Doug Vann

Now works with LocalGov Drupal (or any CMS for that matter - more here: http://jadu.net/lgr) For councils running #LocalGovDrupal, the challenge of helping residents quickly find the right service or answer is a familiar one. Traditional search often falls short, and most AI chatbots are clunky, impersonal, and expensive to train and run. AgentEx: Search from Jadu now works seamlessly with #LocalGov #Drupal, bringing powerful agentic AI search directly into your website, without the need for annoying chatbots or complex technical integrations. With just a short implementation, it transforms your existing search box into an intelligent digital assistant that understands natural language, speaks over 70 languages, and delivers task-focused answers in real time, 24/7 and accessible to everyone. Why this matters for Drupal users? The LocalGovDrupal community also prioritises accessibility, reuse, and cost-efficiency. AgentEx: Search fits naturally into this ecosystem, offering councils a way to bring #AI to their residents without compromising on those values. Especially important in light of Local Government Reorganisation and the opportunity for much needed service reform. As councils merge or collaborate across shared services, websites often become more complex. Residents just want to know when their bins are collected, how to apply for school places, or where to find support. AgentEx: Search uses your existing content to deliver accurate, accessible responses instantly, guiding people to tasks, not just pages. (more about LGR: http://jadu.net/lgr ). Agent-Ex: Search is the single front-door for newly re-organised councils. Unlike generic AI tools or external scraping solutions, AgentEx: Search is trained on your site’s actual content. It doesn’t invent answers or rely on vague matches, it reads your structured data and delivers it back as plain-language responses that align with your brand and meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards. Crucially, it’s not a chatbot. There’s no awkward pop-up to dismiss. It enhances your search bar with AI-powered intelligence that users trust, presented in a way that feels familiar. Whether a resident types or speaks their query, AgentEx: Search responds quickly and clearly, in their language and with a clear call to action. Many authorities don’t have the time, resources or budget to overhaul their site or retrain editors. That’s where AgentEx: Search shines. It integrates quickly with LocalGov Drupal, requires no manual tagging or AI expertise, and brings immediate value by reducing contact centre load and improving customer satisfaction. More: http://jadu.net/agent-ex Nick Hill Helen Olsen Bedford Dipti Amin Lee Russell Mark Say Mark Chillingworth Mike Gifford, CPWA Simon Gray Richard Beards #localgov #localgovdrupal #ai #agents

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How North Dakota State University unified nearly 300 sites into one Drupal platform with support from Four Kitchens 🎓 This case study covers: • Governance at scale for 150+ editors • 0.5s homepage load + Lighthouse 99 • AI-assisted migration of legacy apps Todd Ross Nienkerk writes Read via The Drop Times: https://lnkd.in/gysNBZ7Q #Drupal #HigherEd #WebDev #OpenSource

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Drupal folks are everywhere! Former Drupal folks anyway. Over the last few days several people I know from the Drupal community have shown up on the front page of Hacker News. They weren't talking about Drupal. They've moved on to other things. Miguel Jacq released Enroll, a tool for importing existing servers into Ansible. This morning Mattias Geniar's post entitled "Web development is fun again" was sitting in the top 20. He discusses how AI has removed the need for deep domain knowledge, which in turn has made "web dev fun again". If it is a day ending in y, then Jeff Geerling is probably on the front page of the orange site. This was confirmed by him coming in second in the "The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025" rankings.

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I hate disparaging others but apparently this came up on Drupal Planet so I must. The article from "Drupal life hack's" with url drupal com ua has an article Object-Oriented Form API in Drupal 11. This has nothing to do with reality. Absolutely none. There's not a single thing in there which corresponds to a committed change. Please consult the change notices instead: "New Object oriented approach for working with form/render arrays" and "Widget elements can be written using object oriented approach".

