The Drop Times: Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp 2026 Tackles AI Trust and Drupal 12 Readiness

Jordan’s responses further identified per-importer permissions, batch sizing, chunked processing and scaffolding conventions as important takeaways. He hopes to compare approaches with other developers dealing with complex import workflows and long-term maintenance.Mauricio told The DropTimes that module maintainers need guidance extending beyond simple conversion examples, particularly when maintaining compatibility across Drupal 10, 11 and 12. The potential problems include duplicate hook execution and legacy implementations that no longer run as expected.

Aidan Foster: Keeping Human Judgement at the Centre of AI

David Pascoe-DeslauriersJordan Thompson

Contribution activities will also provide opportunities to work on Drupal projects. The organisers welcome not only developers but also participants interested in documentation, quality assurance, testing, design, accessibility, content strategy and project management. The contribution programme offers a way for attendees to apply new knowledge, collaborate with maintainers and support the wider Drupal ecosystem.

It doesn’t tell you how to keep one codebase running on Drupal 10, 11 and 12 at the same time without your hooks firing twice, and it doesn’t warn you about the changes in Drupal 12 that make some of your hooks silently stop running.

Fran Wyllie: Making Accessibility Survive Beyond Launch Day

Aidan FosterThe camp is free to attend, with voluntary donations welcomed to help support the event. For the complete schedule, speaker information, registration and venue details, readers can visit the official Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp website.

Jordan told The DropTimes that the presentation is intended for developers who have already built an importer and now need a maintainable way to support several implementations.

I think people should attend my session if they haven’t used Drupal CMS, and want to check it out and find out what they’ve been missing.Dan Friedman, director at Consensus Enterprises, will facilitate the discussion with Liam McDermott, partner at Woolwich Web Works; Alan Dixon, principal at Blackfly Solutions; and Derek Laventure, senior web architect at Consensus Enterprises. According to the official programme, the panel will explore hosting performance, operating costs, data residency, vendor independence and the availability of Canadian-owned infrastructure.

Andrew Berry: Containing the Risks of AI Coding Agents

Christopher GervaisAI will happily write you a detailed, convincing plan for a terrible idea. Deciding whether the idea is any good is still very much our job.

David told The DropTimes that the session offers an introduction for developers and site builders who have not yet tried Drupal CMS.

His presentation follows the January 2026 release of Drupal CMS 2.0. The official session description approaches the product from the perspective of an experienced Drupal developer who had not previously examined it in depth, looking at its features, pre-packaged recipes, relationship with Drupal core and potential use cases.Drupal’s ability to coordinate processes across applications, people and AI agents will be examined by Randy Kolenko, senior solutions architect and partner at Nextide Inc., during From Workflows to Agents: Drupal Orchestration and the Rosetta Sprint.

Dan Friedman: Investigating Infrastructure Problems Before Solving Them

AI agents can ship a week of work in a day, and they’ll also happily wreck your laptop. Learn how to get the speed without the risk.AI coding agents promise faster development, but their growing autonomy introduces new security concerns. Andrew Berry, vice president of technology at Lullabot, will examine the trade-off in Trust Nothing, Ship Anyway: Coding Agents in Disposable VMs, scheduled for Friday from 11:20 to 12:10 EDT.Canadian hosting requirements will receive attention in Escape from Big Cloud: Canadian-Friendly Infrastructure for Drupal & CiviCRM, a Friday panel examining how smaller agencies manage infrastructure for nonprofit, public-sector and mission-driven organisations.

Speaking more broadly about his technical approach to The DropTimes, Dan emphasised that complex operational problems require careful investigation, measurable outcomes and a willingness to examine underlying causes. He described this as Test Driven Operations.

Effective Drupal projects depend on how teams organise and make decisions, not only on their technical architecture. Christopher Gervais, founding partner at Consensus Enterprises, will examine that organisational dimension during Everyone’s Voice Matters: Empower Stakeholders With Sociocracy.

Jordan Thompson: Building Reusable Drupal Import Frameworks

Most accessibility programs do not fail loudly, they just quietly stop. This session is about the opposite: how we turned ours from a one-person burden into something the whole team actually owns.Typically, organizations adopt it as a way to move away from traditional management hierarchies. But we’ve found that it also works really well at a project level, dovetailing with agile practices.

The official session description outlines the conversion of procedural hooks from .module files into classes with dependency injection. It also covers the #[LegacyHook] compatibility mechanism, hook class registration, changes affecting automatic loading of .inc files, and tools including Drupal Rector and a DDEV-based converter.

The session description identifies web searches, documentation retrieval and Model Context Protocol integrations as potential prompt-injection entry points. Andrew will demonstrate Sandbar, an open-source application from Lullabot that runs coding agents inside disposable virtual machines, isolating their activity from the developer’s host environment. Sandbar supports tools including Docker, DDEV and nested virtualisation.Randy told The DropTimes that his presentation focuses on overcoming communication barriers between otherwise separate systems. He sees orchestration as a way to coordinate data ingestion, processing and handoffs between external services and Drupal applications with limited custom coding.

