Dries Buytaert

Focusing on all Drupal competitors

At times, it feels like many of us in the Drupal community are a bit too focused on WordPress.

Last week I was in Europe giving a couple of presentations on Drupal: one at a technology event for executive decision makers organized by Deloitte, and the other at the Drupal Gov Days. I also had various meetings with both Drupal development companies and large scale Drupal users.

I came away feeling that Drupal is extremely hot in Europe. Plenty of companies are migrating to Drupal from enterprise content management systems like SDL Tridion, Vignette, Sitecore and Polopoly. In some situations, though, Drupal is being outsold by these vendors -- we don't always win. In Europe, Drupal is also competing with other Open Source systems like Typo3 and ezPublish -- we don't really encounter these in the United States.

It begs an important question. Who in the community has deep understanding of SDL Tridion, EMC Documentum, Vignette, Sitecore, Open Text (RedDot), Clickability, Autonomy Interwoven, EPiServer, Polopoly or FatWire. Who in the community knows anything but WordPress? The answer: almost no one.

While there are things we can learn from WordPress, it is not the competition. If you want to build your business and give back to Drupal, learn about some of the proprietary competition, and help large companies to migrate to Drupal. There are many organizations looking for help. There is real money to be made in this, as well. Money that can be used to improve Drupal's usability, better internationalization capabilities, and other such areas.

We can and should learn from WordPress, but let's not be blind-sided. I would love to see more people make comparisons with other competitors and share migration stories. Like that, we can learn and become better across the board.

Staking our future on PHP

I believe that the growth of PHP depends increasingly on applications like Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, phpBB, Typo3, ezPublish and similar systems. Specifically, I believe that most organizations adopt PHP primarily because they want to use one of these popular applications which have PHP at their core. Fewer organizations adopt PHP because they want to build from scratch their own PHP applications. Hence, more than ever, the future of PHP depends on popular PHP applications that have emerged over recent years.

Conversely, the future of Drupal depends on PHP. Moreover, many of us are staking our future, and that of our businesses, on Drupal and, by extension, on PHP. The same is true for those who make their living with Joomla!, WordPress, phpBB, vBulletin, Typo3, and ezPublish.

It seems that we have arrived at a point in which there is a symbiotic relationship between PHP and the most popular PHP applications. A relationship that did not exist when PHP was created. Symbiotic relationships are obligatory: we depend entirely on each other for survival. And yet, I feel like we've been living apart. It makes sense for us (i.e, application developers) to contribute to the development of PHP, and for the PHP core developers to work more closely with the developers of the most popular PHP applications.

Having spent ten years of my life developing Java Virtual Machines and run-time systems, I feel that I'd be able to contribute to PHP. Unfortunately, I don't currently have time for it. Maybe when Acquia is a bit larger, we'll hire a full-time engineer to contribute to PHP's development. Maybe other organizations will consider doing the same, or more people will find the time to be active in more than just one project. It seems as though our future would really benefit from such people.

If you could contribute to PHP core, what would you change?

Investor.gov using Drupal

Investor.gov recently switched to Drupal from WordPress. The site houses a lot of information for investors.

The new investor.gov is a good looking site that also seems to be 508 compliant (for accessibility). The site is easy to use, making it easy for users to get the information they need without being overwhelmed.

All in all, the site is great example of how governments can leverage Drupal to create beautiful and accessible sites. Nice work SEC!

The commercialization of a volunteer-driven Open Source project

In the Open Source software community, there is a considerable nervousness regarding paying people to work on volunteer-driven projects. For example, Joomla recently hired some developers to work on their core software, a decision that has caused much debate in their community. At Drupal, we recently hired a temporary staff to help with the Drupal.org redesign. There is an understandable concern that the spirit of volunteerism will be lost or a volunteer project will be tainted when a paid staff is introduced. There are worries that a project's agenda will change to suit the needs of 'privateers'. However, many projects that rely completely on volunteers fall short of what can be done by a paid staff. Some projects can't afford not to make use of the benefits that a full-time, focused staff can provide.

