Dries Buytaert used his State of Drupal keynote at DrupalCon Rotterdam on September 29, 2026, to argue that Drupal's biggest problem is no longer the software. "Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation," the project's founder wrote in a recap of the talk on dri.es , published October 7. "Closing that gap is our #1 challenge."

Buytaert launched Drupal Starshot just over two years ago because, as he put it, "I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can." Starshot became Drupal CMS, which bundles Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI and the Drupal Canvas page builder to make building websites easier. He said that work has also pushed Drupal Core to become a faster and better framework for developers.

Canvas goes multilingual and headless

The first part of the keynote covered multilingual sites, JavaScript front-ends, headless Canvas and Drupal AI. Drupal has long handled multilingual content well, but Canvas didn't support it until now.…