The State of Drupal 2011

Kicking off DrupalCon London this year saw Dries Buytaert, the man who wrote the first build of Drupal, give his six monthly State of Drupal, going over the changes that have happened since DrupalCon Chicago and what’s to come in the future.

According to Dries, we are coming to a point where Drupal is becoming standard within the media and entertainment industries, with companies like Sony, Universal, NBC, Warner Music Group, Cartoon Network and Turner using Drupal as a platform for their sites. However, other industries like finance, government and high tech companies are also getting involved, with Twitter now running it’s developer network on Drupal.

Even though people are worried about the adoption of Drupal 7, it took Drupal 6 12 months to get to 100,000 live sites, yet it only took Drupal 7 only 6 months to reach the same figure. Further to this, the number of commits have spiked to almost 20,000 per month since January 2011, as have the number of committers. Dries cites a few examples of where Drupal is moving forward, including the media module and the almost released commerce module.

As Dries said, “All in all, we have a lot to be proud of.”

At the beginning of each major release cycle, Drupal put out a ‘State of Drupal’ survey, with the last one happening in 2008. 2011′s survey saw over 3000 people take part. From the results, Dries mentions that Drupal has a lot of developers and business owners, but nowhere near enough product managers and usability experts. However, when asked to describe Drupal in one word, the major response was ‘Flexible’ and ‘Awesome’.

Most organisations have multiple websites, including product sites, community platforms, media platforms, microsites, blogs, event sites, ecommerce, corp com site, wikis, forums and extranets, with the tradition being that a lot of these run on different platforms. Now, a lot of organisations are realising they can standardise on Drupal across the board. Drupal is uniquely positioned to fulfil this big vision, as it’s one of the only ones to have the scalability and the ability to be a jack of all trades.

One of the big things that Drupal needs to do, according to Dries, is to increase adoption and attract more hobbyists, who usually become Drupal experts over time. From the results of the survey, they’ve determined that their biggest long term goal for adoption is a better product. However, the big short terms goals are more marketing and training new users.

On Drupal 8, Dries goes over the Drupal 8 initiatives, including Web services, HTML5, Design, Config management and Internationalisation, with each of them progressing nicely, and HTML5 and Internationalisation having patches committed already. In terms of responses from the survey that are going to become Drupal 8 initiatives, Dries has prioritised numbers of these including Native HTML5/CSS3, Media/asset handling, Usability and ease of use, mobile support, WYSIWYG editor and Better APIs.

However, Dries makes it very clear that just because certain things that people want from Drupal didn’t make the top 9, doesn’t mean you can’t work on them. In his words, ‘We love it when you work on other things.’

Drupal has a huge opportunity ahead of them. It can change the way people build and manage websites, as long as it doesn’t get blindsided by the competition. In summary, Dries says we have to think bigger, making sure that Drupal focuses on three key areas, technical strength, ease of use and good marketing.

Questions after the Keynote

Are there any major sites running Drupal 7 at the moment?
Examples cited by the crowd include Examiner.com and the US House of Representatives.

You mention about the need for marketing. Is the community able to do it, or does it need a top down approach?
Dries says that the Drupal association should take a lead, but everyone could participate.

Picture by @thomasmuirhead