The session opens with the "why Gutenberg" question, perhaps the most important one for the Drupal community right now. Gutenberg and Canvas serve different primary audiences and carry different levels of maturity. Gutenberg is an editor-first experience built around in-place editing, what you see is what you get, right where you're working. It benefits from eight years of continuous development as WordPress's core editor, resulting in a battle-tested, stable block ecosystem with a rich third-party plugin landscape and a familiar experience for editors coming from other platforms. While it primarily targets content editors, its capabilities naturally overlap with site-building workflows. Canvas, on the other hand, is purpose-built for Drupal and focused primarily on site builders, a powerful tool, but still in its early stages of maturity. Rather than framing this as a competition, we'll explore when each approach makes sense and how teams can make an informed choice based on their project's needs, editorial culture and team composition.
From there, we dive into what makes Gutenberg 4 a compelling release:
The updated Gutenberg core library: what's changed upstream, how those improvements land in the Drupal module and what this means for block compatibility, performance and developer experience.
Full SDC (Single Directory Components) support: a game-changer for Drupal developers. Gutenberg 4 will fully integrate with Drupal's SDC architecture, allowing teams to use their existing Drupal components as Gutenberg blocks. This bridges the gap between Drupal's component-driven theming and Gutenberg's block-based editing, eliminating duplication and ensuring consistency between what editors build in Gutenberg and what the front end renders.
Structured block data: one of the most architecturally significant additions. Gutenberg 4 will be able to save block content as structured JSON fields, making block data fully queryable. This moves Gutenberg beyond opaque HTML blobs and into Drupal's structured content philosophy, enabling views, APIs, migrations, and any workflow that depends on being able to query and manipulate content at the field level.
After 4.0 and already in the works:
Real-time collaborative editing: the headline feature for content teams. We'll look at how multi-user editing will work under the hood, what the UX looks like in practice, and how it compares to tools like Google Docs or Notion that editorial teams already rely on.
Drupal AI integration: how Gutenberg 4 will connect with Drupal's emerging AI capabilities to assist with content generation, translation, summarization, and other editorial workflows directly within the block editor.
The session will include a live demo showcasing these features in action and will close with a discussion on adoption strategy: when to upgrade, what to watch out for and how to prepare existing Drupal Gutenberg installations for the transition.