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If your documentation lives only inside a help desk, you cannot monitor it like a product. Most teams want proactive upkeep, yet their content is scattered across tickets, snippets, and long-form articles that no pipeline can actually watch. The fix is not another rewrite; it’s turning docs into an instrumented system with a single source of truth that supports governance, analytics, and AI-assisted checks under human review. What operationalizing “proactive” really looks like: • Create a single source of truth for content, using one topic per document, so every page can be versioned, reviewed, and measured like code. • Move customer-facing help center articles into a structured repository or headless CMS, which allows CI/CD, automated validation, and consistent publishing to every channel. • Instrument the journeys that matter, including time-to-first-success, search-success on top tasks, and support correlation for the articles that deflect repeat questions. • Monitor content health continuously, using freshness SLAs, drift checks after UI or API changes, and link integrity to prevent quiet breakage. • Adopt docs-as-code workflows, including Git review, templates, acceptance criteria, and predictable release cadences that keep truth aligned with product reality. • Use AI where it helps, applying targeted structure and drift checks, while keeping human owners accountable for accuracy, tone, and final changes. • Report on outcomes monthly, with a short health summary, prioritized fixes, and visible trends that tie documentation work to activation and support results. Who benefits first from this approach: • API-first SaaS and platform teams where integrator time and first success drive adoption. • B2B products with complex onboarding that need clear upgrade paths and canonical answers for high-value tasks. • Mid-market and enterprise groups coordinating multiple teams, versions, and releases across several channels. Why this works in practice: • A single source of truth enables analytics that leaders trust, because every improvement maps to a specific journey and a specific metric. • CI/CD and governance remove the lag between product changes and published guidance, which protects launches and reduces escalations. • Proactive monitoring converts documentation from a cost line into a predictable lever for activation lift and ticket deflection. Turn your help content into a monitored system with owners, cadences, and numbers that move, and your documentation will finally behave like part of the product rather than an afterthought.

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ADA Title II Just Got Real for State and Local Governments. I know. You were hoping this was another “someday” rule. It isn’t. The Department of Justice finalized a Title II rule in 2024 requiring state and local governments to make all their digital content conform to WCAG 2.1 AA. If you serve 50,000 people or more, April 24, 2026 is your date. Smaller entities get until April 26, 2027. That’s like… what… two budget cycles away? And no, this doesn’t mean installing a widget and congratulating the IT department. It means your websites, PDFs, forms, bill pay portals, permit systems—the whole digital front door—have to work for real human beings with disabilities. Not just blind users with screen readers. Also the resident who’s deaf trying to watch a council meeting without captions. The veteran who can’t use a mouse. The grandmother with low vision renewing a license. The parent with dyslexia filling out a school form at midnight. The student with ADHD who can’t read the analog clock on a testing portal and freezes. The person recovering from a concussion who suddenly can’t process dense text. Accessibility isn’t exotic. It’s practical. It asks one question: can someone use your services independently without calling for help? If this feels familiar, Section 508 has required something similar at the federal level for years. ADA Title II now makes it explicit for state and local governments. Different law. Same technical standard: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG rests on four principles: Perceivable. Operable. Understandable. Robust. Translated: people must be able to perceive the content, navigate it, understand it, and use it with assistive technology. This is where many municipalities say, “We added ARIA labels. We ran a scan. We’re fine.” You’re not fine. Accessibility is structural. It lives in templates, document practices, vendor contracts, form builders, procurement language, and governance decisions. The unglamorous parts — which means they’re also the fixable parts. You don’t need to panic. You need an inventory. You need to know what carries the highest public risk. And you need a documented, phased plan before 2026 or 2027. You can’t audit 12,000 PDFs in a weekend. No one sane expects you to. Start with the services people rely on most. Fix what matters first. Build the structure. Move outward. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about responsibility. Accessibility is civil rights applied to code and content. And structure, fortunately, can be built. Caption: Clarity, compliance, and a Boston terrier for moral support.

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Metadata and taxonomy don’t make noise. They don’t shout for attention. But without them, your entire documentation system collapses into confusion. If you want your documents to work for you — not against you — invest time in getting metadata right. It’s the silent architecture of every flourishing knowledge ecosystem.

