Talking Drupal #527 - AI in Drupal

Today we are talking about AI, New Drupal Features, and the future of AI in Drupal with guest Jamie Abrahams. We'll also cover Orchestration as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/527

Topics

• Exciting Announcement: Object-Oriented Hooks in Themes
• The Drupal AI Initiative
• Canvas AI and Migration Challenges
• AI Powered Features and Future Directions
• AI's Role in Drupal vs. Other Platforms
• Human in the Loop AI in Drupal
• Canvas AI and Human Control
• Challenges with Customizability and AI Integration
• Transparency and Ethics in AI
• Modernizing Drupal's Core for AI
• Future of AI in Drupal
• Community Engagement and Events

Resources

• Flowdrop
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/flowdrop
  • https://flowdrop.xyz/
• Dries blog
  • Rethinking drupal in the world of AI
• Tool
• Paris event
  • API days
• Pune Event - 29th - 30th November
• Tracking
• Action API issue

Guests

Jamie Abrahams - freelygive.io yautja_cetanu

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Maya Schaeffer - evolvingweb.com mayalena

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to expose Drupal's capabilities to external automation platforms? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Orchestration
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Aug 2025 by Jürgen Haas of LakeDrops, in collaboration with Dries, who some of our listeners may be familiar with
  • Versions available: 1.0.0, which supports Drupal 11.2 or newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Documentation site
  • Number of open issues: 11 open issues, none of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 3 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the Orchestration module installed, external systems can trigger Drupal workflows, call AI agents, and execute business logic through a unified API
  • The modules functions as a bi-directional bridge, so Drupal events like content updates, user registrations, or form submissions can also trigger external processing
  • Using the Orchestration module with the Activepieces automation platform in particular was featured at about the one hour mark in the most recent Driesnote, from DrupalCon Vienna, and we'll include a link to watch that in the show notes. The complex example Dries shows is pulling content from a Wordpress site, using AI to evaluate whether or not each post met certain criteria, and then conditionally calling one of a couple of ECA functions, in addition to using AI to rewrite the incoming content to change Wordpress terminology into Drupalisms
  • Under the hood Orchestration provides an endpoint that will return a JSON list of services, including the properties that are needed for each service. The external service also needs to provide the username and password for a Drupal account, so you can control what services will be available based on permissions for the Drupal user that will be used
  • Already Orchestration works with ECA, AI Agents, Tool API, and AI function calls
  • There is also work underway for integrations using webhooks, for integration platforms that aren't ready to directly support Drupal's orchestration services
  • In his presentation Dries mentioned that they are looking for feedback. Specifically, they would like feedback on what platforms should have integrations available