What shipped in 2026: making it easier to work together

This year's Community Management System (CMS) work focused on one goal: making it easier for people from different organisations to work together inside a community. Alexander Varwijk, technical product lead, presented the results at the Open Social Summit '26, much of it built with support from the European Commission.

Files and documents

Working with files used to mean handling them one at a time. Members can now upload a set of files in one go, download a whole folder, and select several files to move, download or delete them together. This is available to every customer.

With the optional Collabora integration, members can open a PDF in the browser and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations together in real time. The file never leaves the server, so sensitive documents can be shared for reading without allowing downloads.

Meetings that start from events

With the new BigBlueButton integration, members who enrolled for an event can join an online meeting with one click from the event page. Access follows the platform's existing rules, so the people who enrolled are the people in the meeting. Afterwards, event managers can add notes, slides and links to a recap section, and a BigBlueButton recording is added automatically.

Knowing who you work with

In a community of people from many organisations, knowing who you are dealing with matters. Affiliations let members show which organisation or group they represent, next to their name across the platform. Because joining an organisation or group usually involves vetting, an affiliation tells other members something real. Members can also add an affiliation for organisations that are not on the platform.

New search, sorting and filters on group and organisation overviews, and in the admin screens, make it quicker to find the right people and places.

Faster, safer releases

Some of the most important work is invisible. Since September, Open Social releases every week, so fixes reach clients as soon as they are ready. That pace matters for security. AI tools are helping researchers find vulnerabilities in open source projects faster than before. In the weeks before the Summit, a single Drupal module that Open Social uses received a release covering around 20 potential issues. Open source makes responsible disclosure possible at scale, and weekly releases mean fixes do not wait.

What's next?

The Drupal 11 update lands in November, bringing performance improvements and better tooling. Kubernetes support, starting with the Community Management System, will let organisations run Open Social on their own infrastructure. After that come a redesign of group pages and organisations in search. In 2027 the focus moves to onboarding new members and better guidance for community and site managers.

See it for yourself

If you run a network of organisations and want to see how this works in practice, request a demo.