I'm Going to DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026
I'm going to DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026. My company is sending a group of us, and now it's real: from 28 September to 1 October 2026 I'll be in the Netherlands with a few colleagues, a laptop full of half-finished patches, and a long list of people to finally catch up with. This is my "here's why I'm excited" post, written for anyone who works on the web and might be on the fence about going.
So what actually is DrupalCon?
DrupalCon is the flagship conference for the Drupal community, run by the Drupal Association. It's the once-a-year gathering where developers, designers, agency owners, and the people running big Drupal sites all end up in the same building.
The rhythm of the week is fairly consistent: a specialised summit day at the start (an add-on ticket), two core days of keynotes and expert-led sessions in the middle, and a dedicated contribution day at the end where people sit down together and actually move the project forward. Somewhere in there is the Driesnote — founder Dries Buytaert's "state of Drupal" keynote, which sets the tone for where the project is heading. There are also birds-of-a-feather sessions, training, and the legendary hallway track.
The when and where
This year it's in Rotterdam, at what appears to be the Postillion Hotel & Convention Centre WTC Rotterdam. Four days, late September into early October. Registration is open on the event site, and from what I can see the regular rate runs until 31 August 2026 — so if you're waiting on a budget sign-off like I was, that's your clock.
Why 2026 feels like a good year to show up
The program this year leans hard into six tracks, and the through-line is unmistakable: Drupal wants to be a serious open AI platform. The tracks appear to cover Agency/Business, Development with AI and "agentic architecture," Digital Sovereignty and the Open Web, Drupal CMS, success stories, and UX/accessibility/design.
That's not marketing fog to me. Drupal CMS — the new, opinionated, ready-to-go install profile — has real momentum, and the project is barreling toward Drupal 12 in the back half of 2026. As a day-job Drupal dev, I want to hear how the community is genuinely wiring AI, the Model Context Protocol, and agentic workflows into a CMS without turning it into a toy.
The thing I keep coming back to: this is a community that competes for the same clients all year, then sits shoulder to shoulder to fix the same bug in September.
What I plan to do there
- Catch the Driesnote in person instead of on a livestream at my desk.
- Go to at least two sessions on AI/agentic architecture that I'd normally skim in a blog post.
- Enjoy contribution day and get a couple of real patches over the line.
- Spend proper time on the hallway track — half the reason I go.
Honestly, it's a reunion too
Here's the part the schedule never mentions. I've been in the Drupal world since the Drupal 6 days and done a fair few DrupalCamps and Cons since, and somewhere along the way the community became a bunch of actual friends. Ex-colleagues I worked with years ago, people from abroad I only ever see at events like this — DrupalCon is the one place we all reliably end up in the same building. Half of why I go is the code; the other half is catching up over a coffee or a beer with people I genuinely miss.
That's the thing outsiders underrate about a good tech conference. The sessions get recorded and I can watch them later. The hallway track — the unplanned "oh, you're here too!" conversation — is the part you can't stream. It's also, not coincidentally, where I've learned the most and picked up half my work over the years.
Contribution day rounds it out nicely. My pre-flight is basically muscle memory at this point:
git clone https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git
cd drupal
composer install
# spin up a throwaway local site to test issues against
drush site:install --account-pass=admin -yIf our group gets a couple of patches over the line and I close the week having properly reconnected with old friends, that's a trip well spent.
If you're a web dev who's curious — Drupal shop or not — come say hi. We'll be the cluster near the coffee, probably arguing about whether AI belongs in the CMS. Here's a past Driesnote to give you the flavour of what these keynotes are like: