I’m sitting in the main concert hall at Fairfield Halls in Croydon, UK waiting for the beginning of the 1st keynote. The hall is getting full and there’s obviously a ton of geek energy in the air….
Dries is on the stage now …
1750 attendees – totally sold out. (largest European Drupal ever)
The State of Drupal
- Media and entertainment: Pretty much all the major advertising companies in NY are using Drupal … Sony, Universal, NBC, Turner are all standardizing on Drupal as a platform.
- Education: 39% of .edu domains run Drupal.
- Finance: Euronext and NY Stock Exchange. are using Drupal.
- Government: data.gov.uk, london.gov.uk
- Tech: Twitter developer website
Time to 100,000 sites:
- 12 months for Drupal 6
- 6 months for Drupal 7
3 Important Modules for 7:
- Workbench: workflow
- Media: media galleries
- Commerce:ecommerce
The State of Drupal Survey – 2011
- 281 Beginner – Drupal is a hobby
- 2,113 Proficient – Drupal provides a portion of their income
- 413 Experts – Drupal is their living
- 44% Western Europe
- 41% US
(Drupal is probably growing faster in Europe than North America)
Drupal in one word: Flexible, Awesome, Powerful, Complex, Community.
Biggest Opportunities
Replace legacy platforms, Mobile, IT Cost Reduction.
A lot of organizations are realizing that they can standardize on one platform – Drupal. Imagine simplifying your internal teams around one platform instead of 10 …
Drupal is uniquely positioned to fill this – it has reach, flexibility and scalability to become the platform for almost all websites.
Who does Drupal compete with?
- WordPress (1220 responses)
- Joomla (496 responses)
- Sharepoint (75 responses)
- Typo3 (70 responses)
- Very few mentioned legacy systems
The issue is not to compete with WordPress – the issue is to complete the vision…
Biggest Challenges
- Usability and ease of use: 10%
- Configuration management: 9%
- Determining which modules to use: 8%
Complexity
Complexity goes up as power is increased… the iPhone breaks that paradigm … amazing tech + easy to use = market leadership. That’s what Drupal needs to find. We need to embrace the tension of usability and functionality.
How do we increase adoption? Survey respondents were overwhelmingly developers:
- Marketing 15%
- Training – 27%
- Better product – 58%
Interesting – Drupal 7 hasn’t changed the minds of many about how easy Drupal is to use. Definitely a marketing issue – Dries shoed the WP showcase site vs. drupal showcase site.
Bottom Line: expect a ton of Drupal marketing in 2011/2012.
Drupal needs: technically strong, easy to use, well marketed = Apple.
The State of Drupal 8
- Initiatives: Web Services, HTML5, Design, Config Management, Internationalization
- Each patch now needs to pass 5 gates – performance, accessibility, usability, documentation, testing
- Focus for Drupal 8 – less than 15 critical bugs at any given time to keep the process going
- In the 6 months since DrupalCon Chicago – a lot of progress has been made – but not enough
- Usability is the #1 challenge.
- Embracing HTML5 and CSS3 is the #1 requests from developers
- User Requests: better media, mobile, editing (wysiwyg editors)
Here is the state of the Drupal 8 initiatives:
- HTML5/CSS3 – on track.
- Media/asset handling – not started. The aim is to manage files through browser and provide better audio/video support. Every WordPress and Joomla user would be shocked that’s not already in place in Drupal.
- Usability/ease of use – started – but focus needed
- Mobile Support – partially covered by #1 and the design initiative.
- WYSIWYG – not started. Aim is to make it native, preconfigured
- Better APIs – not started. Partially covered by web services.
- Configuration Management – on track
- Content import/export – partially covered by web services
- Content Staging – partially covered by config.
Bottom Line: if those 9 things can be accomplished, Drupal 8 will be pretty awesome.
Questions and Answer Session for Dries
Who is using Drupal 7?
- Examiner.com
- U.S. House of Representatives
Keynote Recap
And that was it. Dries received a huge round of applause as you would expect. The keynote was pretty much what I anticipated after attending DrupalCon Chicago. He spent more time on the path for Drupal as a movement than the actual CMS – but very informative. The survey results seem to indicate that Drupal is still mostly Geek territory… (duh!). The marketers and salespeople that use/know Drupal are almost non-existent.
I heard a fair bit of chatter after the keynote that was negative toward the marketing issues that Dries suggested. I agree with Dries – he said during the keynote that Drupal developers need to “get over themselves” to some degree … this is a huge business that needs to start acting more like one in my opinion.
I would expect some significant movement in the Drupal world to take over Joomla as the #2 CMS within a year or two… will be an interesting time
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