I recently stood before a room of fellow builders at Drupal Developer Days Athens 2026 and asked a question: "How many of you use Drupal distributions?" Lots of hands shot up across the room. But when I followed up with, "And how many of you are actually happy with them?" the room went quiet, only a couple hands remained in the air. Distributions were our solution for long to make starting easier with Drupal, so this was sad.

To say that there is not an agreement of using large language models (LLMs) for Drupal development would be an understatement. I've been using Claude Code for a while to assits with my Drupal development and I shared a month ago how I brought back the Drupal 7 module upgrader tool from the dead. That was a bit of an involved example, so I wanted to find a simpler one and this time rely even more on Claude.

Drupal Module Upgrader (DMU) was created by Angie Byron and Adam Hoenich way back in 2014 at Acquia to help folks upgrade custom Drupal 7 modules to modern Drupal. It was magic. Cameron Zemek at PreviousNext built the crucial underlying library, Pharborist, which abstracted PHP manipulation into a generic dependency. Many relied on DMU to upgrade custom code, and it was even updated for Drupal 9; however, keeping it current over time proved challenging.

Did you know that Drupal 12 is expected as early as mid-2026? That is in 8 months! Drupal 11.2 already defined most deprecated APIs and disruptive deprecations are now deferred to Drupal 13. So it was time to look at where the contributed ecosystem stands and kick off the creation of automations (for example rector rules) to help the ecosystem along.

In the past month or so I had the opportunity to record videos featuring key DrupalCon Vienna sessions not to miss to learn where Drupal is going. With only a couple days left to buy regular tickets, I think it is a good time to review my suggestions. I even put together a whole shared calendar you can subscribe to. That way you can be sure not to miss key sessions.

Did you search for Drupal API documentation in the past and ended up on outdated information on api.drupal.org? I heard this story from many people before and it also happens to AI bots. This is a problem the Drupal Association wanted to fix for a while but did not get around to it with all the priorities. 

Acquia held an internal hackathon called 48Create on 15-16 May, 2025. I joined the team formed by Ben Mullins around Drupal documentation and I decided to take on this problem. 

Composer is a widely used dependency manager that modern Drupal uses to rely on various third party components. Unfortunately it is not very straightforward to use and was definitely a departure from Drupal 7's self-contained package that had the few dependencies directly shipped. As we realized that Composer itself is a big barrier to make Drupal easier to use, we started to chip away at use cases where Drupal sites would rely on it.

We still keep improving the ecosystem readiness and tooling with each new major Drupal core version. Drupal 11 is to be released in a few weeks on the week of July 29 (so probably the first days of August) and already almost half of the top 200 modules are ready. But we need to keep thinking ahead.

The Project Update Bot (originally built by Ted Bowman at Acquia and since then very actively owned and improved by Björn Brala at SWIS) posted into more than 7600 project issue queues on Drupal.org with merge request suggestions to improve and in many cases solve compatibility with the upcoming major version. 

The bot is a clever combination of Upgrade Status and drupal-rector with some custom decision logic. So humans can also run those tools! But what if we automate it even more? What if we help pre-empt forwards incompatible code getting into modules in the first place? 

I presented my first ever Drupal 11 deep dive session at DrupalCon Portland 2024 last week. It turned out to not just be about Drupal 11 but also about Starshot and even about Drupal 12 thanks to the coolest future-proofing technology I announced in this talk. Unfortunately not all of the attendees fit in, that wanted to attend, as the room was standing space only and many turned around and left. But here we go!

I strongly believe in open content. I came to open source from open content 24 or so years ago. So in good tradition, I built this slide deck on slides.com in way that is easy to share and fork. You can create your own or present directly from my deck with my speaker notes. The content is licensed with a Creative Commons license. I'll keep updating this slideshow, but under different URLs, so people can catch the latest edition of this presentation at Drupal Devdays Burgas next month for example. See some of you there!

If you can't make it there or plan to present this at your organization or meetup in the meantime, check out the open source slides.

The recording from DrupalCon Portland is below. Unfortunately I was not well prepared with a subtitling set up. I am exploring good tools and will do better next time! The conference tech crew tried to help in the middle of the session, but unfortunately they could not make it work either. At least managed to discuss some current Starshot questions while that was attempted. I promised a video with subtitles, which turns out Youtube nicely delivered, so I will not create a separate recording now. Hope this helps!