Four speakers at Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) 2026 have shared with The DropTimes the practical challenges they plan to address when the event opens in Oakland, California, on 12 November. Their sessions explore how Drupal's recent improvements can be explained to clients, how developers can manage infrastructure without relying on managed hosting, and how institutions can establish stronger governance for accessibility and artificial intelligence.
The speakers, Drupal Association CTO Tim Lehnen, developer Jordan Koplowicz, UCLA's Val Trullinger and Context Control Center maintainer Kristen Pol, approach these challenges from different directions. Their responses offer specific examples of the decisions developers and organisations face when adopting new capabilities or maintaining large Drupal installations.
Organised by Drupal community volunteers, BADCamp is a gathering that brings together Drupal developers, site builders, designers, marketers and content professionals. Hosted by Bay Area Drupal Limited, the 2026 edition takes place on 12–13 November at Oakstop, 1721 Broadway, Oakland, with free admission supported by sponsors and community contributions. The programme includes demonstrations, case studies, technical sessions and roundtables covering Drupal AI, Drupal CMS and Canvas, accessibility, DevOps and modern authoring. Alongside these sessions, a Higher Education Summit on 12 November and an AI Summit on 13 November will bring practitioners together to discuss shared challenges.
Tim Lehnen's opening keynote, scheduled for 12 November from 09:00 to 10:00 PST, will examine developments across Drupal CMS, Canvas, the AI initiative and Drupal core. His presentation will feature short video demonstrations from the contributors behind these improvements, offering attendees material they can use when explaining recent Drupal developments to colleagues and clients.
A lot has changed in Drupal in the last year. It is hard to keep track of all of it, and harder still to explain it to a client or a colleague who last looked at Drupal years ago.
–Tim Lehnen, CTO, Drupal Association
Tim said the keynote will also compare Drupal with competing platforms, including areas where further improvements are necessary. For site owners, he identified Drupal 10 reaching end of life on 9 December 2026 as an immediate priority. The presentation materials and video clips will be published openly for reuse, and attendees can earn contribution credit through the Drupal Advocacy Program by sharing them outside the Drupal community. Tim said conversations with practitioners, particularly around accessibility and higher education, also help inform the Drupal Association's work.
For developers managing their own hosting environments, the challenge is more immediate. Jordan Koplowicz will present "Kubernetes for Drupal Devs" on 12 November from 15:00 to 15:45 PST, focusing on developers who cannot rely on managed hosting providers such as Pantheon or Acquia.
Jordan Koplowicz
Jordan Koplowicz
"Devops" usually means "the web developer has to do it." So, arm yourself with some knowledge, and let's demystify the Dockerfile.
–Jordan Koplowicz, BADCamp speaker
Jordan's session will explain what Kubernetes does, when developers might need it and how to create a Dockerfile for Drupal. The presentation will introduce Dockerfiles and explain when Kubernetes is useful for Drupal development. Jordan will also discuss an approach using Prometheus and Docker on a virtual private server without requiring Kubernetes. Having recently struggled with these technologies himself, Jordan said sharing those lessons with other developers was an important motivation for the session.
According to Val, UCLA supports more than 450 websites on Pantheon and maintains SiteDen, its Drupal distribution used by more than 65 sites. Val also helps implement accessibility standards across a wider campus environment of more than 1,000 websites. Those overlapping responsibilities have shaped his view of what institutions need to make accessibility improvements last.
Val Trullinger
Val Trullinger
The lesson from that work is that accessibility is a governance problem first and a technical problem second.
–Val Trullinger, UCLA
One example Val will discuss involves implementing HTML Purifier within SiteDen to address recurring problems that training and audits had failed to resolve. His session will examine accessibility at three levels: platform, programme and governance. He will also explain how the University of California's IT accessibility policy, institutional steering committees and programme teams help turn standards into responsibilities that website teams can act on. Val is helping organise the Higher Education Summit, where participants will discuss common constraints including decentralised campus structures, limited staffing and lengthy procurement processes.
AI is only as useful as the context it has. Organizations have all sorts of guidelines, policies, and institutional knowledge, but that information is often scattered across documents, prompts, and other places.
–Kristen Pol, primary maintainer of Context Control Center
Kristen will show how CCC allows teams to create and manage reusable context, determine when it applies and share it across AI agents, automators, content editing and translation. Her presentation will cover scoping by language, site section and use case, alongside prioritisation, token limits and governance. The approach is intended to make organisational guidance reusable across AI features, while leaving teams responsible for selecting appropriate context and evaluating the results.
Context Control Center reached release candidate 1 on 25 September 2026, although it does not yet have a supported stable release. As Kristen explained in an earlier interview with The DropTimes, governing the context supplied to an AI model does not guarantee that the model will follow it or produce better results. Her BADCamp session will focus on applying the available tools in practical workflows, while inviting discussion of implementation difficulties and opportunities for collaboration within Drupal's AI ecosystem.
BADCamp 2026 is free to attend, with registration available through the official event website. The complete programme and session details are available on the BADCamp sessions page.
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Kazima AbbasKazima Abbas is a sub-editor at The Drop Times
