I Built a Daily Content Delivery System. Drupal is the Glue. Claude Connects the Pieces

This isn't a writeup about Drupal AI.  It's a writeup about AI that uses Drupal as the glue for an entire content production system.

A Little Background

If you've ever read my blog (https://imrodmartin.com), you know I have two masters degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary, was a Pastor for 13 years and I've taught the Bible at the college level.  I've also been a fan of personality types and how they impact our learning for over 30 years.  When it comes to anything, including Scripture, the same Bible passage, read by two different people can land in two different ways. A careful planner reads Philippians 2 and hears an invitation to order their life around others. A free spirit reads the same verses and hears something about freedom from keeping score. Same truth. Same text. Two people who need it explained in their own language.

I set out to build something that does exactly that. One daily devotional, written 16 ways, one for each Myers Briggs (MBTI) personality type sent to a person's email according to their personality type.  That is a nice idea in a sentence. In practice it is a machine with a lot of moving parts, and most of them do not naturally talk to each other. This is the story of how I got them to. 

If you're reading this and the outcome of this project is something you have no interest in - or don't even agree with - that's ok.  The project itself is worth learning about.

The parts that did not want to cooperate

Here is what a single day actually requires.

First, the writing. Not one devotional but 16, plus 16 reflection questions and 16 prayers, all faithful to the same passage and the same theology. That is 48 pieces of content, every day, that have to agree with each other.

Second, the website. I run it on Drupal, the same content system I have taught for years. Each day is one page holding all 48 pieces, with a little tool up front that lets a visitor choose their type and see only their version. Most people will never see this page since they get it in their email.  But if they do, they can select the version they want to see.

Third, the email. People do not want to remember to visit a website every morning. They want it to arrive. So each of the 16 types needed its own daily email going to the right people.

Fourth, the video, because some people would rather listen than watch a page of text. A short daily video, in my own voice, reading that day's passage and devotional.

Each of those is a normal task on its own. The hard part is the seams. The writing has to land in the website in the right shape. The website has to hand the right version to the email system, and the same content out to the video. The email system has to know which of 16 audiences gets which of 16 letters. Get one seam wrong and a planner gets the free spirit's devotional, or the whole day silently fails to send.

For most of my career, connecting parts like these was the expensive, tedious middle of every project. This time I did it differently.

Where Claude came in

I used Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, to help me build the glue that joined the pieces together. I literally type: /theworforme (the skill), the passage, the theme and the date.  The skill has all the instructions built-in.  Four jobs in particular are spun up.

Writing the 48 pieces, consistently. I gave Claude the passage, the theology I hold to, and a detailed voice guide, and it drafts the master devotional first. I read, edit and approve it before anything else happens. That approval step matters to me. The machine does not publish my convictions without me looking first. Once I approve, it writes the 16 personality versions from that same approved master, so they never drift from the source.

Talking to the website. Drupal is powerful, but getting content into it cleanly, in the exact structure it expects, is fussy work. Claude wrote the connector that takes the day's 48 pieces and files them into the right slots on the right page, checks whether that day already exists so nothing gets duplicated, and even generates the banner image for the top of the page. What used to be an afternoon of careful copying and pasting is now one command.

Wiring up the email. The emails run on a separate system called Mautic. It keeps 16 separate audiences (segments), one per type. Every morning, something has to pull the day's devotional off the website, build 16 different emails from it, and hand each one to the matching audience. Claude built that bridge too. The website stays the single source of truth, and the email system just delivers (via SendGrid) what the website already holds in an approved template. No retyping, no second copy of the truth to keep in sync.

Making the daily video. This is the part that still surprises me. Claude built a tool that reads the day's devotional off the website and turns it into a finished video for the TheWordForMeToday YouTube channel, start to end. It narrates the passage and the devotional in a clone of my own voice (ElevenLabs), lays that narration over the day's banner image (openai-gpt-1), builds a thumbnail (openai-gpt-2), and schedules the whole thing to go public early the next morning. I record no audio and edit no footage. The same approved words that became the page and the emails become the video too, spoken in my voice, without me sitting in front of a microphone at dawn.

The theme across all four is the same. I was not asking the AI to have the big idea. I was asking it to build and connect the plumbing, the unglamorous work between the parts, and to do it while I kept my hand on the decisions that actually mattered.

What this changed

The honest result is not that a robot now runs this devotion ministry. It is that one person can now do what used to take a small team, without giving up control of the parts that count.

I still approve every devotional before it goes out. I still decide the theology, the voice, the passages. Claude handles the connective work: get the writing into the site, get the site's content into the email and the video, and make sure the same truth flows through all of them without me copying it by hand four times.

That is the shift worth noticing, and it reaches far past a Bible site. Most useful projects are not one big thing. They are five or six ordinary systems that each work fine alone and fight you at the seams. The website, the database, the email, the video, the payment form, the spreadsheet. For years, stitching those together was the part that killed good ideas before they shipped.

That part just got dramatically cheaper. Not free, and not thoughtless. You still have to know what you want and check the work. But if you have had an idea sitting on a shelf because connecting all the pieces felt like too much, it may be worth another look. The distance between "I have an idea" and "it runs every morning without me" is shorter than it used to be.

Mine sends 16 letters and posts a video every day before I wake up. I just had to decide what they should say. (https://thewordforme.com)

Final Thought on Drupal's Role 

I chose to not build the personality logic into Drupal - though I easily could have.  Drupal AI could have managed every personality based re-write with ease.  It could have written every prayer too.  It could have generated the images and more.  In this instance though, it made more sense to build that into a Claude Skill that could be created and managed in one place, rather than 48 individual fields.

Drupal is still the source of truth that makes the entire thing work.