Talking Drupal #537 - Orchestration

Jan 26, 2026

Jürgen Haas, Drupal contributor and maintainer (Lake Drops), brings expertise in privacy, security, and orchestration. He discusses orchestration vs automation and why Drupal needs a standard orchestration schema. Short takes cover integrator roles, abstraction for switching services, open-source orchestrators like ActivePieces, and security risks and tradeoffs for hosted vs self-hosted solutions.

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INSIGHT

Orchestration Is The Conductor

Orchestration coordinates multiple automated tasks and human steps to achieve long-running workflows.
Jürgen compares it to a conductor bringing instruments (services) together to play a piece of music.

INSIGHT

Orchestrator Makes Dynamic Decisions

An orchestrator organizes automations to run in parallel or in sequence and makes decisions based on results.
It can add new tasks dynamically and coordinate next steps like instruments in a score.

INSIGHT

Drupal Has Built-In Automation Roots

Drupal already hosts multiple automation tools (Maestro, ECA, AI, Flowdrop), creating a fertile ground for orchestration.
Standardizing how those tools interoperate would let them work together instead of duplicating efforts.

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Today we are talking about Integrations into Drupal, Automation, and Drupal with Orchestration with guest Jürgen Haas. We'll also cover CRM as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/537

Topics

Understanding Orchestration
Orchestration in Drupal
Introduction to Orchestration Services
Drupal's Role in Orchestration
Flexibility in Integration
Orchestration Module in Drupal
Active Pieces and Open Source Integration
Security Considerations in Orchestration
Future of Orchestration in Drupal
Getting Involved with Orchestration

Resources

Guests

Jürgen Haas - lakedrops.com jurgenhaas

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted a Drupal-native way to store, manage, and interact with people who might not all be registered users? There's a module for that.
Module name/project name:
- CRM - Contact Relationship Management
Brief history
- How old: created in Apr 2007 by Allie Micka, but the Steve Ayers aka bluegeek9 took over the namespace
- Versions available: 1.0.0-beta2, which works with Drupal 11.1 or newer
Maintainership
- Actively maintained, latest release just a day ago
- Security coverage: opted in, but needs a stable release
- Test coverage
- Number of open issues: 73 open issues, but all bugs have been marked as fixed
Usage stats:
- 10 sites
Module features and usage
- Listeners may remember some mention of the CRM module in the conversation about the Member Platform initiative back in episode 512
- As a reminder, something other than standard Drupal user accounts is useful for working with contact information for people where you may not have all the criteria necessary for a Drupal user account, for example an email address. Also, a dedicated system can make it easier to model relationships between contacts, and provide additional capabilities.
- It's worth noting that this module defines CRM as Contact Relationship Management, not assuming that the data is associated with "customers" or "constituents" as some other solutions do
- At its heart, CRM defines three new entity types: contacts, contact methods, and relationships. Each of these can have fieldable bundles, and provides some default examples: Person, Household, and Organization for contacts; Address, Email, and Telephone for contact methods; and Head of household, Spouse, Employee, and Member for relationships
- Out of the box CRM includes integrations with other popular modules like Group and Context, in addition to a variety of Drupal core systems like views and search
- As previously mentioned CRM is intended to be the foundational data layer of the Member Platform, but is also a key element of the Open Knowledge distribution, meant to allow using Drupal as a collaborative knowledge base and learning platform