DrupalCon Chicago 2026 Full Pre-planned Schedule

Birds of a Feather sessions, or BoFs, are un-conference style sessions where community members self-organize to have a round table discussion about a particular topic. These sessions do not have formal presentations, A/V, or recordings, but are a great opportunity for truly interactive conversations, and to participate in providing feedback on key topics.

NOTE: Summits require an add-on ticket.

The Drupal Community Summit at DrupalCon is a collaborative, discussion-focused gathering where people from across the Drupal ecosystem — from newcomers to long-time contributors — come together to connect, share experiences, and explore ways to get involved with and strengthen the community. It emphasizes networking, inclusive conversation, and community-driven initiatives, using a variety of presentation formats that create a welcoming space to learn, contribute, and help shape the future of Drupal beyond just code.

NOTE: Summits require an add-on ticket.

NOTE: Summits require an add-on ticket.

NOTE: Summits require an add-on ticket.

NOTE: Summits require an add-on ticket.

NOTE: Trainings require an add-on ticket.

NOTE: Summits require an add-on ticket.

Birds of a Feather sessions, or BoFs, are un-conference style sessions where community members self-organize to have a round table discussion about a particular topic. These sessions do not have formal presentations, A/V, or recordings, but are a great opportunity for truly interactive conversations, and to participate in providing feedback on key topics.

Putting the "unity" in community, this invite-only group welcomes participants attending DrupalCon Chicago through Community and Inclusion invitations. Please join us for donuts, coffee, and a chance to fuel your Tuesday morning.

When 500 editors across 130 sites log into our Drupal platform, the first thing they see is a dashboard designed to support their work. But what should that dashboard actually do? Over the last year, we’ve been figuring out how to answer that question. The result is a dashboard that surfaces what matters most to our editors: announcements about new features, their recent edits, broken links, accessibility issues, duplicate profiles, permissions, design settings, and more.

Most custom features in Drupal need settings, but too often, those settings are hidden behind broad admin permissions, hardcoded into modules or themes, or require custom forms just to expose them. In this session, we will explore the Config Pages module, a clean and maintainable solution to manage structured settings through site building tools and the Field API. We will cover use cases like managing site-wide alerts, global contact information, and quick links, demonstrating examples built with U.S. Web Design System (USWDS). You’ll learn how Config Pages improves the editorial experience through tightly scoped permissions that show editors only what they need and giving developers full control over how and where settings appear in Twig templates or as configurable blocks.

Drupal CMS 2.0 has launched, complete with Drupal Canvas and site templates!

Learn about Drupal Test Traits (DTT), an open source project started by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Dive into real tests from our open source project, and learn how DTT works under the hood.

Do you want to contribute but are not sure how? Check out the First Time Contributor Pathway for a list of recommended sessions at DrupalCon Chicago to help you figure out how to use your particular skills to contribute to the Drupal project!

What if Drupal's biggest innovation opportunity comes from studying users, not systems? As Drupal CMS UX Research Lead, my Drupal journey is unconventional. As a content writer and UX professional I am obsessed with watching people use interfaces to spark transformative ideas. I’m committed to aligning Drupal's strengths with user goals, from mindful word choices to strategic AI implementation, so I’m perfectly placed to lead Drupal's UX evolution!

Behind every great Drupal feature is a stubborn person (not necessarily a developer) who refused to let it stay broken. Want to be that person? We’ll show you how.

Higher education is facing a critical challenge: shifting demographics, increasing competition, and evolving student expectations are making enrolment growth harder than ever.

True innovation requires the grappling of ideas—where differing viewpoints, experiences, and expertise collide to create something greater than the sum of their parts. Conflict catalyzes this process by breaking through groupthink, challenging outdated practices, and pushing teams to find better solutions. Without conflict, organizations risk settling for mediocrity, as unchallenged ideas rarely lead to transformative breakthroughs. This session will explore how leaders can harness conflict to create a culture of innovation, where team members feel empowered to challenge each other respectfully and collaboratively.

How the State of Georgia streamlined their QA and UAT process to ship code faster and catch bugs earlier.

Guests can pre-register for the luncheon during the DrupalCon Chicago registration process. If you’re already registered and would like to add the luncheon, simply use the “Modify” button in your confirmation email to update your registration.

"Come for the code and stay for the community" — that's a phrase that runs deep in the Drupal psyche. It's what pulled me in over 20yrs ago. It might be the same for you. But why is that? It's because yes, tools and the things that we can build with them are fun, but we need more than that. As humans, we need purpose, community, and accomplishment.

