Driesnote Drenched in a Fairy Tale: What Lies Ahead?
DrupalCon Lille, this year's European mega event of the Drupalers, came with a surprise. Instead of direct talk, Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, took the help of a fable to talk about what contributed to the exiting of young developers in favour of other CMSes and how Drupal plans to regain their confidence.
Dries set out with a Drupal fairy, learning from the "neighbouring" CMSes fortes and laid out plans for implementing them in Drupal so that the departure would remain brief without causing a mass exodus and the voyage back to the promised land of Drupal to be eventful. Readers can find a detailed appreciation of the story here.
Dries divided his presentation into three parts: the first two as chapters in a book, speaking about technological improvements in Drupal and championing the Open Web. The latter part talked about the marketing initiatives that would help alleviate the ominous clouds of the dark (closed) web from hindering the triumph of Drupal over its competitors. It is about spotlighting the work developers are doing.
What to Anticipate?
Drupal's vision concerning Builder experience must be nothing short of exceptional,
noted Dries.
It should be easier to start, build, and maintain.
Dries went on to describe what lies ahead for Drupal.
Easy to Get Started
In order of business, the first is to 'make it easy to get started.' This is where Project Browser comes in. He reminisced about his previous Driesnote at DrupalCon Pittsburgh, where he detailed the initiative and referred to a lengthy blog post on the evolution of Drupal composability from the CLI to the browser. Code freeze for Drupal 10.2, the next minor release is in November. Although Project Browser is well underway, the chances of it getting ready by then are narrow. The stable release of Project Browser is targeted for Drupal 10.3, due next summer, and by then, it will be part of Drupal Core.
Easy to Build
Creating tools that are easy to use is the next major focus. Dries shared a video from Tim Plunkett, Engineering Manager in Acquia's Drupal Acceleration Team, where he talks about Drupal's content modelling capabilities: Making Drupal's content modelling (Filed UI) easier to use.
Tim Plunkett Presents Content Modelling
Tim starts his talk by identifying the pain points that make people perceive Drupal as hard to use. User research was completed in the first week of February, and after analysing and summarising the feedback, the team began working on two specific areas.
The first area is the workflow in adding new fields. In the new workflow, instead of a new page and two additional steps, a window is opened with a grid of all available field types to choose from. These field types are grouped and better explained with icons and descriptions. An increase in the speed of machine name generation is an added advantage. Now, you have only a single configuration step, which can be done without navigating from the window. The second area is reusing an existing field on another content type.
New rounds of user testing validated the prototypes built, tweaked, and retested. Once they were confident in the approach, Drupal Core issues were created, and work began on cleaning up the prototype code, which wasn't up to the highest coding standards, and making proper merge requests.
The change in reusing fields was the first significant change to land in Drupal Core in April. Incremental improvements are committed every few weeks, with only one remaining piece yet to be finalised. Steps from ideation to delivery were done in just over eight months. There have been 45 commits to Drupal Core improving the Field UI as a direct result of this work, much of which is already available in Drupal 10.1.
Cristina Chumillas Presents Changes to Administrative Navigation
Next, in a pre-recorded video, Cristina Chumillas, Usability Topic Maintainer at Lullabot, appeared to present 'Making Drupal's administrative navigation easier to use.' She spoke about a toolbar in making that will replace the existing toolbar in Drupal Core to enhance the UX of the admin interface in Drupal.
The plan is to move most of the main admin navigation functionality into a left vertical sidebar and a possible top bar with contextual tools. Initial design and prototypes were based on research of competitors, industry standards, and previous UX studies. Insights were also drawn from contributed modules and admin themes to steer their direction.
The prototype was submitted for multiple rounds of usability tests from content users and site builders and iterated, leading to several changes and improvements from the initial assumptions. An alpha release for testing will soon be ready.
Also, there are plans to improve administrative menus by rethinking the words used in the groupings. Mobile UI is also being tested, as the markup is almost done. These changes are also targeted for Drupal 10.3.
Lauri Eskola About Improving Page-Building Experience
Lauri Eskola, Drupal Core Product Manager from Acquia, then talked about taking feedback from ambitious site builders and incorporating it to improve Drupal's page-building experience. The team consulted 30-plus individuals with multiple backgrounds from 16 organisations, from large enterprises to freelancers, using many variant tools to understand the standard requirements across different solutions and the challenges people face, particularly with the current tools available in the market.
There are hard tradeoffs between a good editor experience, choosing a solution that scaled better for their site or how much time it took to set up. Many organisations have made significant investments to improve the UX for their users. To better understand the competition, they also looked into competing solutions.
