DrupalCon North America 2025


DrupalCon North America 2025 brought together members of the Drupal community including developers, designers, site builders, and strategists to exchange ideas, sharpen their skills, and explore new possibilities with Drupal.

Summarized below are four standout sessions. An upcoming blog post will include additional insights about the event.

Drupal CMS 1.0

After months of focused collaboration, the Drupal community unveiled a major milestone: the debut of Drupal CMS 1.0 on January 15, 2025 with a renewed emphasis on usability and content creation. Designed with editors and marketers in mind, it opens the door to a more approachable and modern Drupal experience that offers real benefits for non-technical users who want to build and manage websites with greater ease.

Watch DrupalCon Atlanta 2025: Keynote - The Future of Drupal CMS.

The Neurodivergent SuperPower—How diverse teams function better

Neurodivergent Superpowers highlights both the strengths and challenges neurodivergent individuals face in the workplace. Those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other cognitive differences may display heightened levels of educational attainment and often excel in nonlinear thinking, hyperfocusing, and attention to minute details. In fact, they’re believed to act as a natural defense against groupthink—“conformity to group values and ethics”—within leadership groups. 

Neurodivergent people bring innovation and unique perspectives—traits linked to 19% higher revenues due to increased innovation and 9% higher profit margins in management teams.

Despite this, neurodivergent individuals still face unemployment rates of 30–40%, far higher than the national average. 

Ways you can support neurodivergent employees include:

  • Fostering a culture of respect and understanding
  • Encouraging open communication and flexible participation
  • Creating a low-sensory, flexible work environment
  • Embracing strengths-based collaboration
  • Modeling psychological safety as a leader
  • Implementing clear, inclusive policies

Experience Builder

Experience Builder is a new toolset in Drupal’s site-building capabilities, promising greater flexibility and a more intuitive interface, catering to the needs of both developers and non-technical content creators. By streamlining layout and content workflows, the Experience Builder aims to reduce friction in the site creation process and lower the barrier to entry for users who may not have a technical background.

While there are some concerns about the current maturity and stability of Experience Builder, many are optimistic that the maintainers will address these issues in future releases. 

Leveraging Drupal SaaS to power 400 websites as unique as independent bookstores

IndieCommerce made Drupal more approachable and efficient for bookstore owners by customizing dashboards and reorganizing the admin interface for non-technical users. This role-sensitive design could benefit the University by providing streamlined tools for content editors while reserving more advanced features for administrators or developers. Their implementation of a special layer on top of Drupal’s native permissions also shows the value of adding flexibility and granularity when managing access across diverse user groups like faculty, staff, and students.

Key ideas that could be explored include:

  • Tailored admin interfaces for different user roles to improve usability and reduce confusion
  • An additional permission layer beyond core Drupal to support more precise access control
  • Tiered access to features, enabling different site types (e.g., blogs, department sites) to have appropriate tools and modules
  • Use of config_pages for managing site-specific settings without fragmenting the overall platform

While these solutions were built for a commercial e-commerce platform, the underlying principles—modularity, clarity, and role-driven design—could be adapted to improve usability, governance, and scalability across the University’s distributed Drupal ecosystem.

Watch Leveraging Drupal SaaS to Power 400 Websites as Unique as Independent Bookstores.

If you have questions about Drupal, email the University Relations web team at [email protected].

Topics: Web