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!
Access all DrupalCon content
***Sessions and speakers are subject to change. Additional sessions will be added as they become available.
08:00 to 17:00 CDT
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.
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.
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.
Drupal CMS 2.0 has launched, complete with Drupal Canvas and site templates!
What does this mean for building Drupal sites? And what's next?
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.
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.
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.
We spend significant time optimizing User and Developer Experience (UX/DX), but our next frontier is Agent Experience (AX).
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.
I want...
- Drupal CMS
- Configuration management
- Automatic updates
- Git workflows
- Modern infrastructure
- Continuous delivery
- Project Browser for content editors
In the words of Queen, "I want it all... and I want it now!"
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.
Government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are embracing Drupal to meet the demand for cost-effective, standards-compliant digital services.
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!”
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.
At Vienna, we showcased how Canvas AI can transform page-building in Drupal. Now, we’re excited to show you the next step.
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.
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.
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.
Organizations often struggle with fragmented content, inconsistent messaging, and editorial bottlenecks—especially as websites grow and multiple teams contribute to the same platform.
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.
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!
What if I tell you that those times are in the past?
Transform your Drupal sites with practical AI integration in this hands-on workshop.
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.
Modern web experiences don’t always require decoupled architectures, complex frameworks, or external libraries like React.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
