It’s back! CTI meets Prague for DrupalCon 2022 - the world's second-largest annual gathering of Drupal experts and enthusiasts. For some, it was great to return to the perfect place to share expertise, create solutions and build relationships. For others, it was a first leap into an event which offers a fantastic opportunity to connect with members of the community whilst gaining knowledge from experts.
Last week, over 1,200 Drupalists gathered in Prague for DrupalCon Europe. It was great to see everyone together in person.
In good tradition, I delivered my State of Drupal keynote. You can watch the video of my keynote or download my slides (380 MB).
Today the web is ingrained in every aspect of our daily lives. We use it for work, to socialize, to pay our bills, get healthcare, and gain access to information.
As more transactions, collaborations and interactions are taking place online, there is now a greater responsibility to ensure that the web is inclusive of every person, and accounts for everyone's safety.
When people are excluded from being able to access online experiences, they are also excluded from rewarding careers, independent lifestyles, and the social interactions and friendships that bring people together.
For those reasons, we need to do everything we can to protect and grow the Open Web.
In my keynote, I made the point that Drupal is an important player in the preservation and growth of the Open Web.
I kicked off my keynote talking about some of my personal reasons for using Drupal, most of which have to do with the future of the Open Web.
After all these years, I continue to upload my photos to my website, despite there being plenty of simpler alternatives (e.g. Facebook or Instagram). I do this for a number of reasons.
First, my photos are precious to me, and I don't want them to get lost. I look at news stories about MySpace and Facebook losing users' content. I like that I'm in control of my own data, including my backups.
Second, I don't like how proprietary platforms limit my creative freedom. Pages and templates within a closed platform tend to look the same. It's hard to stand out, or even just express yourself the way you want to. With Drupal, I'm unrestricted in how I share my photos.
Third, I don't like how these platforms treat my friends and family. Many of them use invasive tracking. For that reason, I don't use trackers or ads on my website. My site aspires to the privacy of a printed book.
All of these are reasons why I want both Drupal and the Open Web to win. We don't want to live in a world where proprietary platforms reign supreme. We need more "Good Software". Software that is open, flexible, secure, accessible, and pro-privacy.
Making security, privacy, accessibility, multilingual capabilities, usability, and ease of maintenance top priorities is hard work work, but it's worth it. Caring about Drupal is the same as caring about the Open Web.
The good news is that Drupal has grown into a powerful platform for ambitious site builders. Drupal empowers millions of ambitious site builders to create Open Web experiences.
However, we have to get better at promoting what we're good at to ensure more people understand how powerful and influential Drupal is. That influence becomes really clear when you look at Drupal's end users.
Because of Drupal's impact on the digital landscape, we keep a high bar with regards to stability, reliability, accessibility, security, backwards compatibility, and more. With great impact comes great responsibility.
This high bar can make contribution difficult and slow, and is sometimes what keeps people from contributing back more to Drupal.
Unfortunately, we can't lower the bar. However, we can make it easier to achieve our high bar. That's why we are moving from Drupal's homegrown collaboration tools to GitLab.
GitLab streamlines and automates various steps of the contribution process. Check out the Drupal.org GitLab video from the Drupal Association for an update.
Another way to accelerate innovation is to grow our capacity and attract more people to Drupal.
The best way to attract new people to our community is by making easy-to-use software that solves real world problems.
Since my previous DrupalCon keynote, I'm happy to report that we've made a lot of progress on our key initiatives. A few key highlights:
Each of these initiatives is significant because they make Drupal and the Open Web more approachable.
In addition, the Project Browser initiative and Automatic Updates initiative saw tremendous progress. Videos below.
To learn more about Drupal's strategic initiatives, you can watch the Drupal Core Initiative Leads keynote. Highly recommended for those that want to contribute.
Drupal 10 is scheduled to be released in mid-December. And after the Drupal 10 release, users will have 11 months to upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. Drupal 10 will require PHP 8.1, something to plan for as well.
