Dries Buytaert: I started Drupal, and when other people got involved, Drupal was really a CMS that was built by developers, for developers. I’m a developer; I started Drupal for myself, and then the initial contributors to Drupal were all developers, very tech-savvy people. Honestly, we didn’t care about marketing, and that’s kind of a shame on me. Dries Buytaert: Drupal is a global project, meaning people use Drupal all around the world, and we have communities in many large cities and even not-so-large cities. These local communities are really important, as they are often people’s entry points into Drupal. Someone might discover Drupal online and then attend a local meetup or a local camp, which is typically a two-day event in the Drupal world. These local events are very important for people to get into the community, sometimes even leading them to attend global DrupalCon events.
It was a pivotal moment for Drupal, obviously, because it has to be remembered that back in the day, open source was relatively new. People had all kinds of questions about whether open-source can scale and how can open-source be secure if it’s developed by a global community of people around the world.Because AI can be polarizing, there are wrong ways to use AI and good ways to use AI. One of the things I want to do is establish responsible AI criteria on how and why we will use AI appropriately. Already, a lot of that work is happening. For example, our AI efforts started with using OpenAI, as they were among the first players in the field. Although the whole world is focused on OpenAI and ChatGPT, we’ve been working on an abstraction layer so that you can swap out OpenAI and bring your own LLM or use another LLM that may be trained more responsibly or uses exclusively your own data. This is a good example of how we can build AI solutions the right way—ethically and legally.If you don’t know where to start, take a look at what we’re doing with Drupal Starshot. We’re really trying to make it easy for everybody to get involved, and we’re focusing Starshot on amplifying Drupal’s impact.
TDT [16]: As we anticipate a significant year ahead, do you have any final messages or insights you would like to share with the Drupal community about what to expect and look forward to?Drupal is built by an amazing community, and we need more people to get involved in any way possible—organizing events, local meetups, local conferences, all the way to writing code, improving our documentation, and marketing. Any of these things are great ways to get involved.The DropTimes (TDT) proudly presents its milestone 100th interview featuring Dries Buytaert, the visionary founder of Drupal. Interviewed by Anoop John, Founder and Lead of The DropTimes, this conversation delves into the rich history and transformative journey of Drupal, an open-source platform that now powers around 2% of all websites globally, including one out of ten enterprise sites.TDT [9]: There is one last aspect that I wanted to touch upon regarding perceptions. As a community, we know that Google has entered large enterprises, and we have seen a lot of growth. But how do we see the maker ecosystem correspondingly and explosively grow to become a very large, thriving global community? It is already quite big, but how do we take it to the next level?
AI could help automate this process. I wouldn’t want AI to automatically add alt text to all of my images. Instead, I would want AI to suggest alt text, which I could then proofread and approve. This is an example of using AI responsibly. Many Drupal users face similar challenges with large amounts of content. AI can assist them, provided it’s used responsibly, allowing users to choose their LLM and approve suggestions before saving.
What exactly we need to build for Starshot is still to be decided. There has already been incredible innovation in the Drupal community. Early next week, I am meeting with several people driving different AI initiatives, like Kevin and Jamie. We will brainstorm about how we can incorporate AI into Starshot. We will consider Starshot’s mission and identify ways AI can accelerate that mission.Drupal has a modern architecture that will serve us well for the next decades. We use design patterns and principles found in state-of-the-art web frameworks. In a way, Drupal is more modern than many other classic CMSs, like WordPress.
Drupal has a more sophisticated, more modern architecture, which is great for developers to build on and for module maintainers to work with. This is because we were never afraid to make big changes to the architecture and to keep up with the times. We just had to combine that with providing a smooth upgrade path. We’ve spent months of hard work making upgrades easier, providing backward compatibility layers, and managing deprecated code. This effort has made a big difference. Now, we have a modern CMS with state-of-the-art architecture and a much better upgrade experience than ever before.
switching to Drupal back in it’s infancy.
Dries Buytaert: I think AI is here to stay. AI presents a unique opportunity to redefine how people build things. It’s already impacting how software engineers write code, whether we like it or not. The next step is to use AI to automate more tasks, including tools like Drupal. There is no doubt in my mind that AI has an important role. AI can help improve Drupal’s accessibility and empower builders to create websites more easily.
