DrupalCon Atlanta Wrap Up: Building an (Even Better) Drupal
Like many previous events, DrupalCon Atlanta brought an overwhelming number of exciting announcements, valuable talks, and fantastic conversations with this amazing community. There is so much going on that it’s impossible to see and experience everything at DrupalCon, even when you have an entire team at the event.
We’re here to bring you a glimpse of what the CKEditor team experienced at this year’s event and the announcements we were excited by. Whether you were at DrupalCon Atlanta or not, here you’ll find a slice of what went on at last week’s event.
DrupalCon Atlanta: The 2025 DriesNote
It was hard to imagine the excitement around Starshot or Dries Buytaert surpassing DrupalCon Portland’s announcement of Drupal CMS 1.0. And yet, this year, Dries’s keynote, affectionately known as the DriesNote, laid the groundwork for not only focusing Drupal around usability and the platform’s experience, but also providing the tools that set Drupal up as the content management system of choice for marketers, agencies, content teams, and even first-time users.
Drupal CMS 1.0 & 2.0
In Portland we learned about the Drupal Starshot Initiative. Their goal was the launch of Drupal CMS, and just 8 months after DrupalCon 2024 world celebrated its launch. A streamlined and ready-to-use product that is built on top of Drupal 11, Drupal CMS is a packaging of Drupal 11 core that creates opportunity for groups with less technical expertise, like marketing teams and content creators, to benefit from the flexibility, privacy, and open source community that are the hallmarks of the Drupal platform.
The January 15th, 2025 launch offered a great user experience out of the box. But it wasn’t the end of the road. Instead, as Dries explained during his keynote, “Drupal CMS 1.0 is a milestone, not the finish line.” A host of enhancements were announced at DrupalCon Atlanta, with Drupal CMS 2.0 set for launch a short seven months from now at DrupalCon Vienna.
The Experience Builder & Site Templates
The Atlanta conference gave the community a first look at two exciting enhancements to Drupal CMS - the Experience Builder and site templates.
Experience Builder (XB): Demoed as part of the keynote, this module offers a user friendly editing experience, featuring a lightning-fast interface with drag-and-drop, visual editing, reusable and customizable content sections, global regions for shared components, and multi-page functionality that allows publishing and auto-saving across pages. Drupal’s AI integration plays a role as well, with demos at the conference showing the AI taking a sketch or screenshot and turning it into a functional element. This is so influential, Dries noted during the demo that “People will switch to Drupal for Experience Builder.”
Site Templates: Designed to ease kickstarting a page, site templates bundle Recipes, Experience Builder theme and some initial content, accelerating initial setup from hours or days to as little as minutes. With a vision for hundreds of templates for just about every kind of site, templates are a roadmap to making it easier to jumpstart the use of Drupal, without building from scratch.
The intent, it was clear, isn’t to make Drupal a no-code solution, but to provide a means for organizations to get a head start and then grow with the platform and become part of the larger ecosystem. Experience Builder and templates do that. But they also provide opportunities for Drupal developers, who can contribute their own templates and XB components, using a built-in code editor and support for Tailwind CSS.
One thing was clear - the intentional choices for Drupal CMS aren’t an appeal to the masses. Instead, they are a path to making Drupal more accessible to an audience that craves solutions that are part of the open web but need a conquerable on-ramp to get them started.
CKEditor at DrupalCon
As sponsors, we were thrilled to return to DrupalCon. We loaded the booth with fun, giveaways, and prizes, and gave back to the community through talks provided by our experts.
New enhancements to the Drupal Plugin Pack
First, Aleks Kicior gave the lightning talk CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10: Unlocking Content Editor Productivity with the Plugin Pack. CKEditor has been contributing to Drupal since 2009 and is the core editor in Drupal 10. In this quick, 15 minute presentation, Aleks shared how our free Drupal Plugin Pack extends the core editor, and how recent enhancements build on the module that we introduced at last year’s conference. These enhancements include:
-
The addition of new plugins, like Select All, Auto Image, Emoji, Paste Markdown, and Page Break
-
Enhanced the existing tools, like more flexible font control and advanced options for Find and Replace
-
Introduced the Link Attributes plugin to ensure that links in content meet accessibility and SEO standards - without requiring additional tools
Download the free Drupal Plugin Pack for CKEditor now to get access to these features and more.
Building a Custom GPT to Power Your Content Pipeline
Mrina Sugosh, Developer Relations Manager, returned to the DrupalCon talk track this year, again speaking on the power of AI in content creation. This year’s topic, Building a Customer GPT to Power Your Content Pipeline, had Mrina walking talk attendees through nine research-backed prompting techniques, including methods like Meta Prompting and Chain of Thought. She showed how to operationalize prompt engineering to build effective and reliable custom GPTs. Framing LLMs as functions, she emphasized that well-structured and intentional prompting is key to achieving high-quality, consistent outputs from LLMs. Driving home the point was a real-world example of her own - an SEO Brief generator that she uses almost daily in her work at CKEditor.
Popcorn, Raccoons, and Pet Portraits
The CKEditor editor team was ready to welcome the Drupal community in our booth this year with t-shirts, stickers, and lots of delicious popcorn. We got to meet so many attendees and introduce them to all the features available in Drupal’s core editor.
While at the booth, attendees had a chance to enter to win one of two prizes. The first let booth goers enter to win a Pawsitively Majestic custom pet portrait. The winner of the portrait, Everett Case and their dog Artemis, was chosen from dozens of goofy pet photos sent to us during the conference.
The second prize kept with the DrupalCon Lego theme - a rare Lego Typewriter! Yas Naoi was the winner, chosen randomly from all of the entrants who stopped by the booth.
Acquia Bullseye Bash
In addition to the fun at the CKEditor booth, we were pleased to join our partners, Acquia, in hosting a happy hour, named the Bullseye Bash, for the community on Wednesday night. This gave us a chance to meet with other community members in a relaxed atmosphere, share a drink and relax after a long day of learning and sharing.
What’s next?
If you were able to attend DrupalCon this year, you might be energized and looking for more opportunities to connect with the community. If you weren’t able to make it, now is your chance to find the next Drupal event and get involved. Here are a few of the upcoming U.S.-based Drupal focused conferences and events that will help you learn, contribute, and keep on top of everything going on with the platform in the next year.
You can find CKEditor sponsoring the Acquia Engage event in Boston later in April, where Mrina’s workshop, Become a 10x Content Team with CKEditor 5 and Drupal, will offer practical guidance on using the Drupal Plugin Pack and CKEditor’s advanced features to boost team productivity.
CKEditor will also be opening registration for a Drupal webinar in the next few weeks. Stay tuned to our social channels for that announcement!
DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 Recap Webinar
April 9, 2025 - 10 AM CDT
Aquia Engage: Boston
April 28 - 29, 2025 - Boston, MA
Midcamp
May 20 - 22, 2025 - Chicago, IL
EvolveDrupal Boston
June 6, 2025 - Cambridge, MA
Plus, the location of next year’s DrupalCon was announced - the 2026 conference will be held in Chicago from March 23 to the 26th. We can’t wait to see you all in the Windy City!
