Dries Buytaert

Drupal is a young adult

In my DrupalCon Paris presentation I talked about what it means for Drupal to grow up -- and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit more in this blog post. I hope that the analogy that I'll use in this post can provide a framework for thinking and discussion about it.

We, as a community, are growing up and there is not much you can do about it.

If you're my age (currently 30 years old), sometimes you remember how great it was when you were in your teens. Unfortunately, you have no choice to grow up: you can't roll back time nor freeze it. I think this will ring true with most of us, and frankly, the same is true for Drupal: Drupal is growing up, and we have no choice but to grow along with it. Growing up is inevitable. Life changes every day and excessive nostalgia kills happiness.

So if Drupal is growing up, where is it in its life?

For me, Drupal is a young adult in the early phases of its professional career. Drupal is fresh out of college with A-grades, did some highly-visible internships while in college, landed its first job in a high-profile company, and built up some initial work experience. He has everything it takes to become successful, but being a junior team member, hasn't yet proven himself in a big way. He has the raw talent to become a key part of the business. In fact, his first promotion is just weeks away, and it remains to be seen how he'll handle some additional responsibilities. Either he is happy with his life as it is, and takes it the easy way, or, instead, embarks on a bigger career path in a somewhat naive but admirable desire to conquer the world.

But, enough with the analogies. For Drupal, growing means we must continue to innovate at the framework layer by improving our code, our tools and our developer workflows. We have to continue to do what we have been doing the best. But, there is also a really big "and" that is key to us growing up ...

As a community, we have to embrace increasingly more end-users, content editors, designers, usability experts and organizations. It may sound obvious, but we have to learn to build software for the people that are our users, rather than mainly designing for ourselves like we've always historically been doing. We, developers, should be the primary target audience of "Drupal: the developer framework" and we should continue to invest heavily in it. But end-users, and content editors in particular, have to be the primary audience of "Drupal: the content management system". Both areas have to thrive and work together. We can either succeed at making that happen with a somewhat naive but admirable desire to conquer the world, or we can fail at making that happen and remain insignificant in the bigger picture.

There is a lot of richness in the Drupal platform that we haven't really figured out how to package in order to reach many more people. Drupal 7 will hopefully be a big help with that, but we'll need to continue that trend with Drupal 8 and beyond. Doing so may provide some initial discomfort as we break out of our traditional mindsets, but it is also tremendously exciting. It's like getting a promotion.

At the end of the day, it is all part of growing up and part of Drupal's natural evolution as a product and technology. Growing up is inevitable -- you can't freeze time. Part of growing is learning to take on more and bigger problems. It is no coincidence that the biggest challenges tend to be ahead of you. This is true for your personal life as well as for the life of an Open Source project. Being a young adult is one of the most exciting times of life, and is filled with lots of changes. What's not to like?

Maybe in a few year's time, I'll write about how Drupal is getting married, and that they are talking about getting kids. ;-)

Anouk

Another post in my favorite music category: Anouk, a Dutch singer.

Between 1998 and 2008, Anouk left The Netherlands and moved to US to escape the pressures of fame, only to return a few years later.

I embedded two of my favorite songs in this blog post. The first song (Nobody's wife) was recorded in 1998 before she left, the second song (Michel) ten years later in 2008 after she had returned from the US. In the first song, she is getting eggs smashed at her t-shirt and simply takes of her t-shirt to continue in her bra. In the second song, she performs live in front of 60.000 people, and is visibly more relax.

I've been a big fan of Anouk from day one, for more than 10 years, and still think she is one of the best European singers.

State of Drupal (September 2009)

Two weeks ago at DrupalCon Paris, I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is available from archive.org, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 8 MB) as well.

I don't want to give away the spoiler, but essentially, the state of Drupal is strong. :) We should be really proud of what we have accomplished with Drupal 6, and what we're about to accomplish with Drupal 7. In the presentation, I also talk about what it means for Drupal to grow up, and what the next phase of our life will most likely look like.

Rackspace using Drupal

Rackspace, the hosting giant, is using Drupal on a support addon website: http://www.rackspace.com/apps/support.

In their blog post on the Rackspace Blog they explain: "The new site was designed to give our customers immediate access to the support documentation they need. We took our existing support information, re-wrote it, organized it into categories and subcategories, and built a new search system so you can find your answers in a hurry ...".

Rackspace's support ideology - termed Fanatical Support - is something they are very proud of and has made Rackspace one of the world's leaders in hosting. I assume this Drupal-based support site is very important to their business.

Drupal lends itself perfectly to these kind of sites and allows organizations to get a site up and running quickly. Given that they are looking for feedback on the new site, I'd recommend them to install Apache Solr (or to sign up for Acquia Search), as search facets would make searching their knowledge base both faster and easier. Drupal's custom content types and taxonomy system in combination with Apache Solr's faceted navigation makes for a very powerful knowledge base.

Either way, it is great to see well-established organizations use Drupal for micro sites or add-on sites. It is a great way to dabble your feet in Drupal and get a sample of its power. It is often individual developers or small teams that bring Drupal into use within larger organizations. Once an organization has its feet wet with Drupal after implementing a couple of micro- or add-on sites, you start to see Drupal bubble to the top of the organization or to larger and larger web properties. In fact, it is remarkably similar to how Linux started to get adopted in the enterprise ten years ago. Let's hope we see more Drupal at Rackspace. Either way, Drupal should have 'grassroots' tattooed on its arm.

Drupal license plate

A car has been spotted with a Drupal license plate that reads 'Drupal star'.

So who's car is it? Take a guess in the comments.

I know the answer and will share it in the comments later today. :)

Druplicon stress balls

Mattel using Drupal

Mattel, the world's largest toy company, just relaunched Mattel.com on Drupal. The site was built by Vancouver-based work [at] play. Mattel products include Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels, Matchbox cars, Masters of the Universe, and much more. For once, my kids and family will understand what I'm talking about. ;-)