DrupalCamp Colorado 2026 Puts Long-Term Drupal Practice in Focus

Organisers have scheduled an optional paid training day on 26 August 2026 before the free DrupalCamp Colorado 2026 programme on 27–28 August at the Lowry Conference Center in Denver. The official programme includes sessions, keynotes, contribution sprints and networking across Thursday and Friday. The event page lists the venue at 1061 Akron Way in Denver's Lowry neighbourhood.

The programme brings developers, designers, strategists and other Drupal practitioners together around development, artificial intelligence, accessibility and content design. Its opening training day focuses on implementation, while Thursday's programme shifts to shorter sessions on operational decisions behind Drupal platforms and publishing workflows. DrupalCamp Colorado speakers Matt Dorman and Steve Kessler also provided The DropTimes with written comments on the governance and staged-publishing questions behind their sessions.

Three paid workshops are listed for the training programme on 26 August. Two full-day sessions run from 09:30–16:30 MDT and cost $99.99 each, while an afternoon workshop runs from 13:30–16:30 MDT for $49.99. The individual training pages also list an option for free lunch during the 12:30–13:30 MDT break.

Matthew Saunders will lead Drupal AI - Practical AI Integration for Content Workflows in Room 106. Starting with a clean Drupal installation, the workshop covers installing and configuring the Drupal AI module and creating prompt-driven workflows for summarisation, translation, metadata enrichment, CKEditor-assisted authoring and editorial support. The programme also addresses privacy, accessibility, governance and bias mitigation and is intended for content editors, site builders, product owners, digital strategists and participants without previous AI experience.

Alexis Church will lead Designing Drupal Content Authoring Experiences to Encourage Accessible Content in Room 107. The workshop focuses on preventing accessibility problems during authoring rather than waiting for them to surface during an audit, with attention to structured fields, field help text, editor formatting controls and content moderation as an accessibility review point. The training also covers using AI to identify patterns in audit results, draft alt text, and handle formatting introduced when AI-generated content is pasted into Drupal.

Christine Coughlan will lead Designing Conversations for AI Chatbots in Room 105 from 13:30–16:30 MDT. The introductory workshop focuses on conversational design, including chatbot personality and tone, sample content and interaction flows. Instruction, examples and exercises are intended to give content strategists, UX designers, developers and other Drupal practitioners frameworks for planning AI-assisted conversations around user outcomes.

Thursday's programme includes Matt's 100 Sites, 6 Multisites, 12 Years: Lessons from an Enterprise CMS Engagement from 11:15–12:00 MDT in Room 100 A. His session uses a 12-year enterprise engagement to examine governance, staff turnover, technical debt and the authority structures surrounding a large multisite estate. In written comments provided to The DropTimes, Matt said the hardest questions over that period were less about code than about who could make decisions, what happened when those people left and how the team responded when a proposed rebuild would not solve the underlying problems.

One distinction Matt wants attendees to consider is the difference between recording a decision and recording who has authority to change it. He said governance arrangements in the engagement survived considerable staff turnover before eventually reaching a point where nobody within the organisation remained to own them. His session will also provide a six-part scorecard that attendees can apply to their own arrangements without making the CMS itself the focus.

Governance has a half-life. Ours ran about five years.

Steve's Staged Publishing With Entity Share follows from 13:30–14:15 MDT in Room 100 A. The session examines how Entity Share can support staged publishing by moving content between environments so editors and developers can preview and validate it before it goes live. In written comments provided to The DropTimes, Steve said the session is aimed at people interested in distributing content or creating a staging environment before material reaches production websites.

Steve said the session is intended to help participants judge both where Entity Share fits and where it does not. The official session description similarly lists the benefits, limitations and implementation challenges of sharing content between environments among its topics. His emphasis is therefore on choosing an approach appropriate for a Drupal implementation rather than treating staged publishing as a universal requirement.

Both speakers also pointed to the community side of DrupalCamp Colorado. Matt said he is looking forward to reconnecting with people face to face and described conference hallway conversations as an important way to learn what others are working on. Steve said he has been involved with the camp since its first year, when he delivered his first Drupal session, and looks forward to returning to learn alongside other community members. The DrupalCamp Colorado programme continues through 28 August 2026.