Dries Buytaert: We recently had DrupalCon Portland just a couple of months ago and launched the Drupal Starshot initiative, which was extremely well received. We’d say a lot of people are excited and talking about it. I can talk a little bit more about that if you’d like, but in general, we definitely plan to give some big updates on the Drupal Starshot projects.
Now, the question is, can we do these things? Some of the early experimentation that I think you and I have seen seems to suggest that we might. It’s very exciting. I want to be clear: I want to encourage the Drupal community to experiment with these things. But I also want us to do it responsibly. It’s important that we play around with this, try things, and then build it the right way.
Dries Buytaert: Some governments have standardized on Drupal, like in Australia with GovCMS. That’s what I mean: think about all these things, about the thousands of nonprofits. Every improvement that we make to Drupal helps them fulfill their mission. It helps Amnesty International, Red Cross, Greenpeace, Doctors Without Borders are all using Drupal. So, if we make Drupal a little bit better, that will propagate to all of these governments trying to serve their citizens, and it will propagate to all of these nonprofits with such important missions. TDT [11]: To think that it is actually touching everybody in the world even for a small time is a great thought. Also, governments across the world is using Drupal, what are your thoughts on that?
Thank you for being with us on this incredible journey. Cheers to many more milestones ahead!
Then, on top of that, we can try to support them, because a lot of these local events need some infrastructure. Whether it’s a way for people to sign up or, if it’s a camp, they need a bit of an event website where they can promote schedules. There are things that we can operationalize, if you will, by providing tools, playbooks, and best practices to the local communities. This will help them because if you have to invent everything yourself and reinvent the wheel around the world, it’s not very efficient and can create friction for people to step up and organize.We’re working on setting up much of the infrastructure, such as Git repos and testing frameworks. That’s underway. So, a lot of different things have been happening. I should probably write about it more. We’ve been trying to keep people in the loop and haven’t had a chance to blog about much of this progress, but it’s coming along.TDT [13]: One major goal of the Starshot initiative is to position Drupal as a solution ready for both enterprises and small businesses, as well as site builders, not just developers. We aim to leverage our strengths and promote Drupal to a broader audience. We are anticipating a significant push in marketing and growth in Drupal’s adoption. What are your thoughts on how this initiative will be embraced by small businesses, considering Drupal’s existing success in large enterprises?The number of clicks people have to do is one thing, but what I didn’t mention is all the things you have to learn: the mental model you have to build of Drupal, understanding entities, and the order in which you have to do things. These are all things that people have to learn. That would all go away, and we would help people get started.
Today, you have Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace. I think there’s a part of the market that is now served completely differently than 10-15 years ago, and that’s okay. As a result, Drupal has evolved and pivoted more into the upper end of the market and the enterprise. Further, the Drupal ecosystem has changed, too. Now we have more web agencies that are a little bit larger, maybe not individuals or single developers, but slightly bigger teams that tend to focus on slightly bigger websites. I think there’s been a lot of commercial growth in this way.
Additionally, we are bundling many best practices for people with over 10 years of experience with Drupal. They know how to do things, but how do we package all that knowledge in the heads of senior Drupal developers who have been using Drupal for many years? How do we turn that knowledge into recipes so that we can give best practices to people new to Drupal? We’re very focused on that, and our goal is to make Drupal more accessible….we invested in web service APIs before headless and decoupled were official terms. Drupal shipped out of the box with web services long before others.
If you look at the adoption of Drupal, a lot of the small sites are moving off Drupal to SaaS solutions, and then we have new sites coming in that tend to be bigger. So there has been a rotation, but the total number of Drupal sites has been sort of flat.
Imagine you could prompt Drupal and say, “Hey, I want a landing page. I want two columns. I want the hero image. I want a form with these fields and a blue button. Go.” AI could put it all together for you. You could then take over and finish it. You wouldn’t have to do it completely automatically, but it would at least be an 80% start. This would make it a lot easier for people.
TDT [7]: Drupal also made a major change in terms of how we look at marketing as a community. Now, we have a dedicated marketing committee and are actively looking at our branding or messaging. Can you share your insights on that?
