It was great to attend DrupalCon Vienna this year with my colleague Dan and to catch up with some of the people whose open-source work has shaped my career over the past couple of decades.

Ryan Szrama, for example, whose work on Drupal Commerce has enabled several brilliant projects I’ve been lucky enough to work on.

But as always, DrupalCon is primarily a chance to look ahead; to find out what’s going to be powering brilliant Drupal projects over the next few years.

Drupal Canvas

Last year was all about AI. This year, the focus shifted to Drupal Canvas (formerly Experience Builder).

Drupal Canvas is the next major step towards making Drupal sites something that can be got up and running in days rather than weeks.

Recent improvements like the updated installer, recipes, templates, and module browser have simplified setup. Canvas now aims to go further by fixing one of Drupal’s oldest pain points: page building.

Gone are the “forms within forms”. In their place: drag-and-drop, inline editing, and a zoomable artboard you can toggle between mobile, tablet and desktop views.

For content editors who want immediate visual feedback on the page they’re building, this is a genuine leap forward.

Canvas feels genuinely editor-centred, and importantly, the community are rallying behind it rather than fragmenting across competing visions.

If it continues to focus on real-world editorial needs, it could finally bridge the gap between editors and developers.

JS Code Components

Something new that caught my attention were JS Code Components, part of Canvas itself.

JS Code Components let front-end developers build new visual components directly in the browser using a React-like syntax and TailwindCSS.

This means that with some React and Tailwind knowledge – common among front-end developers – you can design and refine Drupal’s front end without touching PHP or learning deep “Drupalisms”.

It’s a big step forward: Modern, flexible, and a welcome bridge between Drupal’s back-end power and today’s front-end skill sets.

AI: From Novelty to Infrastructure

While Canvas dominated this year’s focus, AI continued to mature from novelty to infrastructure.

• Canvas AI Figma Assistant, which can interpret a Figma design, generate layouts, and even build JS Code Components from an AI prompt.
• Contextual component data, helping AI understand how visual blocks should be used.
• Site Contexts, providing AI with global awareness of a site’s purpose and audience.
• Human-in-the-loop logging, allowing edits to be tracked and rolled back.

One standout presentation by Marcus Johansson showed Drupal turning a photo of a hand-drawn webform into a working form, and even taking submissions by phone through a voice interface.

And there was a timely section on security in AI (particularly prompt injection) and how Drupal’s permission model can help mitigate those risks. It’s good to see responsible engineering taking precedence over hype.

Neurodiversity in Business

Away from the code, Vera Herzmann’s session on neurodiversity was thought-provoking.

It’s a topic I care about personally, through my richly neurodivergent family, and Vera Herzmann’s approach struck a great balance between optimism and realism.

She highlighted that many qualities businesses prize – focus, integrity, independent thinking – are often associated with neurodivergent people. Greta Thunberg and Richard Branson were cited as examples of how traits like determination and alternative thinking can drive impact.

One audience member made an interesting point about the danger of groupthink; that people less swayed by social consensus can act as early warning systems, spotting problems others overlook.

As a caveat: I’m wary of making sweeping generalisations about neurodiversity.

It’s vital to celebrate neurodivergent strengths, but equally important to acknowledge the challenges and not to stereotype neurodiverse people as campaigning “firebrands”, creative visionaries, and savant disrupters.

Those who don’t fit that mould shouldn’t feel excluded or lesser, either.

Looking Ahead to DrupalCon 2026 in Rotterdam

In just a year, Canvas has evolved from a concept to a usable beta, complete with Code Components.

By next year’s DrupalCon in Rotterdam, I expect it will be production-ready; something we can confidently use in client projects.

This is the target that the Drupal project has been aiming towards since the announcement of the Starshot programme back in Barcelona. Here’s hoping that 2026 is when we see it all come together.

See you in Rotterdam.