Drupal Planet

Today we are talking about Marketing, AI, and Drupal with guest Paul Johnson. We'll also cover Curated Colors as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/559

• Paul's Current Projects
• Enterprise AI Summit Details
• Marketing the AI Initiative
• Partnering on Event Booths
• Drupal's Outside Perception
• What's Working Now
• Growing the Marketing Team
• How to Contribute
• Outside In Storytelling
• Case Study Examples
• AI Initiative Impact
• Roadmap and Launch Planning
• Finding New Adopters
• Where Pros Research
• Conference Pitch Story
• Local Event Playbook
• Funnel and Webinars
• Industry Guides and Demos
• SEO and AI Search
• Why Agents Avoid Drupal
• High Leverage Contributions
• Measuring AI Mentions
• Vibe Coders to Governance
• Fixing Misconceptions

• Drupal AI Initiative home page
• Slack
  • #ai-initiative-marketing
• Enterprise AI Summit Rotterdam
• AI Dev Summit Rotterdam
• Drupal AI TV
  • We've curated a selection of the best presentations, workshops and demonstrations freely available to provide a practical way to stay informed about the latest innovations in Drupal AI.
• Drupal AI Webinars playlist
• Demos
• Ryan Whitcombe
• 1xINTERNET S1xSignals free AIO GEO assessment
• All things open
• World cancer day

Paul Johnson - pdjohnson

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Scott Falconer - managing-ai.com scott-falconer

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to allow editors on your Drupal site to choose styling from a brand-approved color palette? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Curated Colors
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2026 by Kyle Einecker (ctrladel) of True Summit
  • Versions available: 1.0.0 which works with Drupal 10.3, 11, and 12
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - in-depth README
  • Number of open issues: 2 open issues, neither of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 27 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Curated Colors enforces brand consistency by replacing generic color text inputs or wide-open color pickers with a curated, visual swatch popover containing only pre-approved, named options
  • It streamlines rebranding by storing abstract keys (such as brand-primary) instead of raw hex values (e.g., #0678be) in the database. That means updating a brand color in the future only requires a CSS or configuration change rather than a massive data migration
  • Curated Colors is also extensible beyond colors. It functions as a generic visual variant selector. Site builders can repurpose it to let editors pick card layouts, button styles (like primary, outline, or danger), hero text alignments, or icon themes
  • Editors can pick from neatly organized groups with human-readable labels and see a live preview swatch of their selection before saving
  • Palettes are managed as exportable Drupal configuration. Each entry maps a machine key to a label, administrative hex preview, and optional custom CSS
  • The module provides a curated_color field type and an accompanying swatch-based popover widget that can be restricted to specific palette groups. It also features a native curated_color_picker Form API element and integrates with the Canvas module via SDC annotations
  • The field exposes properties like value, hex, style, and css, making it simple to output selections as classes, inline styles, or raw codes in Twig templates
  • Finally, Curated Colors includes an example submodule providing a working SDC component and sample palette templates so you can see exactly how it's meant to be used

Artificial intelligence is posing a practical question to Drupal. If AI agents can help plan, build, inspect, and change websites, how easily can they work with Drupal when faster platforms are easier to start?

The Drupal AI Initiative made that question more explicit on 25 June 2026, when it split its work into two streams: Inside AI and Outside AI. Inside AI focuses on tools used within Drupal, including assistants, page-building, and in-product workflows. Outside AI focuses on agents and external tools that need to start with Drupal, connect to it, inspect it, change it, verify it, migrate into it, or launch it.

The shift matters because AI changes how platform choices are made. Human teams may choose Drupal for structured content, permissions, workflows, revisions, and long-term governance. An AI coding agent may judge the same platform by a shorter test: whether it can install, configure, understand, and verify a working site in one session.

Dries Buytaert tested that tension directly when he asked an AI coding agent whether it would recommend Drupal for a site-building task. The agent ranked Drupal third, behind a Next.js and headless CMS stack and WordPress. It did not say Drupal lacked capability. It said Drupal carried more “session-time risk” because setup, module selection, documentation, training data, and frontend choices made the first working session harder to complete confidently.

That is the useful problem for the community to address. Drupal’s AI work cannot depend only on adding visible AI features inside the CMS. It also has to make Drupal easier for external agents and agent-assisted developers to understand, call, inspect, and modify without losing the controls that make the platform valuable.

TDT has also covered this from the workflow side. A report on Drupal orchestration primitives looked at how ECA, FlowDrop, Maestro, and Drupal core are being discussed through shared workflow terms such as triggers, steps, conditions, workflows, and runs. The unresolved question is data handoff: how work moves between Drupal tools, across workflow systems, and out to agents or external automation without breaking governance.

This is where Drupal’s older strengths may become newly important. Revisions, moderation states, permissions, access control, structured content, multilingual architecture, and publishing review are not only CMS features. They are the controls that external AI systems may need when generated content, configuration changes, or workflow actions have to be checked before they reach production.

The test for Outside AI will not be the terminology. It will be about whether Drupal can reduce first-session friction that leads agents to choose simpler tools, while still giving organisations control over review, rollback, audit, and publishing. That means clearer documentation, faster setup paths, reliable examples, machine-readable interfaces, and real feedback from agencies and developers using AI in delivery work.

The curated story list for this edition follows the editor’s note. Readers can also follow The Drop Times on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook, or join the publication’s Drupal Slack channel at #thedroptimes.

Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The Drop Times

The last remaining reason to compile your CSS has just disappeared.

CSS Style Queries have reached Baseline support across all major browsers, and they unlock something we've wanted for years: reusable, stateful design tokens that work entirely in native CSS.

At its most basic, style queries allow you to add CSS rules to a nested element, based on a parent’s CSS variable.