Live from DrupalCon Chicago, Nic Laflin is joined by Tim Plunkett, Steve Wirt, Martin Anderson-Clutz, and John Picozzi to discuss the event’s tone, Dries Notes and key themes including Drupal Canvas, Drupal AI, and new site templates/marketplace progress and more.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/546

Topics

• Reconnecting With Community
• Must See Sessions
• Vibe And Starshot
• Attendance And Venue
• Community Party Returns
• Dries Note and AI Debate
• Roadmap And Templates
• Recipes And Exports
• AI In Engineering Workflows
• Keynote Style Takeaways
• Dries Note Takeaways
• Canvas Content Templates
• View Modes Roadmap
• Translation Plans Explained
• Gala Highlights
• Commemorative Tokens
• Future Excitement Roundtable
• DrupalCon Orlando Tease
• Wrap Up and Contacts

Guests

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

Tim Plunkett - timplunkett

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan

Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it’s used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We’ll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545

Topics

• What Is DKAN
• Who Uses Open Data
• 20:08 DKAN Origin Story
• Why Drupal Fits DKAN
• From Distribution to Module
• DKAN 2 Rebuild and JSON Shift
• Async Jobs and API First
• How Teams Publish Data
• What a Dataset Really Is
• Metadata vs Data Access
• Why DKAN Left Drupal Org
• Migration Path to DKAN Four
• Harvesting and Data Store ETL
• APIs Visualizations and Bots
• Roadmap Data Store and AI
• Contributing and Where to File Issues

Resources

• DKAN
• DKAN Drupal Module
• DKAN on GitHub
• Public sites using DKAN 2
• DKAN channel on Drupal Slack
• JSON Form Widget

Guests

Liz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper
Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to have your Drupal site admins start with a fast, widget-based interface that surfaces key site metrics, system health, and operational insights? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Modern Drupal Dashboard
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Feb 2026 by Gaurav Kapoor (gaurav.kapoor) of werk21 in Berlin
  • Versions available: 1.0.5, which works with Drupal core 10.3 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Number of open issues: no open issues
• Usage stats:
  • 4 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, site visitors with the new “Access modern dashboard” permission can access a React-based dashboard with widgets to provide insights on topics like:
  • Content overview: total content count, published vs unpublished, and per content type breakdown.
  • Users overview: user count per role (users with multiple roles are counted in each role), plus pie chart visualization.
  • Additional Content (Entity overview): lists all entity types (content + configuration), shows counts, and provides direct “Manage” links.
  • Modules overview: installed modules summary, including enabled/disabled and core/contrib breakdown.
  • System & status: key environment details such as Drupal core version, PHP version, and database information.
  • Health checks: displays Drupal requirement checks grouped by status (pass/warning/error) with a dedicated detail view.
  • Each widget can be clicked to open a detail view of the extended data, making it easy for admins to dig into any area
  • The widget-based architecture should also help to pull in data from other sources, potentially including things like analytics

Today we are talking about World Cancer Day, how they use Drupal, and why Drupal was the right choice with our guests Charles Andrew Revkin & Diego Costa. We’ll also cover PDFa11y as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/544

Topics

• What Is World Cancer Day
• Why UICC Uses Drupal
• Diego Joins the Project
• Multilingual Strategy at Scale
• Drupal Architecture and AI Tools
• Vetting AI Moderation and Summaries
• AI Disclosure and Review
• Traffic Spikes and Scaling
• Drupal Stack and React Apps
• Campaign Theme United by Unique
• Yearly Content and Three Year Cycle
• Drupal Community and Open Access
• Custom AI Modules and Azure
• Future Improvements and AI Tagging
• Story Submission Formats
• Prevention PSA and Wrap Up

Resources

• World Cancer Day
• Union for International Cancer Control

Guests

Diego Costa - 1xinternet.com diegofcosta
Charles Andrew Revkin - worldcancerday.org revkin

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to check PDF files for accessibility, as they’re uploaded to your Drupal site? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • PDFa11y
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Feb 2026 by Joshua Mitchell (joshuami), a friend of this podcast
  • Versions available: 1.0.1, which works with Drupal 10.2 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage in process
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: none
• Usage stats:
  • 0 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the PDFa11y module installed, you can set its configuration, including whether to enable or disable automatic checking on upload, whether to block uploads that fail checks or just show warnings, a minimum PDF version requirement, and which accessibility checks to run
  • The module also sets creates three new permissions, Administer PDF accessibility settings, Run PDF accessibility checks, and View PDF accessibility report
  • Each PDF media item has an "Accessibility" tab where anyone with the necessary permissions can view the check results
  • Under the hood PDFa11y uses the smalot/pdfparser library to extract data from PDF files
  • Many sites rely on PDFs to make available content that they aren’t able to migrate directly into Drupal content, so making sure that doesn’t introduce its own accessibility regressions is an important step

Today we are talking about The Good and the Bad of AI , How our panel feels about AI , and you guessed it more AI with guest Scott Falconer. We’ll also cover Field Widget Actions as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/542

Topics

• AI and Social Isolation
• How We Use AI
• Friction and Independence
• Stack Overflow Debate
• Collaboration and Team Culture
• Is AI Inevitable
• AI Hype Meets Costs
• Adoption Cooling Signals
• Pricing Inequality Risks
• Open Source and PRs
• Requirements and LLMs
• Easy Tools Not Always Right
• Juniors Learning and Patterns
• Human Value and Ambiguity
• Losing Cognitive Endurance
• AI vs Social Media
• Uniquely Human Skills

Resources

• Stack overflow

Guests

Scott Falconer - managing-ai.com scott-falconer

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Catherine Tsiboukas - mindcraftgroup.com bletch

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to enhance the Drupal content editing experience by allowing site builders to attach actionable buttons directly to field widgets on entity forms? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Field Widget Actions
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Oct 2025 by Artem Dmitriiev (a.dmitriiev) of 1x Internet, a founding member of the AI Initiative
  • Versions available: 1.0.0-alpha1 and 1.3.0, both of which works with Drupal 10.3 and 11.1 or newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - includes Markdown files that explain how to set up and extend its capabilities
  • Number of open issues: 12 open issues, 4 of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 24 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With this module installed, a site builder can attach action buttons to form fields in Drupal entity forms, for example for creating nodes or taxonomy terms
  • What happens when you click a button depends on what processor you associate with it, and the settings you configure for the processor. Processors can be provided by other modules, like AI or ECA.
  • For example, you could attach a button to a tags field that when clicked will send the content of the body field to an AI agent that will return a set of suggested tags. Or, you could have it trigger an ECA model for a more deterministic flow
  • This is all done using a plugin framework implemented by Field Widget Actions, so you also create your own custom processors to be used with action buttons
  • One of the things that got me excited about working with the team behind Augmentor AI was the approach that module used to make AI something a user would manually trigger, and then can curate before the suggestions are saved. Field Widget Actions allows that same approach to be implemented with the AI ecosystem that is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to the team involved with Drupal’s AI Initiative
  • It’s worth noting that Field Widget Actions used to be a submodule of the AI project, so if you’re using a version of that older than 2.0, you may already have Field Widget Actions available in your codebase