Dries Buytaert: It was amazing, and it’s funny. At the time, I was doing a PhD in computer science and had to go to Vancouver to present at another conference. This was in 2004. Some people in the local community there, Boris Mann and others, basically put on a meetup at night in Vancouver while I was there for a non-Drupal thing, and it was so much fun. That was the very first event that I did for Drupal. It was there that we decided we should do this again, and that eventually led to DrupalCon in Antwerp in 2005.The DropTimes is a product of this vibrant community, and everything we do is for the community. Here’s a toast to our 100th official interview, hosted by Anoop John, our founder and lead, who is also the founder and CTO of Zyxware Technologies, a company that has greatly benefited from Drupal. This interview symbolizes our way of giving back.But what has happened is that Drupal has all of these amazing capabilities. Often we’re leading the world, we’re leading other CMSs in terms of things that we do. For example,So yeah, I think it’s really important that the local communities thrive. I think a lot of it comes down to the people in these areas, and I would invite all of them to organize events and camps, maybe even a DrupalCon. And yeah, collaborate among themselves and with each other to see if we can operationalize parts of what we do.
Dries Buytaert: I think Starshot will do a few things.
Dries Buytaert, a prominent figure in the tech industry, has dedicated over two decades to nurturing and leading Drupal. He co-founded Acquia, a SaaS company that has grown to over 1,400 employees. His expertise extends beyond Drupal, holding dual roles as Acquia’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, and being recognized as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum.
Anoop John: I think it should be a good reminder for all of us who are trying to contribute back that even the smallest contribution can have its impact amplified because of the scale of the reach. It doesn’t matter if it’s a line of code; that line of code is going to go to hundreds and thousands of sites and millions and millions of users out there.
We’re really focused on that; we really want to promote the makers of Drupal. We have aggressive growth targets at the Drupal Association. We have already seen that the Certified Partner Program is picking up speed and companies are getting themselves registered as certified partners. It’s all good news and a great change.Dries Buytaert: Well, a couple of things. I do feel like the commercial ecosystem has continued to grow. I think over the years, there’s been a change in the use of Drupal. As I mentioned, when Drupal was younger, Drupal 7, it was a lot of individuals using Drupal for relatively small sites, and at that time SaaS solutions didn’t really exist, to be honest. So, if somebody wanted to build a hobby website or a small e-commerce website, they would use Drupal.TDT [14]: How is Drupal planning to integrate AI into its platform as AI continues to revolutionize technology sectors? Could you provide some specifics on AI initiatives that are currently in development or planned?
Join us for an engaging discussion that captures the essence of Drupal’s evolution and future aspirations.
TDT [15]: Somebody recently shared a snippet on LinkedIn about how Open AI was integrated to actually create a component right inside Drupal?TDT [8]: How do you see media like The DropTimes play a role in the marketing of Drupal?
Dries Buytaert: “Get involved” would be my message. We have such a special product with a big impact. My ask would be to think about how you might be able to help us if you have the time or resources. Think about how you can help amplify Drupal’s mission and impact.
TDT [3]: In 2019, we were doing very well when COVID-19 started, and that threw a spanner into the works for many of our local events. Now, we are trying to revive all of that globally, and I believe that it’s going to play a big part in mobilizing the community for the bigger initiatives that we have. How do you see the local community growing and getting back on track, and what are your thoughts on how we should mobilize as a global community?I remember 30-40 people showed up in Antwerp, and I couldn’t believe that 30 to 40 people traveled to Antwerp to talk about Drupal for a week. While I was working hard on Drupal, spending a lot of my nights and weekends on it, it wasn’t necessarily something that I talked about much with my friends. So I was a little bit surprised that 30 to 40 people would travel to Belgium, often from the US and other places in the world, just to talk about Drupal for a whole week. It was very special and a great success. We had a lot of fun, and a lot of foundational concepts were actually created there, like CCK, as an example.Drupal, with its strong API capabilities, is already ready to embrace AI. You can just plug in AI, and Drupal can do the work for you. It’s a game-changer.Using the wrong alt text can make things worse. We must ensure that we contribute to a better web. This is a long-winded example, but it illustrates how AI can be applied. There are probably 20 or 30 other things we can do with AI to help Drupal users.In the lower part of the market, we’ll continue to focus. Today, Drupal is very successful in the upper ends of the mid-market and the enterprise. We don’t want to give that up. We want to continue our leadership in these segments of the market, but we can move down-market a little bit. We have new events we’ve gone to. For the first time ever, Drupal went to Web Summit, which is the largest web developer conference in the world. We had a booth; we spent, I think it was 0,000, a lot of money to have a presence there, and about 80,000 web developers or so go to Web Summit. For the first time, we were able to stand in front of thousands of web developers and talk to them about Drupal. Because we all know about Drupal, right? I mean, obviously, you know, I know, probably a lot of the people reading this interview know about Drupal, but what about the millions of other web developers in the world who just don’t know about Drupal?
