Knowledge

DrupalCon Europe returns to the Netherlands on 28 September 2026, running through 1 October at the Postillion Hotel & Convention Centre WTC in Rotterdam. Four days, five summits, six session tracks and a contribution day.

A conference program is a useful document even if you never attend. It is the clearest public statement of where a platform's leadership and its most active contributors think the next year is going — written months in advance, by people who have to defend the choices. The Rotterdam program says three things fairly loudly, and they are worth reading whether or not you book a ticket.

The program in short

Monday 28 September is summit day: five parallel full-day summits — AI Dev, Enterprise Drupal AI, Government, Higher Education and Open Social — closing with the International Splash Awards ceremony.

Tuesday 29 September opens the main conference with the opening ceremony and the Driesnote, then runs concurrent sessions across six tracks: Agency, Business & Marketing; Development, AI & Agentic Architecture; Digital Sovereignty & Open Web; Drupal CMS; Success Stories and Innovation; and User Experience, Accessibility and Design. The Women in Drupal Award and the opening reception close the day.

Wednesday 30 September carries a second keynote and a full session day, with the afternoon weighted towards Canvas, migrations and agentic workflows, followed by the wrap-up ceremony.

Thursday 1 October is contribution day — mentored contribution, first-time contributor workshops and open contribution rooms.

Signal one: two AI summits, not one

The most telling structural detail is that AI gets two separate full-day summits on the same Monday. The AI Dev Summit and the Enterprise Drupal AI Summit are not a duplicate; they are an admission that the two audiences have stopped asking the same questions.

The developer conversation is about mechanism: Drupal as an MCP server, agentic architecture, orchestration through ECA, what an agent is allowed to touch in a running site. The enterprise conversation is about consequence: governance, cost, what happens to editorial workflow when part of it is delegated, and who is accountable when a generated change ships.

Last year that gap was still hidden inside single sessions that tried to serve both rooms and served neither well. Splitting it is a sign the ecosystem has moved past the demo stage into the part where organisations have to operationalise something. If you are sending two people, this is the day to split them.

Signal two: digital sovereignty has become an architecture topic

Digital sovereignty gets its own track in Rotterdam — Digital Sovereignty & Open Web — which is a meaningful promotion from being a keynote talking point.

For European organisations this is the least abstract theme on the program. Public-sector bodies, universities and regulated enterprises across the EU are being asked concrete questions about where data is processed, which vendors hold the keys, and how quickly a platform could be moved if a contract or a jurisdiction changed. Those questions do not have marketing answers. They have architectural ones: hosting topology, data residency, the dependency graph of your contrib stack, how much of your editorial capability lives in a proprietary layer you do not control.

That is also the honest case for open source in this market, and it is stronger when it stays technical. An open platform is not automatically sovereign — a Drupal site running entirely on managed proprietary services with a closed AI provider in the content pipeline has traded most of the advantage away. The useful sessions in this track will be the ones that name the trade-offs rather than the ones that treat "open source" as the end of the argument.

Signal three: Drupal CMS and Canvas are now maintenance topics

Drupal CMS has its own track, and Wednesday's afternoon programming pairs Canvas with migrations. That combination is the interesting part.

When a site-building tool starts appearing next to migration sessions rather than next to launch announcements, it has crossed from "new capability" into "thing that exists on real projects and has to be moved, upgraded and maintained". That is the phase where the practical knowledge appears — what does not migrate cleanly, what breaks under a real editorial team, what a five-year-old custom theme costs you when you adopt it.

For anyone with an established Drupal platform, these sessions are more valuable than the keynote. The keynote tells you the direction. The migration sessions tell you the price.

What we would actually plan for

A few notes for anyone building their schedule, based on how these weeks usually go:

• Pick the summit before you pick the sessions. Monday is the highest-value day per hour, because a summit room is a small audience with the same problem. Sessions are recorded; summit conversations are not.
• Treat Thursday as work, not as an optional extra. Contribution day with mentors present is the cheapest onboarding a team will ever get for the contribution process, and first-time contributor workshops exist precisely because the barrier is procedural rather than technical.
• Go to at least two sessions outside your track. The accessibility, community health and content governance sessions consistently produce more usable takeaways for delivery teams than another architecture talk, because they are about the failure modes that actually stall projects.
• Book conversations, not sessions. The corridor is where the useful information is, and Rotterdam's venue keeps everything on one site. Everything on the main program will be available afterwards.

The read on Drupal's year

Taken together, the program describes a platform positioning itself as the open alternative in the AI content layer, while its European community is simultaneously making the case for sovereignty and control. Those two arguments reinforce each other, and Rotterdam is the first DrupalCon where both are structural parts of the schedule rather than themes in a keynote.

Whether that positioning holds depends on execution — on whether the agentic tooling is production-safe, and whether Canvas and Drupal CMS reduce the total cost of a Drupal platform rather than adding a layer to it. The sessions in Rotterdam are the first place that will be discussed publicly by people who have shipped it.

We will be following the program closely and will write up what actually held after the event, as we did after Vienna last year.

If you are weighing what this direction means for your own platform, our work on Drupal as an AI orchestrator and our approach to enterprise Drupal support cover the practical side. Get in touch if you would like to talk it through.