Drupalcon 2025: The Future of Drupal CMS is Here

There’s nothing quite like Drupalcon. This year’s event in Atlanta was absolutely buzzing — packed with energy, insight, and an incredible sense of global community. People flew in from around the world, and it was both heartwarming and energizing to catch up with familiar faces and finally meet others in person for the first time. It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day of building sites, but Drupalcon always pulls the curtain back and reminds us just how far-reaching and impactful our work is. This year, three areas stood out to me — each rich in features and innovation on its own, but together, they formed a glimpse into the next chapter of what’s possible with Drupal CMS.

AI in Drupal CMS: From Utility to Innovation

It’s official: AI has arrived in the Drupal ecosystem in big fashion. From design and UX to automation and documentation, many exhibitors and sessions focused on artificial intelligence’s practical and creative uses in site building.

The AI module — which was only launched 12 months ago — is now installed on over 3,200 Drupal CMS websites. That’s incredible growth, and the enthusiasm around it was palpable. It was only 1 year ago that major AI integrations began appearing in Drupal, making it the first open-source CMS with feature-rich AI capabilities. Now it's even better.

What makes this module so powerful versus other platform competitors is its extend-ability and ability to slot into different use cases. It’s ready to go out of the box for simple integrations and also serves as a powerful framework for advanced implementations. Whether you’re connecting with providers, experimenting with agents, or testing out new models via MCP (model, context, protocol) architecture, the flexibility is there.

A standout moment for me was seeing early work on an AI-powered migration assistant. Imagine feeding in spreadsheets, markdown files, or even MS Access databases and having AI scaffold your migration definitions. It’s a massive step forward in lowering the barrier to entry and smoothing the path for onboarding Drupal CMS from disparate or legacy systems.

We also saw creative demos where AI could take a sketch or screenshot and turn it into working functionality — like auto-generating a Webform or a theme component. These innovations make Drupal CMS not just powerful but also magical.

Better still, AI integration isn’t happening in isolation. It’s spreading through the contributed module space — powering everything from search to theming, modeling, reporting, and site monitoring.

The Drupal community’s commitment to ethical and responsible AI underpins it all. It’s not just about what’s possible but about building with care and trust, especially for users and organizations still evaluating their comfort level with this technology.

Experience Builder: Drag, Drop, Delight, Deliver

If you haven’t heard of Experience Builder yet, get ready — it’s poised to be a game-changer. Set to launch later this year with a future release of Drupal CMS, Experience Builder is a fresh, modern interface that redefines how content and layouts are created and managed. 

Gone are the days of flipping between admin screens and front-end views to guess what a layout will look like. With real-time sidebar previews, streamlined component editing, and a fast UI, building pages in Drupal CMS is about to become radically more intuitive.

One demo absolutely wowed the room: a user uploaded a screenshot of a hero banner they liked. Using Experience Builder’s AI assistant, they asked it to build a component like the one depicted in the screenshot. In seconds, they received the functional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript needed to power such a component. A few style tweaks later, they had a brand-new branded hero section ready for their site.

Experience Builder supports multiple ways of creating components. Common elements like Blocks, Views, or dynamic Webforms can be dropped directly into layouts. Single Directory Components are also available as drag–and–drop components in the builder. However, one of the most exciting reveals during the keynote was that you can build new components in the built-in browser editor.

The in-browser editor looked awesome and offered a new way of building for people with different levels of skill.

My bold prediction? Experience Builder will become the standard for managing layouts, components, and pages in Drupal CMS. Once it’s available, it’ll be hard to justify using anything else.

👉 See it for yourself during the keynote: Experience Builder demo.

ECA: The New Views

At Drupalcon Portland, I made a firm prediction: the ECA (Event Condition Action) module would become the next “Views” — a powerhouse module of low-code functionality that fundamentally changes what’s possible for site builders.

After seeing the progress this year in Atlanta, I stand by that prediction even more firmly.

For those unfamiliar, Views is one of the early crown jewels of Drupal CMS — a no-code query builder that made creating dynamic content displays accessible to everyone. ECA brings that same accessibility to automation and logic. You build workflows using simple diagrams that combine Events, Conditions, and Actions — all using core Drupal structures and APIs.

Want to send notifications when a form is submitted? Redirect users based on roles? Fully automate customer service tasks with AI chatbots in the loop? You can do all this and more in ECA — no custom code is needed.

The possibilities are endless. Whether you're a site builder or a power user, ECA unlocks functionality that previously required a developer’s touch. While it’s still in the early days, the direction is clear: ECA will become a cornerstone of Drupal CMS, just like Views did nearly 20 years ago when it started as a contributed module.

👉 Check out this excellent overview video of ECA.

Building Smarter in 2025

Drupalcon 2025 left me energized, inspired, and full of ideas. It’s always a joy to see the global community come together, share knowledge, and build the future of Drupal CMS in real time. Between the explosion of AI, the elegance of Experience Builder, and the robust nature of ECA, it’s clear that the future of Drupal CMS is not only bright — it’s already here.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines or haven’t explored Drupal CMS recently, now is the time. There's never been more opportunity — or more momentum — to build better, smarter, and faster than ever.

Want to know more about what Drupal is capable of and how you can leverage its latest features for your organization? Reach out. Our team of Drupal experts would be happy to chat with you.