Still Judging Drupal by Drupal 7? You're Light Years Behind
The product moved on. The perception didn’t.
Drupal's biggest problem in 2026 is not its code. It is the story people still tell about it.
Mention Drupal to a CTO, a marketing lead or a developer outside our community and you often get the same look: is that still a thing? Type "is Drupal" into a search bar and the autocomplete finishes the sentence with "dead" or "still relevant". Many people formed their opinion on Drupal 7 and never looked again.
At DrupalCon Rotterdam (28 September to 1 October 2026), Dries Buytaert named this directly in his keynote: the reputation gap is now Drupal's number one challenge. He opened with a Rotterdam saying, niet lullen maar poetsen - stop talking, start working. Then he flipped it. Drupal has been doing the work. What it has not been doing is talking about it.
I agree with him. As a front-end architect who spends a lot of time in rooms where platform decisions get made, I see the gap every week. So here is my contribution: what Drupal actually is today, and why the perception is years behind the product.
What Drupal looks like now
The Drupal people remember was powerful but hard to start with. The Drupal that showed up in Rotterdam is built around one idea: go where people already are, instead of waiting for them to come to us.
Drupal CMS, recipes and site templates. Drupal CMS was launched at DrupalCon Portland because Dries felt the project had lost speed. It is now real, shipping product. You install it with sensible defaults, add capabilities through recipes, and start from site templates rather than a blank screen.
Multilingual from the installer up. Roughly 80% of the world does not speak English as a first or second language. Drupal CMS 2.2 adds a language selector to the installer, a guided multilingual add-on, and three levels of configuration from one-click defaults to full control. Canvas, the visual page builder, now supports translation with visual previews, review workflows and optional AI translation.
A first-class home for JavaScript developers. This is the part that should change minds in front-end teams. One command scaffolds a standalone React, TypeScript and Tailwind project for Canvas code components. Canvas Workbench previews components without Drupal running. The Canvas CLI syncs components, pages and templates both ways, and any npm package is fair game.
Canvas Headless goes further: point it at an external front end by URL, with starters for Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, TanStack Start and Angular. Editors keep visual editing. Developers keep their stack. For years the choice was "headless and lose the editor experience" or "coupled and lose your framework". That trade-off is going away.
Drupal's accidental AI advantage
Every platform is racing to bolt on AI. Drupal is in an unusual position: the hard parts of trustworthy AI were already built, years before anyone needed them for AI.
The Rotterdam keynote demo made this concrete. A content editor asked ChatGPT to roll back two Dutch pages while leaving the English versions alone. She never touched revisions, moderation states or permissions. Drupal still enforced all of them, and each change landed as a new revision under her name. The same connection works from Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Microsoft Copilot and Slack, available today through a recipe combining OAuth, the MCP Server module and the Tool module.
That is the point people miss. Workflows, revisions, translation and granular access control are exactly what you need when an AI agent is acting on your content. Drupal has had them for a decade. Dries calls this Drupal's accidental AI advantage.
The remaining gap is exposure: each module's capabilities still have to be described as tools. Dries showed that doing this by hand for his own photo album module took about 1,000 lines of code. A prototype built with Matt Glaman and Michael Lander replaces that with roughly 20 PHP attributes on code that already exists. Describe a capability once and it becomes available to MCP clients, workflow tools like ECA, FlowDrop and Maestro, OpenAPI schemas and front-end tooling.
On top of this, the Drupal AI initiative has drawn more than 100 contributors in recent months. Its public demo shows content review against your own standards, grounded on-site answers with sources, guardrails and full logging. This is governed AI, not a chatbot widget.
Why the gap exists, and why it now matters more
The gap exists because we assumed great software explains itself. Dries admitted he was guilty of that magical thinking. It never does.
AI makes this worse. When a decision-maker asks an AI assistant whether Drupal is a good choice, the answer reflects whatever has been written about Drupal. If the public record is a decade of "Drupal is complex" and "is Drupal dead" threads, that is what gets repeated and amplified. The product moves forward; the narrative stays frozen.
The community's answer is a new Drupal advocacy program, led by the Drupal Association:
- Advocacy earns contribution credit. Talks, blog posts, tutorials, videos, podcasts and translations all count.
- Reach is weighted. A talk at a non-Drupal event or an article in a major developer publication earns more than the same work inside our own bubble.
- Low friction. It starts with a simple form at drupal.org/advocacy, with automation planned.
Because credits shape how organisations appear in the Drupal marketplace, agencies now have a business reason to tell the story well. As Dries put it, Drupal does not need hype. It needs a better public record.
Talk louder about what works
Dries closed by rewriting Rotterdam's motto for us: start talking louder about what is working. Drupal is light years ahead of its reputation. That is a good problem to have, but nobody outside our community will solve it for us.
So here is my ask, whether you build with Drupal, sell it, or buy it:
- Pick one thing from Rotterdam that surprised you and share it outside the Drupal bubble, with a client, a colleague, or on LinkedIn.
- Clip and credit. Hundreds of session recordings are coming out of Rotterdam. Turn one good idea into a post, and credit the speaker.
- If you maintain a module, tool-enable it. Make it reachable through MCP or a workflow, note the friction, and send it upstream.
- Log your advocacy at drupal.org/advocacy so it counts.
And if you last looked at Drupal in the Drupal 7 era: look again. Install Drupal CMS, open Canvas, try the AI demo. Then tell me if the reputation still fits.