The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. The first trade routes were ancient trackways which citizens later developed on their own into roads suited for wheeled vehicles in order to improve commerce. Transportation was improved for all citizens, driven by the commercial interest of some. Today, we certainly appreciate that our governments maintain the roads. However, we still see road signs stating that a particular section of a highway is kept clean and trim by volunteers -- at least in some countries. When new ground needs to be broken, it's often volunteer communities that do it. But a full-time, paid infrastructure can be necessary for the preservation and protection of what communities begin. And when new advances are to be made or gaps to be filled in, volunteers rise up within the paid infrastructure. There will always be a place for volunteers, just as there is a place for professionals.

It's quite common in the software industry that great movements are started by volunteers. While this can work quite well initially, there comes a time when a volunteer-based project becomes a threat to larger, controlled organizations (e.g., MySQL to Oracle, Linux to Microsoft). At that point, if the Open Source organization is to survive and compete, it may have to fortify its position by fostering commercial involvement that helps the project advance and compete. Red Hat is a good example. Without Red Hat, Linux might not have the strong market share it has today. It is also one of the reasons I co-founded Acquia, and why it is important that all Drupal companies contribute back to the project.

Within the Drupal project, we don't have a paid staff to advance the core software. However, many of the developers who contribute to critical parts of the Drupal code base make their living by building complex Drupal websites. Some Drupal developers are paid by customers to contribute their expertise to the Drupal project or are employed by companies 'sponsoring' Drupal development. Tens of thousands of developers are working with Drupal today, and many of them contribute back to the project. Albeit different, neither Joomla or Drupal are exclusively a volunteer run project, and that is one of the reasons we've grown so big. Ditto for WordPress that gets a lot of help from Automattic.

Volunteers rally together at times when they're needed and they play a critical role, particularly in the beginning. Without them, we would be nowhere in the Open Source software industry. Over time the maintenance and operation and in some cases the leadership are transferred to paid personnel. We have to accept into our projects those with commercial interests, without capitulating to rigid and narrow commercial interests. The commercialization of a volunteer-driven Open Source project is part of a project's natural life-cycle. While it can be a significant change, it is a great opportunity. We can reap the benefits of growth, prevent volunteer burn-out and distribute the effort.

Open Source CMS market share report 2009

The 2009 Open Source CMS market share report was released a couple of weeks ago. The report concludes that WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal maintain a large lead on the rest of the pack, and that they are the dominant players in the market.

Despite the rather lengthy nature of the survey, more than 600 persons completed the question set. The demographic data gathered shows the survey group to be primarily composed of senior IT professionals working in smaller organizations of 1 to 5 people. More than 80% of the participants had heard about Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal, though most of them were more familiar with Wordpress and Joomla!.

© 2009 Open Source CMS market share report by Water & Stone and CMSWire.

Last year’s report found little to differentiate the three systems, at least in terms of market share. This year it appears that Joomla! gained a lot of market share relative to WordPress and Drupal. For example, the report shows that Joomla! has more books in print than Drupal or WordPress, and that Joomla! is used more than WordPress and Drupal -- at least by the participants in the survey. The results also show that Drupal has the highest abandonment rate of the three, that is, the rate at which systems are tried, then abandoned in favor of another system. The survey concludes that while the race is far from won, it does seem like Joomla! is starting to take the leadership position. On the flip side, the survey participants seems to be more positive about Wordpress and Drupal, than they are about Joomla!. All things combined, the data suggest we should be able to win over many users if we improve the Drupal experience.

© 2009 Open Source CMS market share report by Water & Stone and CMSWire.

All in all an interesting report that matches my perspective on the market. It is great to see Drupal come out strongly, but it also suggests that we have a lot of work to do. I'm very bullish about Drupal's future -- I think Drupal 7 can change the game for Drupal, especially combined with other successes like Whitehouse.gov using Drupal, Drupal being promoted to Gartner's 'visionaries' quadrant, as well as important initiatives as the Drupal.org redesign, Drupal Gardens, Buzzr and more. Exciting times!

