The vision
Dries has lined up what’s next for Drupal’s roadmap. Drupal is for ambitious site builders. At this point everyone should know or should have heard his vision.
Rephrasing Dries words, Drupal “[…] has become much bigger than a CMS alone”. But what does “bigger” really mean? Is it a tool to build apps? Could it become an AI toolset? Could it be much more?
For those who don’t know me, I have been involved in Drupal for nearly two decades (pretty much my whole professional career), in roles that span from Software Engineer, Technical Lead, Technical Architect, Solutions Architect, Developer relations, and more recently, Program Manager of the Innovation Program in the Drupal Association (DA).
I was hired by the DA to spearhead an effort to accelerate innovation and grow contribution to Drupal. In my first few months, I've been [reading/learning/listening], gathering my thoughts about the problems we need to solve as a community, and to start building that “supportive environment, […] allowing time for ideas to flourish'' (Dries, keynote 2023). In other words, I’m trying to find with the rest of my colleagues and community, what “bigger” means, and find how we can plant 1000 seeds and let them bloom.
This is the first part of a series of blog posts where I would like to share my ideas and learnings about the challenges we face, and the opportunities we have to grow as a project and as a community.
Technology, innovation, and the future
Drupal innovation. Drupalcon Pittsburgh echoes are still resonating strongly in my ears. If you were not lucky enough to attend, I will give you a quick one word summary: INNOVATION. From Dries' keynote to the different sessions, to the conversations around coffee breaks and meals… and even weeks after DrupalCon, people are talking about this topic. Innovation was showing a clear presence all over the place.
We left Pittsburgh with some powerful new ideas from the community to explore. But are we doing enough outside of our community to capture the attention and inspire new talent to join Drupal?
If you want my opinion (and, if you are reading this, this is actually just my thoughts ;-) ), we are at a key moment for Drupal.
Drupal has been in the market for quite a few years. We recently celebrated its 20 year anniversary. Our beloved technology has changed immensely, and thanks to that, Drupal has not just survived, but thrived all these years. Just look at what was around you 20 years ago. The mobile phones, the computers, the cars, or even how we used to build our houses… very little has survived unchanged. In fact, very few technologies have survived since. Drupal, however, has changed, evolved, survived, and thrived.
Drupal is a public good that benefits many people and organisations.
Innovation as I already said was the main topic in this year’s Driesnote, and from what I could hear and read outside of the rooms and on social networks, it was a well-received topic. The keynote was full of hope and made people excited again about Drupal and our future.
Even outside of the keynote, innovation was the trend in many sessions. And, as part of that innovation trend, decoupled was having a clear presence, and it could actually be the key for Drupal. The key, amongst other things, is to attract new developers and young people that we are in need of (more on that in my upcoming articles).
You have probably heard or read the StackOverflow survey. If you haven’t, stop what you are doing and go read it.
If you don’t have the time, I’ll give you a couple of snapshots. Technologies that developers want to use (top and bottom of the list):
I have a few takeaways from some of the decoupled sessions and those surveys. On one hand, yes, Drupal as a technology is just amongst the 0.43% of people who want to try it for the first time (another reason for optimism is that this year’s data is a bit higher). However, the top technologies that developers want to try are things like ReactJS, NextJS, … frameworks that work pretty well alongside Drupal, that even matured years before this trend arrived and has made Drupal extremely well suited for this market. I’ll come back to this at a later time with more details and thoughts.
Drupal's innovation is invisible, unless we can find a way to reach outside our existing community
Let me give you another snapshot:
The second takeaway is that Drupal is amongst the most dreaded technologies. Yes, that is rough. However, is that because that poll was answered by people who have not tried the technology since maybe Drupal 7 or even Drupal 6 or 5? With so many changes in the developer experience, performance improvements, and so on, if you haven’t tried Drupal even in the last few years, you are likely having the wrong impression about the framework.
My theory, and what other people have shared with me during the days we spent together at DrupalCon Pittsburgh, is exactly that. Those opinions come from developers who have not tried Drupal for some time. But Drupal has changed an enormous deal since.
Yes, quite a lot of things have changed. Some core components of Drupal have become quite modern and exciting, like Symfony components, Object Orientation, Events, … Drupalisms (which were a pain of the past and a constant reason for discussion and beginner friction) have slowly started to fade in favour of Symfony and PHP vocabulary. A more Drupal agnostic, developer friendly framework, which should attract much needed new blood. Or that was the theory…
And the truth is that Drupal nowadays is a powerful, developer friendly, modern framework, full of potential and exciting features and capabilities. But, the young and new developers do not seem to be arriving to Drupal.
Should we maybe make a bigger effort to show how much Drupal has changed, and how powerful and developer friendly it is nowadays? And should we make that clear OUTSIDE of our Drupal communities?
To sum up
I think we can look at those statistics from a different point of view. A point of view which makes me excited and hopeful for the future of Drupal. The most interesting and attractive technologies are precisely those that we have been pushing as a community to support. Headless frameworks like Vue, NextJS or ReactJS. If we do just a little push and make Drupal THE CMS of reference for those frameworks, we can guarantee growth and success for the next phase we are already in, while we start thinking about the next one. While we plant the seeds.
The same goes for the problem of attracting younger generations to Drupal.
This is probably not going to be easy. But similarly, it’s not going to be a hard, insurmountable task. And it may require not just coding contributions but other contributions as well, like marketing or even collaboration with other communities. We have an amazing and exciting technology that goes beyond CMS. Not just Drupal developers should know about this fact.
So, my message today is an optimistic one. Yes, we don’t have the best statistics in our favour right now to stay optimistic about the PRESENT of Drupal. However, we have some exciting numbers to show what needs to be done to stay VERY optimistic about the FUTURE of Drupal. Let’s prepare for that future, and let’s make Drupal the innovative framework that it has always been by ensuring that everyone outside our community knows about it.
I’m here to listen to you. What role would you like for the Drupal Association on this? What would you like the community to do? Do you have ideas? Let’s talk: Find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.