From Internship to Main Stage: Witze Van der Straeten’s Figma-to-Drupal Journey

A student’s design-to-code experiment led to collaboration with Dries Buytaert and a demo at DrupalCon Vienna 2025.

Staff Reporter

From Internship to DriesNote: How Witze Van der Straeten’s Figma-to-Drupal Workflow Reached the Main Stage

A recent blog post on Drupal.org shares how Belgian student Witze Van der Straeten turned a school project into a community-backed innovation that reached the DriesNote stage at DrupalCon Vienna 2025. Guided by mentors at Calibrate and supported by the Drupal AI Initiative, his Figma-to-Drupal experiment demonstrated how design workflows can link directly to code using Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools.

After sharing his tutorial publicly, the idea caught the attention of Dries Buytaert, who invited Witze to refine the workflow for integration with Canvas AI. That collaboration culminated in a live demo during the DrupalCon keynote, showcasing how emerging developers can help shape Drupal’s next generation of design-to-code tooling.

The post reflects on Witze’s discovery of Drupal’s welcoming community through the Drupal Dev Days and how open-source collaboration can empower newcomers to contribute meaningfully. Readers can explore his full story on Drupal.org.

Reference: From Figma to Drupal: My Journey into AI and Open Source by Paul Johnson (15 October 2025)

DrupalCon Vienna 2025

Driesnote

Canvas

Drupal AI Initiative

Figma

AI in Drupal

Disclosure: This content is produced with the assistance of AI.

Note: The vision of this web portal is to help promote news and stories around the Drupal community and promote and celebrate the people and organizations in the community. We strive to create and distribute our content based on these content policy. If you see any omission/variation on this please reach out to us at #thedroptimes channel on Drupal Slack and we will try to address the issue as best we can.