Drupal 10 will be released on December 14, 2022. This gives site owners until November 2023 to update from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. Luckily, the upgrade path has never been easier. In the video below, we compare the upgrade path from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 to the upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. As you can see, the Drupal 9 to 10 upgrade is much more automated. It will be the easiest yet!
The update to Drupal 10 is required because some of Drupal 9's third-party dependencies will reach end-of-life. If you don't upgrade within 11 months, you will be running a site with unmaintained third-party dependencies.
We recently released the first Drupal 10 beta release. At the time we released Drupal 10 beta-1, 3 times as many modules were ready compared to when we released Drupal 9 beta-1. More than a 1,000 modules are already ready for Drupal 10!Thanks to various focused initiatives, Drupal is starting to get easier. Drupal 8 was peak difficulty.I hope we can all find ways to care about building the web we want to see for the future. Making Drupal better means making the Open Web better.
I'd like to thank everyone that was involved in making DrupalCon Prague, Drupal 10, and the key initiatives described above a resounding success.
Last but not least, I'd like to encourage even more people to get involved. It might not always be easy, but it's well worth it.
Centarro held a productive sprint at DrupalCon Prague on all things Drupal Commerce. Goals for the sprint included planning future Commerce Core improvements, packaging full releases of the modules included in Commerce Kickstart, and catching up on some long overdue marketing tasks. That including rolling out a new project homepage and planning an approach for the project blog to focus on release announcements - like this one!
It's been a while since I wrote about my views on the Content Management System (CMS) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP) markets.
It's also been a while since I gave an update on Acquia's product vision and strategy, like I did in 2009, 2011 or 2017.
In this post, I want to give you an update on both. I will share my views on the Digital Experience Platform market and talk more about Acquia's vision and strategy.
Throughout the article, I will also give practical examples of how Drupal (the Open Source project I started) and Acquia (the company I started) fit into a 'Composable Enterprise'.
The Composable Enterprise has been one of the most important trends in the software industry. Analyst firm Gartner popularized the term, and defines the Composable Enterprise as follows:
A Composable Enterprise is an organization that can innovate and adapt to changing business needs through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities. To enable the Composable Enterprise, organizations will need to adapt the way they source and deliver applications as vendors deliver more modular capabilities.
The main idea behind the Composable Enterprise is that when organizations compose or assemble solutions from existing building blocks, they are able to move faster. It also provides them the flexibility to adjust to changing business needs.
Per Gartner's thought-leadership, architectural modularity is key to composability. But composability is also much more than modularity. Composability defines an end-to-end approach, and not only a software architecture. Composability is a philosophy of business agility, architecture and governance.
In this article, I will apply the ideas of the Composable Enterprise to the DXP market.
Specifically, I will expand upon six core tenets that I believe are key to Composable DXPs:
Before jumping into the six key principles, I wanted to acknowledge that composability in the DXP market has given rise to trends like MACH and Jamstack.
In short, MACH and Jamstack primarily describe architectural approaches. MACH is mostly about the backend architecture of web applications, and Jamstack is mostly about the frontend architecture of web applications.
Both MACH and Jamstack represent developer-centric approaches to the challenge of composability. Neither are prescriptive about the capabilities of a DXP. Both MACH and Jamstack can be part of a Composable DXP.
Composing an experience by assembling different building blocks.At the core of a Composable DXP are modular software design principles. Organizations should reject software monoliths and focus on software that is modular.
Software monoliths are inflexible. Monoliths prevent teams from moving fast, hinder innovation and make it harder to deliver digital products and services.
Modular software is decomposed into smaller pieces with standardized interfaces. Modular software allows solutions to be created by combining reusable chunks of code.
This idea is not new — modular software has been around since the 1960s — but a lot of software still doesn't live up to these basic design principles.
Open Source software is almost always better than proprietary software with regards to APIs and modularity.
For over 10 years, Drupal has been pushing the concept of the Assembled Web.
Today, Drupal's open and modular architecture allows over 10,000 active contributors to build and maintain 46,000 modules for the more than 1 million websites running Drupal.