Dries Buytaert: Drupal has been around for 23 years. One of the reasons we’ve stayed so relevant in the world is that we’ve never been afraid to change. We’ve always evolved and caught up with or led technology trends. When something big comes around, we’re among the first CMSs to implement it. Innovation has been a constant, and I think it’s one of the reasons why we’ve remained relevant.
TDT [2]: One of the remarkable aspects of Drupal as a technology project is the vibrant community that surrounds it. Over the years, we have witnessed numerous exceptional events. The first Drupal developers’ sprint occurred in Antwerp in 2005, followed by the inaugural DrupalCon as part of FOSDEM in 2005, where you delivered the first State of Drupal presentation, a tradition you have maintained ever since. Could you share your initial expectations for these events and how it felt to witness the community coming together and enjoying themselves?
Dries Buytaert: Yeah, there’ve been many, to be honest. And it’s funny because every time these big events happen, I always felt like “I don’t think it can get any bigger than this.” And then yet something bigger happened. KernelTrap was a pivotal moment for sure. When Drupal was only a couple of years old, Howard Dean, a presidential candidate in the US back in the day, switching to Drupal for his campaign platform was a big deal because we got mentioned in all kinds of media like Time Magazine, which was fantastic because this led to larger and larger organizations switching to Drupal.
In a way, we’ve lost ground to WordPress; they’re strong there, and we want to take some of that back. We believe we have a right to win there and a right to play there. We are good at many things, and we actually think we can build something better than some of our competitors. So that’s what we’re going to go after, and it will help Drupal be more successful in the mid-market with medium-sized businesses. Dries Buytaert: We have been working hard on the Starshot initiative, dedicating around six hours a day to it. We have made a lot of progress. Starshot was announced at DrupalCon Portland a few months ago. As I mentioned, hundreds of people signed up to help. Since then, we have been focused on defining our needs and what we want to build. We’ve been working on product strategy and defining the scope of the technical work.I want there to be an open web for the next 100 years. I want my kids and my grandkids (if I have any) to grow up with a web that’s good, that’s not invading their privacy, and that’s not unsafe for them. That is actually a good web, so to speak. This is motivating.I came out of that event, and we have decided to do DrupalCons ever since. I have been to every single one of them. I think we’ve done about 39 or 40 so far. Now, we’re sometimes thousands of people, depending on where it is.A lot of the success of the local communities, I think, depends on local leadership. It only takes one or two people in a city to drive these events and the local community. Sometimes, it’s as simple as scheduling a gathering, like saying, “We’re going to get together in this bar or this office space this evening from six to nine.” I think a lot of it is about encouraging people to organize these events and helping them understand why they’re important. TDT [12]: It’s exciting to see the latest initiative in the Drupal community, the Drupal Starshot initiative, gaining so much attention. The community has been actively writing about it and sharing updates on social media. Could you share some thoughts on our current progress and where we stand now? Additionally, we have some deadlines to meet by the end of the year and two major upcoming events. What are your thoughts on these milestones and events?We have done a lot of enablement sessions because we had hundreds of people willing to help. So far, we have conducted maybe eight or nine Zoom calls or public webinars so people could join. The sessions focus on how you can get involved and highlight specific issues that people can contribute to. We’ve emailed people, and we’ve aligned the Drupal Certified Partner Program more with Starshot.Any flexible, powerful technology tends to have a steeper learning curve in general. However, we’ve made a lot of progress in making Drupal easier to use. Over the years, we’ve had initiatives like Claro, Olivero, and Umami to provide a demo experience. We’ve modernized a lot of the backends and introduced new interaction patterns in Drupal. I think we’ve been on a trend that’s making Drupal easier and easier.
