Talking Drupal

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