Integrations include third-party commerce platforms, digital asset management platforms, analytics platforms, CRM systems, marketing automation software, frontend frameworks, and many more.
Component discovery and maintenance.A Composable Architecture is an architecture in which the individual components of the stack can be replaced without affecting other parts of the system.
The idea is to enable organizations to select and assemble a customized solution that best fits their needs.
Combining components from different providers gives organizations a lot of flexibility, but it also comes with added cost and complexity:
A software stack that consists of many components can be hard to build and maintain. In fact, Composable Architectures shift much of the discovery, orchestration, integration and testing burden from vendors to the end user.
Composability necessitates an approach that simplifies the discovery, installation, assembly, and maintenance of components. A good Composable DXP offers the following solutions to manage diverse components:
Drupal has 46,000 components, called modules. Drupal also offers more than 1,000 PBCs, which Drupal calls distributions and recipes. Distributions and recipes not only combine modules, but also ship with data schemas, configuration, content and data to make everything work well together. Example distributions include:
Modules (components) and distributions (PBCs) can be searched, browsed and filtered in at least three ways:
Since the release of Drupal 8 in 2015, Drupal sites are managed with Composer (a Component Manager) and Packagist (a Component Catalog). Composer downloads and installs modules, along with any third-party dependencies. Composer also takes care of updates, version management, compatibility management and dependency management.
Last but not least, Acquia Code Studio offers a CI/CD pipeline. It continuously checks for new releases of components. When there is an update, it will install the new version and test it in a staging environment. The automated tests include integration testing, security testing, unit testing, performance testing and more.
No-code lets you deliver customer experience faster.To deliver the best customer experiences, all departments (engineering, marketing, sales, customer success and HR) must participate in the creation of these experiences.
Being modular and component-driven is great for developers, but it doesn't necessarily enable other business stakeholders to take part in the experience creation.
This is where low-code and no-code solutions come in. Low-code and no-code technologies use a graphical user interface (GUI) to speed up experience building. They empower every business stakeholder to create customer experiences without the help of software developers.
A Composable DXP with low-code / no-code helps organizations in at least three ways:
In short, low-code / no-code solutions enable cross-functional teams to deliver great customer experiences faster.
For low-code / no-code to be effective across all of an experience's creation, it needs to be available throughout the Composable DXP; from the content layer, to the data layer, to the orchestration layer.
Unified data takes you further!Organizations are increasingly using data to create superior, personalized customer experiences. The goal is simple: improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy via tailored experiences.
Tomorrow's applications will consume data from multiple sources to develop a fine-grained user profile for each user. In turn, these user profiles are used for personalization.
The first problem is that customer data is everywhere: in CRM systems, accounting systems, websites, marketing tools, commerce systems, point of sale systems, analytics platforms, customer support software, mobile applications, chatbots, call center software, and more.
Despite the clear need to tap all data sources, data is locked up in different databases and in disparate formats. Data silos are one of the biggest barriers to delivering personalized experiences.
To use data to its fullest potential, data needs to be unified. It needs to break free from these silos.
The second problem is scalability. Humans can't manually compose an experience for every single single customer and every single customer interaction.
When you have millions of user profiles and millions of interactions, automation is key. Organizations must rely on machine learning algorithms to tailor experiences to people's preferences.
Last but not least, it goes without saying that organizations also need and want to respect their customers' data privacy, and remain in compliance with regulations like GDPR and other local data privacy laws. This adds a third layer of complexity to managing and using user data.
Acquia's Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps companies manage both consumer privacy and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
First, by integrating different data sources, Acquia CDP provides all teams with direct access to unified customer data. Data is integrated, cleaned up, and de-duped.
Second, Acquia's machine learning platform helps teams use that data to deliver personalized experiences or drive targeted campaigns. Acquia delivers over 1 trillion machine learning recommendations a year, or 3 billion personalization recommendations a day.
