Talking Drupal #531 - Drupal as an Application Framework

Dec 8, 2025

Alexander Varwijk, a technical architect focused on strategic Drupal projects, and Jürgen Haas, founder of LakeDrops and a long-time contributor, delve into Drupal's potential as an application framework. They explore challenges and solutions for building real-time applications and the exciting prospects of integrating AI with Drupal. The conversation also highlights successful use cases like intranets and business apps, emphasizing orchestration and integration opportunities that allow Drupal to thrive as a robust data management tool beyond traditional marketing sites.

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ADVICE

Get Help For Legacy Support Work

Maintain backward compatibility for monitoring tools only as long as needed and recruit helpers for compatibility work.
Jürgen asks for contributors to help aggregate update data across Drupal major versions to reduce maintenance burden.

INSIGHT

Drupal As A Data Management Framework

Alexander Varwijk and others frame Drupal as a data-management and application framework, not just a CMS.
Drupal's data modeling, module system, and inter-module contracts make it suited to orchestrating business systems.

INSIGHT

Real-Time Needs Expose PHP Limits

Real-time features (WebSockets, long-lived connections) require long-running processes that traditional PHP request lifecycles struggle with.
Alexander says current workarounds fake persistence but true application support needs runtime changes and async capabilities.

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Today we are talking about Drupal for Applications, Types of Applications Drupal can build, and How we change our thinking of Drupal with guests Alexander Varwijk (far-vag) & Jürgen Haas. We'll also cover Drupal Remote Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/531

Topics

Drupal as an Application Framework
Challenges with Drupal for Real-Time Applications
Exciting Prospects with AI and Drupal
Showcasing Successful Drupal Implementations
Batch Processing and Worker Improvements
Orchestration and Integration with External Platforms
Future of Drupal as an Application Framework

Resources

Guests

Alexander Varwijk - alexandervarwijk.com/ Kingdutch Jürgen Haas - lakedrops.com jurgenhaas

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Fei Lauren - feilauren

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted to manage and monitor a portfolio of Drupal sites from a single interface? There's a module for that.
Module name/project name:
- Drupal Remote Dashboard (DRD)
Brief history
- How old: created in Jan 2010 by Jürgen Haas (jurgenhaas) of LakeDrops
- Versions available: 4.1.7 which works with Drupal 10 and 11
Maintainership
- Actively maintained
- Security coverage
- Full Documentation Guide
- Number of open issues: 22 open issues, 3 of which are bugs against the current branch
Usage stats:
- 126 sites
Module features and usage
- With the module enabled, for each monitored site you'll be able to review information like the version of core, modules, and themes, as well as the status report. Note that the dashboard and monitored sites do NOT need to be on the same major version of core.
- You can also collect any block from a remote site to include on your dashboard, or access the error logs to review them in the dashboard
- You can execute maintenance tasks like taking sites in or out of maintenance mode, running cron or update.php, as well as flushing cache
- The dashboard will also allow you to rebuild job schedulers, update translations from drupal.org, change user credentials, or execute arbitrary PHP code, so you'll definitely want to be selective about who will have access
- From the collected status information you can show a status widget for each domain to display grouped traffic light status levels for security, health, tuning, seo and others. You can also create aggregate status widgets, for example to show the composite health of all sites in a multisite installation.
- Internally DRD is built around a number of entities, and the documentation includes an architecture page with an Entity Relationship Diagram, while the glossary page includes a description for each of the entities and what Drupal site information they map to. Obviously security for this kind of setup is paramount, and there's a documentation page that details the encryption and authentication methods that are supported
- Sites that you want to monitor will need to have the DRD Agent module installed, which provides a simple wrapper to receive, route, handle and respond to requests from authorised Drupal Remote Dashboards. It's worth pointing out that the RDR Agent module is in use by 3,152 sites according to drupal.org, so there may be a small number of sites acting as dashboards, but on average each of them is monitoring 25 sites.