Centarro recently released Commerce Core 3.3.0, which includes a brand now order management interface that the whole team participated in building through the second half of 2025. We're excited to show it off here at DrupalCon Chicago!

We spend significant time optimizing User and Developer Experience (UX/DX), but our next frontier is Agent Experience (AX).

Over the past year, a new kind of bot has shown up in our server logs: AI-powered crawlers scraping public government websites to feed large language models. These bots aren’t malicious, but they hit fast, often ignore robots.txt, and can overwhelm infrastructure not built to handle that level of traffic.

If recognizing the value of neurodiversity is the first step, the next is changing systems, environments, and behaviours to actually support neurodivergent people. Neuroinclusive spaces use the ethos of Universal Design.

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The YMCA’s mission is rooted in community impact—and in today’s world, that includes a strong, unified digital presence. Enter Open Y, an open-source, Drupal-based platform built specifically for YMCAs to streamline content management, marketing, and integrations.

The security team will present topics from their work promoting a more secure Drupal project. The team will also talk about how they recruit new members, refinements to their procedures, and what you can do to support Drupal security.

In this session, we will showcase a custom module designed to assist editors with conducting a content audit, including a ROT analysis (Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial) and translation reviews on their website. Periodically performing these analyses is essential for ensuring the relevance of website content, and it is a crucial step during content migration.

At Vienna, we showcased how Canvas AI can transform page-building in Drupal. Now, we’re excited to show you the next step.

AI is moving fast, and those who wait risk to adopt falling behind. But Drupal AI is already enabling developers and businesses to eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies and deliver more value through enhanced content, AI search, and smarter site operations. In this lightning talk, Michael will show what’s possible today, what’s coming next, and practical ways to adopt AI to build experience, gain momentum, and stay ahead of competitors, rather than scrambling to catch up. Plus, why privacy and security are imperative when adopting AI.

Since our last news session in Atlanta, the editorial landscape has shifted, but CKEditor has continued to deliver continuous value across both open-source and premium modules. This session provides a high-level overview of the progress made in enhancing the experience for Drupal content creators.

AI can generate landing pages, service pages, and blog posts in seconds - but without the right context, the results feel generic, off-brand, or just plain wrong. Context is what takes you from AI-slop to content that is authentic and resonates with your audience.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Claude are increasingly used for search, support, dev tools, and content creation. Out of the box, they can read but not interact with your Drupal sites content and features. Model Context Protocol (MCP) solves this by defining a standard way for LLMs to interact with external data sources and tools. Teaching the LLM to interact with Drupal and perform searches, flag nodes, and more.

For so many of our projects, the key to success lies in mastering the art of listening and interpreting feedback—skills that any seasoned game master knows well. Just as a game master guides players through an evolving story, product teams must navigate the complex dynamics of customer and stakeholder relationships. This session will explore how techniques from tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons can be applied to stakeholder management and all forms of facilitation.

Organizations often struggle with fragmented content, inconsistent messaging, and editorial bottlenecks—especially as websites grow and multiple teams contribute to the same platform. In this session, we’ll explore how to design and implement a sustainable content governance model in Drupal that keeps your content organized, high-quality, and future-proof.

Kat Shaw and M. Nikki Flores are CPACC-certified and work with Javier Reartes at Lullabot to integrate accessibility as a mindset and framework into government platforms, such as for the states of Iowa, Maryland, and Georgia, and higher education, such as UMass Amherst and NYU.

ECA (the Event, Condition, Action module) for modern Drupal has established itself as the go-to tool for automating Drupal workflows with a no-code/low-code approach. After several years in production and with the benefit of experience and feedback from hundreds of power users, the time has come to plan and execute the future of ECA and make an even bigger difference for Drupal and all its users.

For years, the Drupal community has talked about a component-driven future. The Drupal Canvas is where that future finally becomes a reality. This is more than just an evolution of Layout Builder; it's a fundamental paradigm shift in how we think about building with Drupal.

Drupal’s Views module is a powerful tool for building custom content listings, filtered displays, and dynamic, auto-updating pages — all without writing any code.

Every CMS and web tool is racing to add AI content generation, AI image editing, AI assistants. It makes sense — and demos look great! But this approach has a ceiling. We will never out-build the frontier model providers, and the features we ship today will feel outdated in six months.

Oh, that Drupal Forms... Too much code just to create a simple form with a couple of fields!

