Blog

TD Cafe 017 features Mike Anello and Rod Martin discussing what they describe as a sustained decline in demand for beginner Drupal training. Drawing on course registrations, event attendance, YouTube tutorial performance, and feedback from other providers, the conversation links the trend to AI-assisted self-learning, Drupal’s steeper entry path for newcomers, and the need for stronger promotion beyond existing Drupal community spaces. ...more

A closer look at the Speculation Rules API has changed Dries Buytaert's long-held scepticism about web prefetching. In a recent blog post, the Drupal founder argues that modern browser controls allow websites to improve perceived performance while avoiding many of the bandwidth, battery, and resource concerns that have traditionally accompanied speculative loading. ...more

Drupal CMS 2.1 introduces Site Templates, a feature intended to reduce the initial configuration work involved in launching Drupal websites. In an Acquia blog post, Martin Anderson-Clutz argues that pre-configured templates can help organisations start with working content models, roles, workflows, and design foundations instead of a blank installation, while Drupal.org release notes confirm installer-level support for template selection and site export. ...more

Darrell Green reflects on nearly 18 years of Drupal contracting in a DrupalRX field note that shifts attention from code to the organisational realities behind project delivery. Drawing on work across enterprise, government, media, startup, and consulting environments, he argues that project outcomes are often shaped less by Drupal itself than by requirements, ownership, communication, architectural judgement, and stakeholder alignment. ...more

Open source software has moved closer to the centre of Europe’s technology sovereignty agenda. Reflecting on the European Commission’s newly released European Technological Sovereignty Package, Dries Buytaert highlights proposed funding, procurement measures, and a growing policy recognition that open source infrastructure requires sustained investment. His analysis frames the package as a meaningful step, while noting that the proposed funding remains small compared with Europe’s annual spending on largely American proprietary software and services. ...more

Recurring billing in Drupal no longer has a single obvious implementation path. Ryan Szrama’s Centarro analysis explains when Commerce Recurring gives organisations useful control over subscription data, carts, and custom workflows, and when gateway-managed systems such as Stripe may offer a simpler operational fit. The article also outlines hybrid models that keep Drupal as the subscription record while offloading billing execution to the payment provider. ...more

Government Drupal websites can face sustained traffic growth and sharp request spikes from automated bots. In the second part of its website performance series, CivicActions describes how caching, CloudFront configuration, and load testing helped reduce pressure on Drupal while identifying infrastructure bottlenecks. The post also points to future work on query parameter controls and more static delivery models. ...more

ImageX has updated its guide to higher education website strategy, covering signs of poor site performance, student-centred planning, personas, stakeholder buy-in, and Drupal’s role in large institutional web ecosystems. The article frames university websites as recruitment, engagement, and trust-building platforms that require governance, accessibility, measurable goals, and long-term content operations. ...more

A Drupal 11 upgrade test failure led James Williams of ComputerMinds to trace an incomplete router rebuild back through execution paths no longer visible in the active call stack. His article explains how stored stack traces helped identify an unexpected interaction between configuration imports, entity deletion, and Drupal core’s menu link cleanup logic during installation. ...more

A Specbee guide by Priyanka Phukan outlines practical Drupal performance checks for teams trying to improve Core Web Vitals. The article covers caching, BigPipe, Redis, Varnish, content delivery networks, image optimisation, module audits, hosting, PHP versions, and Drupal 11.3 performance improvements, while framing performance maintenance as an ongoing post-launch responsibility. ...more

A technical post-mortem outlines how automated traffic drove CPU usage on a Drupal 11 production platform to 94%, exposing gaps in rate limiting, Varnish cache-key handling, and application-level protection. The scenario traces the incident from the first New Relic alert through access-log analysis, Cloudflare mitigation, Varnish query-string normalization, and recovery, offering a practical view of how infrastructure weaknesses can compound under abnormal traffic. ...more

John Locke of Freelock describes Argo, a parent-directory workflow for managing AI-assisted development across related repositories. The approach uses shared instruction files, repository-specific guidance, and context markers to help coding agents operate with clearer project boundaries while keeping implementation work focused within individual codebases. ...more