Every long-running franchise eventually hits the same wall: the product keeps getting better, but everyone still remembers the awkward early seasons. Drupal is 25 years into its run, and at DrupalCon Rotterdam its founder basically stood up and said, "Folks, the show got good. Tell your friends."
The DriesNote Goes Full Hype Department
In his DriesNote on 29 September 2026, Dries Buytaert argued that Drupal is "light-years ahead of its reputation," and launched a Drupal Advocacy Program that awards contribution credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal. Think tutorials, demos, article translations and amplifying talks, with double credits offered quarterly for themed contributions.
He also proposed a Rosetta Sprint, a focused four-day effort with key maintainers to unify how Drupal describes its own capabilities, in a way that's readable by humans, systems and AI agents alike. Then he closed with the "Rotterdam Pilot," a challenge for attendees to start sharing Drupal content outside the conference bubble that very week.
Twenty PHP Attributes Instead of a Thousand Lines
The marketing push isn't just vibes, because the roadmap backs it up. The keynote framed growth around three routes (multilingual, JavaScript plus headless, and AI) and showed React support for Canvas code components, simpler multilingual site building, and headless support expanded to five frameworks with Angular newly added. On the AI side, assistants can now connect to Drupal through a recipe combining Simple OAuth, MCP Server and the Tool module, and a prototype cut the code needed from roughly 1,000 lines to about 20 PHP attributes.
The sneaky-smart part is the Rosetta Sprint. In a world where buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant "what CMS should I use?", how a platform describes itself in machine-readable terms is quietly becoming a sales channel. Drupal making sure the robots get the memo is less navel-gazing than it sounds. It's SEO for the agent era. Dries summed up the whole philosophy neatly: "Drupal doesn't need hype. It needs a better public record."
Translation: Drupal has spent years shipping like an enterprise heavyweight and marketing like a shy open-source project. Rotterdam is the moment it finally decided to do both.
If your picture of Drupal is still stuck in the Drupal 7 era, I'd genuinely love to walk you through what a modern Drupal build with MCP-connected AI looks like today, because the reputation gap Dries described is real and your competitors may already be on the other side of it.
Source: Drupal.org