# Why Should an Open Source Developer Care About Drupal in 2026?

## Abstract

Why should an open source developer care about Drupal today?

Drupal has been around for more than two decades, but the modern project is much more than the traditional CMS many developers may remember. It is an open source platform for structured content, complex digital experiences and API-driven applications, backed by a global community.

In this session we’ll explore Drupal: from the project and its ecosystem to setting up a local development environment, creating and managing content, and exposing that content through APIs. We’ll look at how Drupal can be used as a traditional, decoupled or headless platform, and we’ll finish with a look at the Drupal AI initiative and how the community is approaching AI in an open source ecosystem.

No previous Drupal experience required.

## Description

Drupal is often introduced as a content management system, but that description only tells part of the story. At its core it is a free and open source platform designed around structured content, extensibility and a large contributor ecosystem. It's a platform capable of delivering content beyond the web and supporting everything from traditional coupled sites to decoupled and fully headless architectures.

Rather than spending the session looking at slides, we’ll explore Drupal interactively.

We’ll start with a short introduction to the project, its community and the kinds of problems Drupal is designed to solve. The deck highlights characteristics such as extensibility, multilingual support, accessibility and a dedicated security process, which have helped Drupal find uses ranging from publishing and universities to government and large-scale digital platforms.

Then we’ll move into the developer experience: navigating the Drupal project and documentation, seeing how a modern Drupal development environment is created, and looking at the concepts that make up a Drupal application.

From there we’ll explore Drupal as an API-first content platform. We’ll create some structured content and see how the same Drupal backend can support a conventional website, a decoupled frontend or other applications consuming its content. That architectural flexibility is a recurring theme in the pitch deck, including examples where Drupal acts as the content and API layer behind custom frontends and external systems.

Finally, we’ll look forward rather than backward: exploring the Drupal AI initiative, what adding AI capabilities to an open source CMS can enable, and some of the questions an open source community needs to consider as AI becomes part of the application stack.

The aim is not to teach Drupal in one session, but to give developers enough of a mental model—and enough practical pointers—to decide whether it is something worth experimenting with themselves.