With Acquia CDP, users can easily leverage pre-built families of predictions, personas or next-best experience models such as 'Likelihood to pay full price', 'Product affinity segments' or 'Next-best channel' models. Users can also implement, manage and publish their own custom ML models.
Remix content and deploy it to different channels.Multi-experience refers to a user's end-to-end experience with one organization across a variety of digital touchpoints — websites, mobile applications, chatbots, voice assistants, wearables, augmented reality, metaverses, and more.
Great content is at the core of any great (multi-)experience. Quality content helps organizations stand out from the competition. This raises expectations for organizations to create content that customers care about, and to deliver that content on the channels they prefer to use. Composable content is key.
A Composable DXP should provide a Content Platform designed to address the challenges of managing content across all channels. These challenges include:
To address these challenges, a Content Platform needs the following core capabilities:
Composable content does not necessarily mean headless CMSes are de facto the best Content Platform. Headless solutions have pros and cons relative to alternative approaches:
Nearly all Traditional CMSes have evolved to be Hybrid CMSes. It's no longer relevant to talk about Traditional CMSes. Today, the choice is really between Headless and Hybrid.
Drupal is decidedly a Hybrid CMS. Drupal evolved from a Traditional CMS to a Hybrid CMS in 2012, more than 10 years ago, well before the term 'headless' became popular. Today, you can use Drupal as a Traditional CMS, a Headless CMS or a combination of both. Drupal is API-first, but not API-only.
When Drupal is used in headless mode, organizations can use their preferred JavaScript framework to build a frontend. This includes React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Angular and more.
To streamline the building of headless applications with Drupal, Acquia provides headless SDKs, Node.js hosting, and more.
Juggling different experience composition and delivery options.If you're like most organizations, the number of digital experience applications you have continues to grow, not shrink.
Different sites also have different scale, functionality, complexity and longevity. Some experiences are continuously developed, while others are only around for a few months. Some are built by IT, others by marketing. Some sites get a thousand visitors a month, others get 100 million visitors a month.
When managing a portfolio of digital experiences, a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn't work. Organizations need to balance development approaches and operational costs.
For one website, an organization might want to use a marketer-friendly page builder and static site hosting. For another website, the same organization might require a headless CMS and PaaS delivery platform.
Furthermore, CIOs and CMOs often face cost-cutting and acceleration pressures at the same time. They are constantly having to figure out how to do more with less.
So how do you manage a diverse portfolio of digital experience applications, maximize velocity, minimize cost and meet growing security demands — all without sacrificing quality?
This is done by standardizing on a platform or ecosystem that scales from small to large, from simple to complex, and from IT to marketing. Specifically, this type of platform lets you choose between different experience composition and delivery options:
These different composition and delivery models also need to be underpinned by a standard set of shared services:
In short, managing a portfolio of digital experiences requires a standard technology footprint, build around certain core services, but with the option to vary approaches to experience building and experience delivery.
More and more, we see organizations standardize on Drupal. Why? Because Drupal is one of the few solutions that can scale from very small to extremely large.
Drupal also has the depth and breadth of functionality to support thousands of different use cases; including blogs, marketing sites, employee experience sites, corporate intranets, commerce sites and extremely high-traffic event websites.
Because Drupal is a hybrid CMS, you can use no-code tools to build experiences, or JavaScript frameworks to build experiences.
For websites that require custom code, Acquia Cloud is the leading Drupal Platform-as-a-Service (Drupal PaaS). It offers high security, high-availability, on-demand elasticity, staging environments and many developer tools.
For templated sites, Acquia Site Factory allows you to assemble tens, hundreds or thousands of unique digital experiences.
Regardless of the delivery model used, services like Acquia Content Hub and Acquia CDP help you share content and data across your portfolio of sites. In addition, Acquia provides global visibility over all your Drupal applications and experiences.
After decades of contending with rigid, inflexible systems, enterprises crave the agility and speed that comes with composability.
This is particularly important in today's economy, where organizations gain competitive advantages based on having a tailored digital customer experience.
I predict that the majority of enterprises will have migrated to a composable model within the next 10 years.