The full pre-planned content of DrupalCon Chicago includes three keynotes from Dries Buytaert, Alexandra Bell and the Drupal CMS team, over 75 sessions (some of which are featured innovation content), seven summits (AI, Government, Higher Education, Non-profit, Healthcare, Community and Drupal Partners), three professional hands-on trainings, the free Drupal in a Day beginner workshop and social events, including the Drupal 25th Anniversary Gala! Use the Sessionize mobile app to view the pre-planned program on the device you’ll have with you at the conference.
DrupalCon also offers participants unconference space of attendee organized sessions (Birds of a Feather). Those are not included in the pre-planned schedule and not presented in the mobile app. Don't miss those either!
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***Sessions and speakers are subject to change. Additional sessions will be added as they become available.
08:00 to 17:00 CDT
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?
