Headless CMS to Remain Niche; Marketers Love Drupal: Dries Buytaert

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Drupal founder Dries Buytaert opined that pure headless solutions and decoupled approach will remain as a niche with developers while Drupal will continue its bandwagon with the complete experience that it provides. Drupal started heavily investing in these technologies 10 years prior and it brought decoupling capability to its core 6.5 years before. With CXP, CDP, email newsletters, and other such services, Drupal is loved by marketers around the world. With its open-source code base, opportunities are endless. 

Buytaert was speaking at ‘Fireside chat with Dries Buytaert’, an event championed by the Drupal India Association as part of DIA Refresh 2022. The second leg of the event will continue on March 12, Saturday. 

Rahul Dewan, founder of Srijan, and Shyamala Rajaram, co-founder, and CEO of Unimity Solutions, the hosts of the Fireside Chat, began with a discussion on Dries's personal life. Dries talked about his family and how his father encouraged him to take up Computer Science in college and become an entrepreneur. He shared how both his grandfather influenced him in life. He also talked about his kids and finds it interesting when they get better at things than him.

He then talked about burnouts using a personal anecdote and explained how he has learned to prioritize his work. Dries believes that sometimes you need to hit rock bottom before coming up. The conversation then moved to his daily routine, where he explained how despite 10 hours of work a day, he has a set family time where he would not have any meetings and would focus on spending time with his family.

As the discussion moved to Drupal, Dries talked about his college days when Drupal was just a project and would work on it in the evenings and during weekends. He remembered how he worked nights to help MTV around 2006 when they moved to Drupal, and it crashed. He said that if he could scale Drupal to manage their traffic, it would help many companies like MTV. This is where the idea of Acquia was born.

Dries talked about how Drupal and Acquia helped each other grow. Drupal is the center of Acquia, and it wouldn't exist without Drupal. On the other hand, Acquia helped Drupal directly through contributors focused only on contributions to Drupal and indirectly by getting customer wins and expanding the Drupal community.

When asked about how COVID impacted Drupal and Acquia, he simply said that customers in Acquia that did not do e-commerce suddenly wanted to do e-commerce within a day. And internal impacts were where they had to shut down some offices as employees were more comfortable working from home. However, he did agree that bringing the community together is just as important.

Talking about a mistake that he would have undone, Dries talked about shutting down Drupal Gardens, a free SaaS implementation of Drupal just as wordpress.com works for wordpress. Though the decision was good in terms of company finances, he felt that it would have been a great contribution to the Drupal community a few years down the line.

Dries also talked about how Acquia has always been a product company and evolved over the years in phases. The first phase was about delivering Drupal support, the second phase was delivering Drupal in the cloud, and the third phase was about delivering digital experience platforms. The focus is on helping and solving all the possible problems faced by the customers.

Discussing phase three of Acquia, Dries said that just like content is the center of every digital experience today, even data is essential. You need to be able to match the right content to the right user at the right time and through the right channel and to do this, you need to know about your visitors. This is where you get CDP personalization to help drive business on the site. He said we do this because our customers ask for it. The requirements generally start with an IT-related requirement and shift to business conversations. 

When discussing headless and decoupled solutions, Dries said that they invested in headless and decoupled 10 years ago and added it to the core around 6.5 years ago. These CMS are innovating fast, and that's what we need to do as a community. But he believes that long-term pure headless will remain niche as today's marketers don't like them, and eventually, they will collide and be less similar. But ultimately, Drupal will win as it is open-source, and they will not be able to compete with it.

Through the discussion, Dries talked about how important it was to market Drupal as he felt that was the only drawback. They can write codes and software, but it is difficult to market Drupal. 

He also talked about how developers loved Drupal as they didn't have to write a lot of codes. Dries said that low code is an opportunity, and we should learn from the platform. Acquia and Drupal are investing in many low-code areas like CKEditor and Site Studio. 

At the end of the session, Dries talked about Drupal in India and said he had seen tremendous change, especially since the last DrupalCon in India. A lot of the companies are in the top 20-30 contributors. Sure there is more to be done, but he is quite happy about what they have already achieved in the last 10 years. He also thanked and congratulated the top contributors and shared some tips for the budding contributors. 

He ended the chat by saying he hopes to connect again and visit India soon.  

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