Transform your Drupal sites with practical AI integration in this hands-on workshop. Starting with the Drupal AI module installation, you'll progressively build AI-powered features including automated content generation, intelligent image alt text, CKEditor AI enhancements, and SEO optimization tools. Advanced topics cover AI automators for PDF processing, URL content import, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for intelligent search. Each concept includes hands-on building with step-by-step guidance. You'll leave with working code, configured AI workflows, and the foundation to build sophisticated AI applications. Bring your laptop for the complete hands-on experience - no AI background required, just curiosity and basic Drupal familiarity.

It’s a scenario we’ve all lived through: your deadline is fast approaching. UI bugs are cropping up left, right and center. Spacing is so inconsistent it looks jarring, and your client is stressed that every image they upload in Drupal comes out with people’s faces cropped in half. Can you resist the temptation to add another hack, another field, another confusing instruction? What if instead we took a peek at the design logic behind these elements and found something better?

Modern web experiences don’t always require decoupled architectures, complex frameworks, or external libraries like React. In this session we’ll show, using real world examples, how vanilla JavaScript can bring rich and interactive storytelling to Drupal without sacrificing performance or editorial workflow.

It's been 13 years since the original call to "get off the island" went out. Since then the web has grown and changed quite a lot, yet DrupalCon remains a sea of familiar faces. Community is a comfort, and there’s much to celebrate on this 25th anniversary, but for this project to thrive it must tap new sources of energy.

The potential of Site Templates is clear: by combining recipes, demo content, and a Canvas-compatible theme, they make Drupal’s power, flexibility, and openness more accessible—giving users a head start with DrupalCMS. That innovation becomes transformative once these templates are easy to find and use via a Marketplace on Drupal.org.

Running multiple sites from a single Drupal codebase is powerful—and tricky—when it comes to configuration. One site needs a feature, another must not have that feature; environment overrides creep in; and “just export and import” stops being simple. This session presents a clear, repeatable approach built around distinct Config Split types and shows how to templatize and automate them so adding a new site is a 5‑minute task, not a much longer ordeal.

Following on from the DrupalCon Vienna session "It’s OK to NOT be OK! Establishing support frameworks in community teams", this session will advance the proposal to create a 'Code of Care' to enshrine in policy how we care for each other in the Drupal community.

Our talk will present the most salient aspects of what we call the HMS Flagship Refresh project, born out of multiple needs: integrating the MD Program’s content into the site, before OpenScholar’s decommissioning in November 2025; enhancing the role of the site as an editorial product, after the 2023 launch of the standalone Harvard Medicine magazine; and the structural and visual modernization of the site, which in 2024 was the oldest flagship among Harvard schools.

Drupal Canvas introduced Code Components last year at DrupalCon Atlanta, opening a new avenue for Drupal frontend engineering by shipping a zero-setup, in-browser code editor, and out-of-the-box support for React and Tailwind CSS. A lot has happened since then. As the technical lead for Code Components, I've watched the possibilities steadily grow as Drupal Canvas has matured and become stable.

We know that Drupal is a predominant Content Management System amongst the top 100 universities globally. What about the other 5,000+ institutions? Who’s choosing proprietary CMS’s, when, and why? How can we ensure Drupal agencies are positioned competitively when competing against proprietary partners for website redesigns?

Shipping your website in multiple languages means more people can read your content or buy your products. Machine translation makes this easier than ever, but you’ll still want to let humans make the final edits . But what if your humans don’t want to use Drupal?

Birds of a Feather sessions, or BoFs, are un-conference style sessions where community members self-organize to have a round table discussion about a particular topic. These sessions do not have formal presentations, A/V, or recordings, but are a great opportunity for truly interactive conversations, and to participate in providing feedback on key topics.

Search has evolved from a list of links to a conversation. AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini don’t just “rank” your site – they ingest, interpret and cite it. In this new landscape, visibility depends on semantic clarity and machine-readability.

Drupal's Recipes Initiative is redefining how we build and share functionality, moving beyond distributions toward lightweight, composable recipes and site templates.

Enabling ambitious site builders has always been a superpower of Drupal and the introduction of Drupal Canvas has taken this to another level. This session will explore advanced site-building techniques utilizing the new Drupal Canvas module. Attendees will learn how to combine the power of Canvas with existing core modules like Views and popular contrib modules, all without writing any code!

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how businesses utilize Artificial Intelligence. The era of simple, text-based chatbots is ending. In its place, a new generation of "AI Agents" is emerging, intelligent digital assistants capable of reasoning and collaborating with humans in real-time to customize content experiences.

