DrupalCon Viyana

Drupal community members from all over the world, but mainly from Europe, organised a great event again. Drupart was founded with a decision taken after DrupalCon, so Drupal conferences have a special importance for us. There are many values that Drupal conferences add to us; we learn the latest plans and developments about Drupal first hand, we meet new people from the community, we make new technical gains, but most importantly, we refresh our excitement and have a very good motivation for new ideas and the future. There will be new and beautiful developments on the Drupart side.

Dries Buytaert, the Keynote speaker of the first day of the conference, shared very important information about the current status and future of the Drupal project, in summary, Drupal is growing and changing.

Drupal is Growing

In the transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, there were some problems and delays that everyone knows, there were some people who turned to different technologies from Drupal, but despite this, the Drupal project continues to grow and expand.

Code enhancements / fixes for Drupal core and community-supported modules on drupal.org increased by 22% compared to last year. This shows us that more work is being done especially for Drupal 8 than in 2016.

The number of users who individually developed or supported modules on drupal.org increased by 28% compared to 2016, meaning that more users started to actively support the Drupal project.

The support of companies to Drupal projects on drupal.org increased by 26% compared to the previous year, and companies contributed to the development both with the financial support they provided to the developers and by allocating the time of their own developers to Drupal projects.

A survey was conducted with Drupal agency managers in 2017. In this survey, some findings were obtained that will allow us to better see the current situation.  According to the table above, it is seen that almost half of Drupal agencies have grown compared to last year in terms of both capacity and sales. In other words, 5 out of 10 Drupal agencies have grown their business and increased their sales.

In addition to numerical growth, Drupal 8 usage is finally increasing :) 38% of the agencies participating in the survey stated that they develop their projects only with Drupal 8 and 25% stated that they mostly develop with Drupal 8, which shows us that Drupal 8 is now more widely used. As Drupart, we have been developing our new projects with Drupal 8 for a while.

Many modules are actively used in Drupal8, especially Panels, Commerce, Search API, Ctools, Token, Pathauto modules being ready has enabled other modules to be developed faster. However, despite all these, there are modules that are not yet actively used, waiting to be developed and tested. Rules, Organic Groups, Backup & Migrate and Feeds modules are not fully ready for Drupal 8.

Drupal is Changing

Especially the changes in web technologies affect the vision and plans of Drupal and Drupal is changing in parallel. There are now new approaches to what Drupal is, for whom it is suitable, and in which projects it can be used. In fact, this is a change - transformation that affects not only Drupal but also the content management systems (CMS) market. Now, promotional sites, landing pages, blog sites, simple websites that do not have advanced interaction with the user are created with structures we call SaaS (Software as a Service). As such, content management systems have to position themselves at a more accurate point.

While promotional websites are easily created with online tools such as wordpress and wix, expectations from CMSs have also changed. Content management systems are no longer just for creating and managing simple websites, but have to include features that can meet the needs of the market at the corporate level. Drupal is also changing in this sense, especially with Drupal 8, it is no longer a very suitable platform for simple websites.

The point Dries emphasised in his presentation, especially with the slide above, is that using Drupal for simple websites will be more costly than SaaS in terms of development and maintenance. With Drupal 8, the Drupal project has become more feature-rich, flexible and responsive to complex needs. Drupal is evolving into a platform that has more features rather than reaching more people. This is exactly what is mentioned in the slide above, not reaching more people with REACH, but turning into a more equipped, corporate content management platform that responds to many more features with RICHNESS.

Another topic that was mentioned in the presentations at the conference was the concepts of "decoupling" and "api first". In other words, an approach that puts Drupal at the centre but the front-end side can be developed with different technologies such as node.js, vuejs, Angular. In fact, this is not very established and widely used, but it is predicted that there will be a serious orientation towards these technologies in the very near future, which is why Drupal is preparing for the future.

In a project like Drupal, there may be different needs and demands in every segment. There are demands and complaints about Drupal as you can see on the screen above. Some of them cannot be corrected, there is no plan to work on this issue in the strategic goals of the project.

• Drupal is no longer suitable for simple websites

• Drupal is changing and progressing very fast

• We don't want to learn object oriented programming with Drupal 8

Yes, this is the issue we mentioned above, Drupal is no longer suitable for simple websites and the project needs to keep up with these changes and transformations within the scope of rapidly changing market needs. There is no improvement to be made in learning object oriented programming, we have to learn object oriented programming to develop with Drupal 8.

In addition, there are other complaints and demands about the project, such as

• Drupal is very difficult to use.

• Drupal administration panel is very old, not suitable for current trends.

• Maintenance and update issues in Drupal are very difficult and costly.

Work is being done or will be done in the near future to correct and improve the above mentioned issues. A more modern and new administration panel is being worked on, several screenshots were shown during the conference and a very good and unusual administration panel is being created. These works, which are still in the test phase, will be included in the project in the future.

Another issue is automatic updates in Drupal, one of the most important issues in Drupal is that these updates take a lot of time and are done manually every time. In fact, there are options for automatic updates in drush or in the administration panel, but despite this, 59% of websites are updated manually by downloading from drupal.org. There are some improvement works planned in this regard and will be included in the project in the future.

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, Drupal Conferences are an important source of motivation for all community members for new ideas and beginnings. Drupal, especially in the transition to 8, has slowed down a bit, faltered, but we can say with certainty that it is on the right track.