January 2026 Town Council

Well, as promised in the last video, we're going to cover automations. This is one of the more exciting parts of Drupal AI for me, other than all of the things we've already talked about, content creation, moderation, summaries, and all of that stuff,

which is pretty amazing when it's used well and set up properly. Automations, they present such potential. Now we're only going to set up a couple of really easy ones. In the session notes below, I'll link to some more advanced videos from guys over at FreelyGive.io

and things like that about what you can do with automations. And this is changing constantly, like literally constantly. So you're going to want to keep up with this. These are two pretty simple ones that we're going to set up, and all we're going to do

is add a field that will provide three suggested titles, and then another field that will suggest a summary that you can update meta tag to point to that field, or you can put it up in the summary by copying and pasting. Again, always a human in the loop here.

So to do this, we have to turn on a couple of modules. You may have already done these. Head over to extend, and once again, let's just head down to the AI area. You want to turn on AI Automators, and since we're here, you might as well turn on AI Agents,

Agents Explorer, and Assistants if you've not already done that, as well as Chatbot. We'll need that for the next couple of sessions. We're going to do search at the very end of this course. By the way, in between the last session and this session, I did update Drupal AI. It came out with an update.

We were using RC1 in the beginning of this course. This is how fast stuff changes. So now we're using 1.2, the full version, and you might want to do the same thing. Once you turn those on, under Configuration, AI, there's some AI Assistants, AI Automators, and more.

We don't need any of those at the moment, as you'll see in just a second. All right, I'm going to go to Structure, Content Types, Article, and Manage Fields. As I mentioned in the intro to this video, we're going to set up two automated fields, one for a Suggested Title and one for a Suggested Summary.

Click Create a New Field. And for the title, we just need a plain text field. We'll call this Suggested Title and just a plain text field. Click Continue. Again, whoops, I guess we should say Suggested, not Suggested Title.

Now, down here at the bottom, once you turned on AI Automators, every single field you add or edit will have this new feature at the bottom, Enable AI Automator. Put a checkmark in there, and then you've got some choices. The AI Automator type for this field is easy.

You just select Text Simple. Then you need to decide on the input mode. OK, so we've got two modes here, Base or Advanced. I like to use Advanced simply because then I can use tokens in the prompt. You don't have to.

You can use the Base mode and enter an Automator prompt in here using the placeholders that are down here, like Context. 601 half does them another. So I'm going to switch that to Advanced Token mode, and I'm going to say,

create three Suggested Titles for this node from the Node Body field. Now, if you don't know what the token is there, don't worry. You can browse the available tokens.

You can also include more than one field here, which is great, especially with tokens, right? If you had multiple fields of information that you wanted to use to suggest a title, again, you would just include them here. Do not use HTML and just provide the suggestions.

Otherwise, it's going to have, hey, here are three suggestions for some titles. No, we don't want that. Scrolling down under Advanced Settings, there's really nothing we need to change here for this particular one. If you wanted to use, say, OpenAI model, you could select that.

The Structured Response Model and Vision Model need some setup. We've not done that. The JSON Model works out of the box. I'm going to leave it at that. But if you do choose OpenAI, there's one important thing you need to change, and that is the temperature. The temperature here indicates how creative the AI will be.

Typically, I want to go down to a 0.2 to 0.5 so I get a targeted response, not some crazy creative response from Chat GPT. As well, I might use Chat GPT 4.1 here instead of 4.0.

But this is where it gets fun and you can experiment as much as you want. I'm going to switch that back to the Advanced JSON Model for this. There are no settings here. I'm going to click Save. Now, before we create the other one, let's see what this does. One thing I missed, let's go back in there for just a second.

And down here, there's an important checkbox. Edit when changed. If you change the body, then this field will be automatically updated. Again, totally up to you. If you're changing the body, a great deal.

You might want to keep that checked. Otherwise, just delete the content of the suggested title field and the AI will recreate it. It's six of one, half dozen of another. Let's head back over to our node and click Edit.

And you'll now see down here at the bottom a suggested title field. I've left it on the display so we can see it. Obviously, typically, you'd go to Manage Display and remove that. I'm going to click Save. Haven't changed anything.

But now down at the bottom of my node, I've got three suggested titles that I can copy and paste or recreate as I need. If this isn't quite what I want, well, then let's refine the prompt to make it a little bit more detailed.

In the notes below, I've linked to what's called a gist, which is a very, very specifically laid out prompt. It's much more detailed than the one I've provided. And you can take a look at it to see what it's done. Thanks to Matt Saunders from amazi.io for creating it and sharing it.

All right. So how easy is that? Let's do a summary field that I can use either in the summary of the body or simply point the MetaTag module to use that field instead. And away we go.

Structure, Content Types, Article, Manage Fields. And this time, I'm going to create a formatted text field called Suggested Summary. Needs to be long, but doesn't need a summary, of course. And click Continue.

Once again, enable the automator. The automator again here, I'm going to keep it as the text simple. You can play with the other settings if you want. Once again, I like the advanced mode. So here's the prompt I'm going to use. Provide a summary of the node body field. Again, you could add any other fields in there you want.

So it should be no longer than 100 words in three sentences. Don't use any HTML. And keep the summary factual and concise.

This time, let's change it up a little bit. Once again, I'm going to use the direct process so it goes straight away. And this time, I am going to use OpenAI. I'm going to use ChatGPT 4.1. And I'm going to change the temperature to 0.3. And we'll see what that does.

Again, no images, HTML block. And let's use the plain text format. Click Save. Go back to my content and click Edit.

So now at the bottom here, we're going to have a suggested summary. Again, I can't type the word suggested apparently. And click Save.

All right, let's take a look and see what OpenAI did. Here's our suggested summary. By 2025, Drupal will integrate advanced AI features into its core, yada, yada, yada. And again, I'm not going to show this on the display, of course. But I can certainly come back in, copy and paste that,

and put that in the summary field if I want, or update the metatag module on the right-hand side to use the actual field I just created. So this is really a simple introduction to automating things in Drupal AI.

There's tons more you can do. There's a demo over at freelygive.io where they upload the picture of a famous place. I think they use the Eiffel Tower. I can't remember. Anyway, the automator looks at the image, figures out what it is, decides where it is, and then provides information

about the famous place, the address, as well as directions with a Google Map. I mean, yeah, you can do all of that kind of stuff with automators. And it is really impressive.