Drupal's Single Directory Components (SDC) represent a significant shift in how we approach component-based theming by grouping templates, CSS, and JavaScript into a single directory. This architecture simplifies both the organization and the management of theme components, making it easier for developers to maintain and scale Drupal projects. SDC ensures that all assets related to a component are located in one place, streamlining the development process and reducing complexity for front-end and back-end teams alike.

Shipping updates for Drupal sites doesn’t have to be stressful or error-prone. In this session, we’ll dive deep into automated testing as the backbone of a reliable CI/CD workflow, showing how developers can confidently move code from development to production while preventing regressions and maintaining site quality.

HTMX has been added to Drupal 11.2 as a light javascript dependency to modernize and unify many legacy Drupal APIs: AJAX, AJAX for Views, Form States, Big Pipe…

For websites to be accessible, content needs to be thoughtfully arranged into sections and navigable by headings, so users can easily scan a page and find the information they are seeking. Ensuring that proper structure can be one of the biggest accessibility challenges for a Drupal site, with many pages ending up with improperly nested heading levels, sections without explicit headings, or regular text that is styled like headings, but missing the proper semantic markup needed by screen readers.

All too frequently the relationship between sales and delivery is a constant balancing act. Sales teams are driven by ambitious targets, while delivery teams are focused on accurate scoping, sustainable recovery rates, and the practical realities of open-source implementation. The result? Friction, misaligned expectations, and, in the worst cases, even a hit to client satisfaction.

Great non-profit websites do more than deliver content, they create connection. They guide users, inspire engagement and donations, and make complex organizations feel human. In this session, we’ll break down real-world examples of top non-profit websites and show how their UX strategies translate into Drupal builds and performant experiences. From navigation patterns to content architecture to design choices, you’ll leave with an actionable playbook of practical ideas ready to apply to your next Drupal project.

AI technologies are evolving faster than our ability to understand them, much less control them. While these technologies have the potential to improve our quality of life across multiple sectors, it is essential to global security that governments and civil society weigh the both the costs and benefits of AI expansion. From nuclear proliferation to the environment to public health to the global economy, AI can bring hope or wreak havoc. Bell will outline both the threats at hand, as well as how to manage or mitigate those threats.

Guests can pre-register for the luncheon during the DrupalCon Chicago registration process. If you’re already registered and would like to add the luncheon, simply use the “Modify” button in your confirmation email to update your registration.

How do you learn to cook? Try the dish first, watch someone make it, deconstruct the recipe, then make it yourself. Same with fixing cars, playing music, or any skill. But learning AI in Drupal is hard - where are the working examples to try?

Drupal has always thrived because of its passionate developer community. But the future of Drupal depends on something bigger: the ecosystem around it. Designers, communicators, strategists, web managers, and decision-makers all influence whether Drupal gets adopted and sustained.

When your Drupal site spans thousands of pages, good content structure isn’t just helpful, it’s essential. This 30-minute session will share practical strategies for managing large-scale Drupal sites through user-centered information architecture (IA) and smart use of Drupal’s tools.

This technical session covers the high-level architecture and inner workings of Drupal Canvas. The session focuses on the back-end aspects that Drupal developers need to know when developing with future Canvas adoption in mind.

Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cwnuN5UooC_dnwGhzFqt8rTGBVV4YAD9/view?…

Do you want to contribute but are not sure how? Check out the First Time Contributor Pathway for a list of recommended sessions at DrupalCon Chicago to help you figure out how to use your particular skills to contribute to the Drupal project!

Drupal excels at the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) model—using structured content to enable the same individual piece of content to flow into a variety of contexts.

Explore practical strategies for adopting Drupal's Drupal Canvas in existing platforms, ensuring a smooth transition without compromising current investments.

Site templates are a big deal. They have the potential to open Drupal up to more people than ever by delivering functional and beautiful starter sites. But it's up to the Drupal community to create them. And, as with anything in the Drupal world, there are a few ways to go about it.

In this session, we will let you all see behind the curtain of amazee.ai. This will not be a sales pitch in any way, but rather an in depth overview how AI infrastructure is ran today on a global scale. While AI developers might only see an API endpoint, behind the scenes a lot more is happening. A short overview of the things that we will cover:

As a project manager, I remember how overwhelming it was to handle that big Drupal multi-site rollout. There were so many tickets to track, and the client’s priorities kept shifting. With different teams depending on each other, I often felt like I was just putting out fires instead of steering the project.

Organizations rush to implement AI but see minimal ROI by treating it as a feature rather than a fundamental shift in how teams work. This gap costs companies millions in wasted licenses and missed opportunities.