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What does it mean to leave your mark on a project—and still check in on it years later? In this in-depth interview for The Drop Times, I had the chance to speak with Samuel Mortenson, the developer behind tools like Tome, SFC, and numerous Drupal core contributions. His influence shaped workflows many of us now take for granted—but what’s fascinating is how deeply personal that journey remains. Samuel talks about the itch to make things simpler, the impulse to open-source even the smallest fixes, and the quiet persistence of caring about a project long after stepping away. His story isn’t just about code—it’s about legacy, minimalism, and finding joy in problems worth solving. It’s rare to hear someone articulate so clearly what motivates their work and how that evolves over time. This is one of those conversations that sticks with you. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ga5S_CxS #OpenSource #Drupal #DeveloperLegacy #StaticSites #TomeCMS

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Technical writing as a profession is not going away any time soon. I’ve said it before, and that will be the hot take of my keynote at #MEGAComm in February. The profession is being stress tested, and has regularly been stress-tested since the mid 1900s, when the translation industry starting using artificial intelligence, aka "machine translation" for automation. There have been four major shifts in the last 40 years, all from outside stimuli: 1. The move from typing to desktop publishing and the ability to print high-quality output in-house. 2. The World Wide Web, which changed the creation process from long-form “documents” to Web-page sized “topics” and multichannel publishing to PDFs, online help, and HTML for web pages. 3. The introduction of production-grade authoring systems, which allowed for more sophisticated delivery: component re-use, personalisation, omnichannel, AR/VR, localisation management, content delivery platforms, and so on. 4. Generative AI, which is relatively immature in how it affects content professionals, and is in the stage where inflated expectations of AI has senior management trying to replace human writers with AI output. Industry is beginning its slow realisation that they are still in the Trough of Disillusionment. You’ll notice that everyone is talking about knowledge graphs at the moment, and they are shown on the downward slope of the trough, so industry has some way to go before it begins its painful climb up the Slope of Enlightenment. As content fields of practice were hit particularly hard with the short-sighted mass layoffs in the belief that AI could completely replace content professionals, recovering from the AI slop blip is going to take longer. The activities that technical writers undertake will undoubtedly change - they’re already changing - and the focus will change. Even the job title may change. In reality, technical writers are needed more than ever. They are needed for more than writing, which takes about 15% of a tech writer’s time. They are needed for: - Stakeholder management – prying the relevant information out of the SMEs. - Research – figuring out what the product or service does and how to present that in a way that’s useful to the different audiences. - Context curation – writing variants for multiple audiences and tagging them up appropriately. - Closing the communication loop – making sure that customer support information is up-to-date to avoid repetitive inquiries. And so much more. Evolution is inevitable, and technical writers have always been good at evolving with the times. Content professionals do need to learn how to use AI, but likely more as an assistant to automate rote tasks and create more capacity within their roles. With each shift, technical writers have had to learn a new bunch of skills, and this is no different.

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Got a question about building food recipe sites in Drupal on a live stream. Someone asked about using Paragraphs for ingredients and quantities, which is actually a smart approach. While many use Paragraphs for page layout components, it's great at creating structured, repeatable data like recipe ingredients. There's also a dedicated Recipe module that's been around since 2003 (yes, 23 years!). It peaked at 1400 sites and provides specialized recipe functionality out of the box. For new recipe sites, consider both options. Paragraphs gives you flexibility to build exactly what you need, while the Recipe module offers proven recipe-specific features. #drupal #drupalcms #drupalrecipes ~~~ If you found this post helpful. ♻️ Please repost and follow. 📧 Join our newsletter; link in the first comment.

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Agentic coding tool pro tip: Remind your agentic tool of choice (Claude Code, Qwen Code, etc.) frequently about its own capabilities, to the point where you might want to set up a hook for it. The most common thing I remind Claude Code? "You must use subagents and you can have up to 50 subagents running in parallel." It's smart enough to know what tasks have dependencies and what don't - and then deploy the correct number of agents in parallel to get work done as quickly as possible without losing quality. If you're working on non-code tasks? This is ESSENTIAL to getting things done quickly. For example, if you're writing emails for a nurture campaign, there are no dependencies from one to the next as long as you've built a solid plan. For example, when I used an agentic tool to write some fiction, it was able to launch one agent per chapter because it was working from a master outline, and what would have taken 16 hours was done in 90 minutes. But the trick is... the tools forget their own capabilities. They forget what's available to them. So get in the habit of reminding them early and often what they have available. #AI #GenerativeAI #GenAI #ChatGPT #ArtificialIntelligence #LargeLanguageModels #MachineLearning #IntelligenceRevolution

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