In this interview, Dries shares insights on pivotal moments that accelerated Drupal’s adoption, such as the KernelTrap migration and Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. He reflects on the community’s growth through events like the first Drupal developers’ sprint and the inaugural DrupalCon. The conversation also explores the impact of the Drupal Starshot initiative, strategies for making Drupal more accessible to small businesses, and the integration of AI into the platform.
At the same time, there was a slight shift in the market where Drupal 7 was really appealing to what I call ambitious site builders. These are people who aren’t necessarily professionally trained engineers; they can be low-code, no-code site builders, sometimes with more of a marketing background, or junior developers. One of the major insights was that we suddenly had so many more people using Drupal 7 who were not as technically savvy as they used to be. This created a conundrum where we realized we needed to make upgrades easier. When Drupal was smaller, and most users were very technically savvy, it was fine for them to upgrade their custom code. But as Drupal got bigger and the install base grew, this became more of an issue.Dries Buytaert: I mean, it’s key. I think what The DropTimes has been doing is great. There are so many amazing things happening in Drupal, and The DropTimes has been a constant presence. There’s been a consistent cadence of educating people about what’s happening in the Drupal world. I’ve been following along with a lot of the articles and reading them. Thank you for such important contributions.Maybe even a small change that somebody contributes can help them raise a little bit more money, or it can help them activate a few more passionate contributors through these nonprofits, or it can help us share information in a little bit more accessible way so that we’re more inclusive. I think it’s the sum of all of these improvements, and combined with the scale across thousands and thousands of important websites. It is what makes it so exciting.
What we have seen is that a lot of people use Drupal but don’t necessarily contribute to Drupal. We call those people who don’t contribute “takers,” and the people who do contribute, we call them “makers.” We are trying to incentivize more and more organizations to become makers and are trying to convert takers into makers. We’ve done that through a variety of different initiatives, like evolving the credit system, having a Certified Partner Program at the Drupal Association, and explaining to people why they should contribute and why it’s good for them and others.
Dries Buytaert: Drupal is driving me! I mean, it has evolved over time. Initially, I was using Drupal for myself, and what drove me 24 years ago was just building a website for myself. What drives me today, I would say, is the impact that Drupal has on the world.TDT [1]: Drupal is 23 years old, indeed a long journey. Drupal’s early adoption was influenced by key events such as the KernelTrap migration to Drupal 3.0 in 2002 and Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Are there any other turning points in those early days that you feel were instrumental in accelerating Drupal’s adoption and growth?
If you think about all of the Drupal websites out there, it’s roughly one in 30 websites in the world. Now, if you look at the larger websites or the websites that people visit more, it’s more like one in 10 or so. So it’s all Drupal websites out there. I think of everybody that visits those 30 websites. Let’s say basically everybody in the world who’s on the web will visit a Drupal site, which is a special thought and feeling.
TDT [5]: Reflecting on the journey of the Drupal community over the past several years, we have seen significant milestones, such as the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and the subsequent architectural improvements. What major learnings or takeaways have emerged from this process, particularly regarding the ease of upgrading? Additionally, considering the remaining Drupal 7 sites, what are your thoughts on the strategies needed to transition them to newer versions?What is in a number? In the grand design of events, 100 might seem insignificant. Yet, it marks a monumental milestone in our journey. Today, we celebrate our 100th official interview with none other than Dries Buytaert, the founder and visionary leader of Drupal. This milestone stands as a testament to our unwavering commitment to the incredible Drupal community and the Free and Open-Source ecosystem that has made Drupal possible.Our next big milestone is DrupalCon Barcelona, which is in September. We hope to show some real progress there on a variety of different things, from marketing to our demo of Starshot to maybe having the first recipes, which is one of the technical pieces of Starshot, implemented. So, it has been a lot of work to get things off the ground. We’re still getting things off the ground. We haven’t reached cruising altitude yet where it’s a more stable flight. We’re still taking off, but we’ll continue to work on it and hope to hit the milestones.