Chat bubbles are everywhere, but are they actually working for users? Sandstorm® conducted usability studies with actual users to uncover what people really want when interacting with AI-driven tools. We tested transactional bots, generative AI, hybrid models, and domain-specific chat experiences to see where they succeed, where they fall short, and how they compare to traditional search.

Drupal’s frontend ecosystem continues to evolve, and the right frontend strategy depends on the project context. Rather than a narrow “how-to” on a specific editor or framework, this session looks across types of Drupal frontend projects and the strategies that make them successful. Through case studies (multisite rollouts, design-system adoption, platform migrations and consolidations), attendees will learn which frontend approaches and tradeoffs map to which project types — and how to plan for maintainability, editor happiness, and cross-team adoption.

Dive deeper into the latest developments of Drupal CMS and the AI Initiative in a series of lightning talks. The speakers are not only experts in their field, but they are the ones leading each area of development or research.

Migrating a 15-year-old Italian humor site (132K nodes, 100K newsletter subscribers, 18 custom modules, 93 contrib modules, and a MailUp integration) to Drupal 11 is the kind of project that traditionally requires a team, months of work, and a budget that's hard to swallow. This session shows how a structured, artifact-driven AI methodology rewrote that calculus on a real, completed project.

Whether you're an AI optimist, a pessimist, or somewhere in-between, there's no getting around it: if you aren't shipping AI-generated code yet, you will be. Are you and your team prepared for it?

Need a little joy right now? This story has it all: success metrics exceeded, meaningful digital transformation, and a team that genuinely enjoyed the journey. As one usability test participant put it: “I can’t wait until this is live!”

Today the European Commission runs one of the largest Drupal platforms in the world. In the beginning it was adoption without contribution. Each institution tried to implement similar solutions. This talk is about what changed when we stopped trying to justify giving back to the community and started building in a way where contribution is what comes out the other end. Shared modules, common governance, and a platform designed so that doing the work well and doing open source are the same thing. If your organization uses open source but hasn't figured out how to give back, this one's for you.

To be a true enterprise content management system, Drupal must support comprehensive, site-wide content staging. That means content editors, publishers and site builders need to be able to preview entire sets of changes from an end-user's perspective before publishing them easily with a single click.

What if you could open up the world of Agents, so that people with communication and language skills could focus on the prompt writing and the actual way the Agents interact with Drupal or its content is just an abstraction that you get access to with a click of a button.

Everyone’s talking about RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), but let’s be honest: the standard demo usually goes something like this: split your content into chunks, toss them into a vector database, cross your fingers, and hope the LLM comes back with something vaguely useful. That’s fine for a project with straightforward content, but in the case of a hundred thousand Drupal nodes, you need a different RAG setup and strategy.

With the launch of the Drupal AI Initiative approaching its one-year anniversary, now is the perfect time for a critical look back and an exciting preview of what's next.

Join the Drupal.org engineering team for updates on our work to support the community.

Team's aren't getting stuck because they lack ideas -- they get stuck because they can’t agree on what to try next. Whether it’s due to navigating internal politics, a fear of failure, or decision fatigue, progress becomes a never-ending churn when a path forward struggles to be defined.

HTMX has steadily risen among JavaScript projects since its release in recent years, gaining more new stars on GitHub in 2024 than React. Now HTMX is integrated into Drupal core and forms the basis of a subsystem that will replace our jQuery based Ajax API.

A major contributing factor to the Digital Divide - the unequal access to and effective use of digital technology - lies squarely with those of us who build and maintain websites. We often compel users to download enormous images to use our sites, without considering the burden this places on infrastructure, devices, data costs, and personal patience. The sheer magnitude of image-based web content, estimated at about 35% by volume, exacerbates the problem.

Government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are embracing Drupal to meet the demand for cost-effective, standards-compliant digital services. In the UK, LocalGov Drupal has grown into a shared open-source platform supported by dozens of councils, with a strong collaborative governance model. In the US, ProvusGov builds on the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) to provide a reusable Drupal distribution tailored to state and local government needs, emphasizing accessibility, compliance, and low-cost deployment.

If you are already familiar with the tools the Drupal community uses (such as the issue queue and/or a local development environment), but could still use help choosing issues and navigating the process, Mentored Contribution is for you.

Do you want to contribute but are not sure how? Check out the First Time Contributor Pathway for a list of recommended sessions at DrupalCon Chicago to help you figure out how to use your particular skills to contribute to the Drupal project!

DrupalCon Chicago Trivia Night will be held on Thursday, March 26 from 5:30-8:30PM at the Weather Mark Tavern (1503 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605).