Based on these findings, the team has started working on a next-generation page-building tool for Drupal that is more flexible and powerful than the currently available ones but would not require site builders to weigh between multiple options, a single solution that is easy for site builders to set up, a solution that editors find intuitive to use, enabling them to get started without significant onboarding.
He also went to showcase some mockups they had designed, allowing editors to edit and build the page layout. It is still in the early stages, and lots of work must be done.
Easy to Maintain
After the three short video presentations, Dries back on stage went to talk about reducing manual upkeep and maintenance. With the new release and innovation model that came in Drupal 8, Core updates became a lot easier and contrib module updates too became easier. Automatic code fixes with Drupal Rector helped improve things. Automatic updates will most probably come to Core on Drupal 10.3. All of these combined make Drupal maintenance easier than ever before.
Drupal 9 will reach its end-of-life in three weeks, cautioned Dries, asking people to upgrade their sites to Drupal 10. The good news is that only 2.6% of contributed modules are remaining to be made compatible with Drupal 10. He also urged the maintainers of those modules not yet ready for D10 to upgrade soon and tag stable releases.
Committed to Open Web
Dries went on to talk about the Open Web Manifesto, a declaration of unwavering commitment to an open and accessible web for all. It is an important document released after DrupalCon Pittsburgh, which promises that Drupal will always be built on freedom, decentralisation, inclusion, participation, and empowerment.
Drupal has now made two promises, reiterated Dries. One is improving the builder experience, and the other is being the open web champion. And he ventured out to voice a third promise: Marketing Investment!
New Marketing Efforts
"Drupal Association is now focusing on three strategic initiatives. We are going to invest a lot more in innovation,"
said Dries.
"We also committed to investing in marketing. The third piece is philanthropy, trying to raise more money to invest back in Drupal. The marketing committee is one of the recently created committees,"
paused Dries, asking three of the marketing committee members on stage to introduce themselves before a Q&A session.
Lynne Capozzi, former CMO of Acquia and a member of the Drupal Association Board; Suzanne Dergacheva, co-founder of Evolving Web and the lead of Promote Drupal Initiative, and Nikhil Deshpande, Chief Digital Officer with the state of Georgia and a Drupal Association Board member participated in the session. They primarily discussed hardcore product marketing for Drupal: messaging and positioning.
Lynn hinted at a program encouraging students through events across universities worldwide, increasing exposure. Creating a marketing playbook is another in the offing. Drupal is now more competitive than ever before on the product side. It has much excitement around it. That, coupled with how many people need the full DXP capability, opens up new doors of opportunities for us. It is time to make some tweaks to make it more modern.
A complete marketing plan will be ready by December. A collaborative effort of Drupal Association, Acquia, Phase2, FFW and 1xINTERNET will go as a team for the web summit in Spain, where 70,000 people worldwide will gather. It is not about individual agencies but about highlighting and talking about Drupal.
Suzanne introduced the Promote Drupal Initiative with designers, copyrighters and marketers at the helm. The community initiative is working very closely with the Drupal Association to produce marketing materials. It functions as a community voice in product marketing. She later went on to speak about expanding the market to sell Drupal more to newcomers. Code contributions happened in Drupal on a large scale because of the tooling. The same should occur in marketing.
The question posed to Nikhil was why marketing Drupal now, which has survived two decades without marketing. He reminisced about his move from a closed-source product that was bleeding his budget to Drupal some 13 years ago. Compared to then, the landscape has expanded and is cluttered by many options and loud voices. They are very aggressive in their marketing efforts.
While it is a testament to the product that it has survived these many years without marketing, he feels marketing is essential in this day and age. It is very important to spread the word and convey that it is easy for a single person or a small business to move and build something, and it is equally safe and trustworthy for a large enterprise to build its mansion or mall. Having building those advocates, building those champions is very important.
As an end user, the intention and overall competence of the product is something to be considered, remarked Nikhil. For larger organisations, the intention, the Open Web, is a point to be recognised. Even those who can afford to invest in proprietary platforms should consider this point: invest in Drupal to contribute to the community and improve the entire ecosystem.
"I feel that the education is still not there. We have come a long way. But I still feel there needs to be a lot of these conversations to have larger organisations realise that an open web is a good idea. Larger organisations tend to be a lot more risk-averse than may be smaller organisations. But it is okay; we have a large supporting community that can help through whatever transition they are traversing. The message should encourage the larger players to move into the Drupal village,"
opined Nikhil Deshpande.
Dries also shared the timeline for marketing plans. "Now we get to write what happens next, maybe in a future DrupalCon," concluded Dries Buyteart.
Also read: Celebrating Excellence: Women in Drupal Shines at DrupalCon Lille 2023
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DrupalCon Lille 2023
Lille, France
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