Think about all of the people, thousands of people, that have been impacted by Drupal. I get emails every week; I get approached by people telling me how Drupal impacted their lives. And yeah, that’s really inspirational for me, and it makes me do what I do. It makes me wake up in the morning and think about how I best spend my time. And it’s really been focused on how to maximize the impact of Drupal on the world. I’m very, very lucky that I can focus so much of my time on Drupal. It is a privilege, and it’s exciting.
We have a pipeline of almost 30 Drupal-certified partners that are willing to contribute to Starshot. We’re doing some matchmaking between their skills, resources, and the time they have, trying to map it onto the work packages that we have for Starshot.So, over the years, I’ve learned that marketing is really important, and that’s a personal learning. I wish we had been better all along in marketing; however, now we’re trying to catch up a little bit.I remember MTV switching to Drupal, which, especially back then, maybe still today, is a big deal because everybody in the world knows MTV or whitehouse.gov, the website of the Office of the President in the US, switching to Drupal. That was a big deal.
We made a big pivot with Drupal 8, deciding that going forward, we would provide a smooth upgrade path and enable smoother upgrades without having to rewrite everything. This is one of the biggest learnings. I’m happy that we made many of the changes we did.
Some of these milestones, like whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal, really are a testament to Drupal’s scalability and security and gave a lot of credibility to the project. There are many more, but yes, it’s a long history. Long history!TDT [4]: With DrupalCon Barcelona and DrupalCon Singapore on the horizon, what key themes or announcements can attendees look forward to? Can we have a sneak peek?
Drupal has many amazing features, but the thing is, we don’t market them. If I go to a conference with an audience full of web developers, most of them don’t know Drupal. We’ve had a big lack of marketing, and it has resulted in people not really understanding all the amazing work that we have done and all of the great capabilities that Drupal has. So we finally said, enough is enough! We are going to invest more in marketing and tell the world how amazing Drupal is and all of the great capabilities that Drupal has. We’ve done that over the years and incrementally more, starting with the Promote Drupal initiative.
Similarly, if you look at the number of contributors and the organizations contributing to Drupal, that has been steadily going up as well. We have more people contributing today than 10 years ago. We have more organizations contributing today than 10 years ago. At the same time, we have a lot of incentives and programs in place to help grow the maker ecosystem. With StarShot, we’re trying to do much more, much faster, to focus on enabling new people—those who have never used Drupal before—to get up to speed with Drupal quickly. There are some really exciting developments in what we’re doing.Dries Buytaert: I think that’s where we will go. If you think about today, you want to create a landing page or something and you want to add a signup form with a few fields, you want the Submit button to be blue. Imagine any landing page: you want a few images in there. It probably takes 100-plus clicks. Someone has to create the page, create the layouts, add the images, then create a form. That’s a lot of clicks. Then, embed the form in the page and somehow style the color of the button. It’s complex, right? Even if we spend a lot of time making it very intuitive and easy, it’s still a lot of clicking.We’re never going to compete with Wix and Squarespace on the lower end of the market, but in the mid-market, we have a license to win. We just need to do a few things to make it easier for people to get started and help people understand why we have a better product than some of the other CMSs out there. I think Starshot will really help with that because the cost of running a Drupal site will come down, and the entry points will become easier.AI has a place, but we have to do it right. Having a human in the process is another important step for many AI applications. AI can have a big impact. For example, I have a small Drupal site, https://dri.es, with over 10,000 images. I have made a point of ensuring each image has alt text for accessibility. However, when I started adding photos 15 or 20 years ago, I didn’t always add alt text. As a result, I have around 8,000-9,000 images without alt text. Manually fixing this would take me 10-15 years.People have asked me if I have burnouts after 24 years. My answer is I really don’t. It’s because I think I’m also lucky that I have a lot of variety in what I do. I can focus on technical things, focus on strategy, and maybe the marketing of Drupal. I get to travel and speak at Drupal events. There are a lot of different things that I do as well, which helps. So it’s really the variety and the impact, I would say, that keeps me so engaged.
I believe a lot of partners have said, “Alright, I want to be a certified partner. How can I contribute?” They’re willing to contribute, and often, they don’t know how to best contribute. So a lot of the work that we’re doing right now is actually enabling them to contribute and pointing them to things where they can contribute and have an impact.
