Drupal is older than the iPhone, older than Facebook, older than the job title “frontend developer”. It turned 25 this year.
I've been working in it for twelve of those, mostly on EU institutional platforms where “we'll rebuild it in three years” is not an option and the site has to still work in 2035.
What shipped in 2026. Drupal CMS 2.0 in January, with Canvas as the default page builder. Whether Canvas replaces your Layout Builder setup is a longer conversation, but as a default it's a serious upgrade on what shipped before.
Core 11.3 and 11.4 cut database queries on uncached pages by roughly half.
The AI Initiative arrived at DrupalCon Chicago with 31 partner organisations and $1.5 million in funding and staff time behind it. The AI module is at close to 14,000 installs. Whatever you think about AI in a CMS, that is not a side project anymore.
Drupal 12 arrives in December.
And the number I keep quoting at people who still think Drupal is a legacy choice: the European Commission's Europa Web Publishing Platform runs 770 live sites, 700 million visits a year, 2.2 billion page views, across 44 Commission services. One platform.
The thing Dries said in Chicago that I keep repeating to clients: prototype fast with AI, build the lasting system in Drupal. A decade of being told structured content was over-engineering, and it turns out structured content is exactly what these models need.
Most open source projects don't see five years. This one is 25 and shipped a new page builder.
Happy birthday. Back to the queue.