David Pascoe-Deslauriers: Examining Drupal CMS Through a Developer’s Eyes

He expects attendees to gain familiarity with components and capabilities they can use in their projects, alongside a practical assessment of the product’s user experience. David added that smaller Drupal gatherings provide valuable opportunities to meet people building new things with Drupal and other open-source technologies.Following Friday’s presentations, Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp will continue on Saturday, 24 October, at Conestoga College’s Waterloo Campus. The second day includes Drupal in a Day, a practical introduction for students, newcomers and other participants interested in learning how to create a Drupal website.According to the session description, the presentation will examine the complementary approaches of Maestro, ECA and FlowDrop within the Rosetta Initiative. It will distinguish basic automation from durable orchestration, where processes must coordinate execution context, deterministic workflows, human decisions and interactions with AI agents.

Accessibility initiatives frequently lose momentum when their success depends on a single employee or last-minute compliance checks. Fran Wyllie, a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility and development manager at Northern Commerce, will examine how organisations can avoid that problem during Building a Sustainable Accessibility System, scheduled for Friday from 10:20 to 11:10 EDT.

Christopher told The DropTimes that Sociocracy offers a framework for cooperation, shared authority and consent-based decision-making. He believes its principles can be applied not only to organisational governance but also to individual projects operating under agile development practices.

Randy Kolenko: Connecting Drupal Workflows With External Systems and AI

The official session description details how accessibility checks can be integrated into development environments, component libraries and continuous integration pipelines. Fran will also explain why her team developed an internal accessibility tool when existing products did not adequately support its workflow.According to the organisers, the training will introduce Drupal’s core features and site-building fundamentals. Participants will have opportunities to build a working Drupal website, receive a participation certificate and connect with members of the community.

Ahead of Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp 2026, nine speakers have told The DropTimes what attendees can expect to learn about artificial intelligence, accessibility, Drupal 12 compatibility and the challenges of modern web development. The two-day gathering opens on Friday, 23 October 2026, in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, with a keynote by Aidan Foster, UX manager for the Drupal AI Initiative, on keeping human judgement central to AI adoption.

Andrew’s responses also highlighted the importance of preparing Drupal projects for agent-assisted development and using automated tests to evaluate generated code. Beyond security, he is interested in discussing a changing development bottleneck: AI can now generate code faster than teams can review it.Drupal CMS aims to make Drupal more approachable for site builders who may have little or no previous experience with the platform. David Pascoe-Deslauriers, chief technology officer at Coldfront Labs, will explore what the product offers during An Exploration of Drupal CMS, scheduled for Friday from 11:20 to 12:10 EDT.

Mauricio Silveira: Avoiding Compatibility Problems During Hook Migration

The official session outline describes consent-based decision-making, clear responsibilities, transparency and participation as core elements of Sociocracy. It will introduce practical methods for involving stakeholders while maintaining the ability to make decisions and move projects forward.We have a very powerful orchestration platform in Drupal. You’ll get an appreciation on how we can build an actual application and how that application requires next to zero coding, all the while orchestrating data ingestion and manipulation with ECA, Maestro and AI.

Andrew told The DropTimes that developers need safeguards that allow agents to work efficiently without exposing their computers and projects to unnecessary risks.

Adnrew BerryProcedural hooks remain supported in current Drupal versions, but the session identifies their planned removal in Drupal 13 as a reason for maintainers to begin preparing now. Mauricio aims to give attendees a repeatable five-step migration process and hopes Friday’s presentation will encourage participants to convert actual contributed modules during Saturday’s contribution activities.Fran told The DropTimes that sustainable accessibility requires more than introducing rules. Teams must distribute responsibility across development, quality assurance, content and leadership while making accessible practices part of existing workflows.

Christopher Gervais: Bringing Shared Decision-Making Into Drupal Projects

Randy KolenkoPreparing contributed modules for Drupal 12 requires more than replacing procedural hooks with object-oriented classes. Mauricio Silveira, senior architect at Kalamuna, will examine the less obvious problems in Hooked on Attributes: Migrating Your Module’s Hooks to OOP Classes Before They’re Gone.

Fran Wyllie

Hosted by the Waterloo Region Drupal Users group with support from the Drupal Canada Association, the camp will hold its technical presentations and networking activities at Kitchener Public Library on Friday. Drupal in a Day training and community contribution activities will follow on Saturday, 24 October, at Conestoga College’s Waterloo Campus. The programme brings together discussions on AI-assisted coding, accessible development, Canadian cloud infrastructure, Drupal CMS, application orchestration and project governance.Aidan Foster, UX manager for the Drupal AI Initiative and owner of Foster Interactive, will open the conference at 09:00 EDT with The AI Survivors’ Handbook: Should We Adapt to AI or Should It Adapt to Us? The keynote will address a question facing professionals across industries: how can organisations benefit from AI without letting the technology dictate their priorities and decisions?

Saturday Focuses on Drupal Training and Community Contributions

Mauricio SilveiraDan also encouraged practitioners to contribute reusable solutions back to the open-source community rather than limiting improvements to individual projects. He told The DropTimes that he looks forward to demonstrating the tools used at Consensus and discussing the problem-solving process behind complex operational work. His broader comments complement the conference’s focus on practical engineering challenges without being presented as specific conclusions from the cloud-hosting panel.According to the official session description, Aidan will draw on historical technological changes and his personal journey from anxiety to optimism to offer practical guidelines for adopting AI. The keynote is intended for individuals and organisations assessing AI’s role in their work while preserving human oversight. Aidan told The DropTimes that he particularly looks forward to discussing these shared concerns with others navigating the same transition.She will also address where AI can help scale accessibility efforts and where human evaluation remains essential, offering practical actions that teams can apply to existing projects.