However, if you were to look at the dollar amounts, it has gone up and up. Look at all of the organizations in the Drupal ecosystem, the Acquias of the world, the Pantheons of the world; a lot of these agencies have gotten bigger and bigger over time. This means that the projects have gotten bigger and that there has been growth that way.While the number of people we’ve engaged with might surpass the 100 mark—given that some were featured stories, multi-person interviews, or brief talks posted only on LinkedIn as part of social media campaigns—this interview with Dries is officially our 100th. Who better to mark this occasion than Dries Buytaert himself?I think it’s also going to be exciting for the community to be actively involved in the Starshot initiative, as it is being mobilized locally across the world. Regular updates are being given, and people from across the world have been joining all these sessions, which has been pretty amazing.Up until Drupal 7, we would make API changes, and Drupal upgrades were not backward compatible. Every time you did a major upgrade, say from 6 to 7 or 7 to 8, people had to update their custom code, and module maintainers needed to update their contributed modules. Drupal 7 was a milestone release that almost caused rocket-ship growth for Drupal. Hundreds of thousands of websites migrated to Drupal 7, and we’d never seen that kind of groundswell of adoption before.Accessibility has now become very important in the world, but we made a commitment to accessibility many years ago, long before it became a big topic.Think about how the web is so important for everyone. It has become an infrastructure that has enabled people to share, stay in touch, make a living, and do good things in the world. I believe it’s really important that the web continues to exist. And I think it’s also really important that the web continues to exist in a good way—in an open way—with a focus on security, scalability, and accessibility: all of the things that we really value in Drupal. That’s definitely one thing that motivates me.
We also had to put in place a leadership team, create a governance model, and recruit people for leadership roles. We have the first number of people in place, and we have also created an advisory board that we’re calling the Starshot Council. We even had our first Advisory Board Meeting.
Unlike any other media entity, except for the long-running ‘Talking Drupal’ podcast, we consistently cover Drupal with such depth and breadth. Over the years, we have had the privilege of interviewing numerous Drupal Core Developers, CXOs of Drupal agencies, leaders of various Drupal initiatives, and everyday contributors who generously share their knowledge at Drupal events. Our mission is to amplify Drupal’s voices, whether through summarizing blog posts from agencies big and small, providing pre-and post-event coverage, promoting innovative ideas, boosting community ‘asks,’ or posting Drupal job opportunities in your locality.But then, in the last two years, we leveled up more and created a formal marketing committee in the Drupal Association. It is a team of volunteers, including some board members, and we have really worked on a marketing plan to try and market Drupal. A lot of great things have come out of that.
First, it focuses on the initial out-of-the-box experience for people new to Drupal. We hope that will attract more people to Drupal. I think a lot of people try Drupal but then get overwhelmed by its learning curve, and we’re super focused on making Drupal easy to use out-of-the-box with Starshot.
Dries Buytaert: It’s become easier and easier to work with, but we still have a ways to go. I think there’s still a learning curve to Drupal that other CMSs don’t have. This is because Drupal is more flexible and powerful. Our caching infrastructure and how we can scale and perform are world-class. I actually don’t think I know a single CMS that has the same richness and out-of-the-box features as Drupal in terms of its ability to scale and deliver pages fast. I could go on and on…
In my keynote at DrupalCon Portland, I put up a QR code where people could visit a page and pledge to help or make a promise to help build Starshot. We’ve had more than 500, maybe close to 600 people now, pledge to help.
TDT [6]: Some of the changes in Drupal have been well embraced by the community, though there have been challenges in perceptions along the way. As we move forward, how do you think it is important to manage these perceptions and ensure effective communication not just within the current community but also to those considering joining? Additionally, how would you address the misconception and highlight that Drupal is now a very easy platform to work with?TDT [10]: As an individual, what has driven you to lead the Drupal project all these years? What motivates you to dedicate millions of man-hours to the project, inspiring tens of thousands of contributors, and maintaining your respected and well-loved status within the community?People from all around the world, which is amazing, and also people with lots of different skill sets, from front-end developers to back-end developers, but also project managers, people willing to write documentation, marketers—you name it. We’ve had so many people raise their hands, pledging to help. A lot of what we’ve been doing now is trying to enable them, activate them, and help them get involved.
