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
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.
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.