Happy belated first birthday, WP-Mollom

On his blog, Matthias Vandermaesen comments that his Mollom plugin for Wordpress was a year old on April 2nd of this year. At the same time, he announces the release of WP-Mollom 0.7.4 (which mainly includes some new translations), and lays out a roadmap for future development.

But what a difference a year makes. One year later, Mollom has blocked well over fifty million pieces of spam, and Matthias' Wordpress plugin is an important part of the Mollom ecosystem.

In his blog post, Matthias lays out a great set of feature enhancements and code refactoring in his blog post; like us, he's interested in optimizing his plugin code as much as possible. He's got lots of great usability ideas as well, and contemplates new features to integrate with the upcoming WordPress 2.8.

Matthias -- Happy Birthday to WP-Mollom. Let us know how we can help!

Mollom launch coverage

It is now five days after Mollom came out of beta and some of the dust has settled, so I figured I'd give you an update on what people wrote. Here is a selected subset of some of the coverage we got:

• Peter Hagopian at InformationWeek: Mollom Comment Spam Solution Emerges From Beta. Mollom is currently supported by Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, as well as the recent additions Radiant (a CMS built on the Ruby On Rails framework) and DaliCMS. Mollom seems to be getting better and better and it's nice to see it come out of beta.
• Mikkel Høgh: My six months with Mollom. Before Mollom, I’ve been using spam.module and Akismet with varying degrees of success, and when Mollom first came out, I wondered why we needed another Akismet, but decided to try it out to support Dries. The answer to that question is that Mollom is in fact not just another Akismet. Spam blocking is just one of the things it does. That does not mean that Mollom is not good at blocking spam. My experience is that Mollom is more effective than Akismet and spam.module combined.
• Growing Venture Solutions: Mollom - Out of Beta and Ready to Eat Your Spam (without bothering your normal visitors). The service is now out of Beta and available to large sites that need redundancy and volume analysis for 30 euros/month. That seems like a great deal and they've even got a better deal: most sites with limited needs who are willing to accept occasional server downtime can still get the service for free. Wonderful news.
• Jan Polzer at Maxiorel: Mollom: komentářový antispam a zkušenosti z praxe. (Czech article)
• Justin Miller at Code Sorcery: Mollom anti-spam service is out of beta. I've been using Mollom for a few months and have been very happy with it. If you run a blog, even one that isn't in Drupal, I would encourage you to check it out. It's free for many uses, so you lose nothing by at least giving it a shot.
• Josiah Ritchie: Mollom - The Bullet Proof Vest. All this means, the content on the site is pure, not diluted by the evils of this world. Pure, meaningful and trustworthy content means more activity from your visitors. If their experience in pleasant, not inhibited by spam checking devices or spent filtering spam themselves, they are much more likely to return.
• Robin Wauters at The Next Web: Mollom drops beta tag in quest to challenge Akismet. In the six months that the Belgium-based company has been beta-testing Mollom, they said to have blocked almost 9 million spam messages on thousands of sites.
• Glenn Paulley at Sybase: Fighting spam with Mollom. I’ve been using Mollom (as a beta customer) for several months for one of the websites that I manage and the effectiveness of Mollom’s techniques are impressive.
• Patrick Teglia: It's Best if You Don't See This. So, what makes Mollom different, from an end-user's point of view, than the other spam solutions I have tried (Akismet, Spam Karma, etc.)? Nothing, or rather, you have to do nothing, which is a whole lot less than what you do with the others. In fact, you don't have to deal with queues, moderation, constant attention and emails about all of the above. In other words you don't have to do anything. Oh, yeah, and the fact that it just plain works. I have yet to see a spam on my site.
• Robin Wauters at Tijd.be: Mollom niet langer in beta, krijgt er een betalend broertje bij. (Dutch article)

Thanks for the positive feedback, and I'm glad you like our service.