Drupal Dev Days 2025: Innovation, Community, and Collaboration in Leuven
This year's annual Drupal Developer event of Europe, the Drupal Dev Days 2025, was taking place in the lovely city of Leuven, Belgium - nearby Brussels. Of course, drunomics joined the event also!
Since I've not been able to join any events personally for about a year, the event was the perfect opportunity for me to meet again with so many amazing people of the Drupal community, some of those I haven't seen for many years! The event was sold out, well organized and featured lots of social activities after the main event, what allowed us to continue nerding out in the evenings, while trying some of the gorgeous Belgian beers. This was the recipe for a few enjoyable days, but of course the event also provided lots of great content in the form of sessions and discussions! It's been really exciting to see a tremendous amount of innovation happening all around Drupal - I must say Drupal's starshot is really taking off!
The news
So what's going on in the Drupal world? Let's have a short summary:
- Drupal CMS - The Drupal lead Dries was joining the event for a few days and gave a Q&A on Drupal CMS. A good discussion of where we are and where we need to go, which leads us to the next point.
- Drupal Marketplace - The Drupal community is currently considering launching a marketplace for site templates directly on drupal.org, including the possibility to sell commercial templates. While the modules would always be open source, the site template could be sold. The discussion is ongoing and a decision on whether the plan is going to be pursued will be made by Drupalcon Vienna.
- Experience Builder is the next big thing that is about to launch at Drupalcon Vienna, as part of Drupal CMS 2.0. It's a user-friendly tool that is going to allow non-technical users (e.g. marketers) to build pages out of a library of components. Acquia is sponsoring a big team to work on it with great results: it's already a truly impressive tool that is going to turn around Drupal theming and site-building forever.
- Components: With the introduction of Single-Directory-Components and now experience builder, components are (finally!) becoming the main building blocks of Drupal's frontend, which led to the appointment of Pierre Dureau (pdureau) - the driving force behind components - as provisional Frontend Framework Manager for Drupal core! Congratulations!
- AI - James Abrahams (yautja_cetanu) gave a keynote on Drupal AI and related developments, like experiences with Claude Code for Drupal development and updates on MCP v2. Next, there was an amazing session on AI agents and lots of discussions around the future of AI and Drupal. It's incredible to see what Drupal can do with AI already, and even more what's being worked on!
- Drupal Europe - The creation of a new pan-european Drupal association is currently considered and was discussed at the conference with national association leaders. Some more details can be found here.
A presentation and code sprints
This year I ended up giving a presentation in the "frontend development" track, a quite unusual terrain for me since my usual contribution area with topics like Entities and Rules is clearly on the backend side of things. But every web site needs a great frontend, so I gave an intro to "Nuxt for Drupal developers- Modern frontend without the Javascript Jungle" this time. The session was well received and I was happy that it sparked quite some interest in Nuxt and the Lupus Decoupled module.
Progressing with Lupus Decoupled and experience builder integration was my main goal for the sprints. With the Experience builder release coming up, we want to deliver first-class experience builder support for Lupus Decoupled. So it was the perfect opportunity to meet and discuss the topic with the main contributors and maintainers of experience builder - what resulted in fruitful discussions with Bálint Kléri (balintbrews) and a first plan to build up a prototype. That and many more aspiring discussions on other (related) topics, directly with the people involved, is what makes sprinting together so much better than just remote interactions: much more effective, but also much more fun!
Altogether, it was an outstanding event with lots of positive energy! At this point, a big thank you goes to the organization team, which did an amazing job! I look forward to the next Drupal event, and of course, the highlight of the year: Drupalcon Vienna. See you there!
