for gaining government buy-in for a contribution-first approach. You'll learn how to position reusable Drupal solutions as responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars, communicate the long-term value of shared software, address common client concerns, and gain resources to take back to your agency to help you share the story of why building for the community is often the smarter investment.
Whether you work for a government agency or a contractor supporting one, you'll leave with practical talking points and a repeatable framework for helping clients choose community-driven solutions over one-off custom code.