At Drupalcon CPH: What We Can Learn From WordPress
In the Driesnote here at DrupalCon CopenHagen there was much speculation as to where Drupal may be in 10 years. I really hope that 10 years from now we'll be able to look back at Dries' slides and giggle at our projections, but a part of me fears that if this community doesn't change our ways, that won't be the case.
WordPress as a platform has made it easy for the world to blog. As their community grows and ages, they are starting to see that the web is a great place to do a whole lot more than simply publish content. As demands increase, WordPress adapts.
WordPress is quickly transforming from a blog engine to a content management system. Drupal may be stronger, more secure, more flexible, more mature, more stable, and more technically awesome. But the Drupal community needs to recognize that these things won't guarantee our survival. WordPress has the brand, and the market. WordPress serves as the perfect introduction to web publishing, and once people are hooked it's hard to break their loyalty.
We are a community of developers, and we've been in such high demand recently that we've grown comfortable with some bad habits. We focus on solving hard problems and writing beautiful code, but we've been ignoring the needs of our audience.
I love Drupal, and I love what I do, but I think we need to fight a little harder to assure we will still be relevant 10 years from now.
Do you disagree? Come to my WordPress is better than Drupal session tomorrow morning to participate in this conversation: 9am in room 12.
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I love the way the Drupal community can discuss what's strong about other technologies and communicate intelligently to come up with ways to evolve. Thanks for the post.
Speaking as someone who tries to sit on the fringes of Drupal... 2 things stand out as barriers:
1. drupal.org badly needs the new theme implemented. A geeky look may be appealing to the Drupal community, but to outsiders it looks amateur. wordpress.com looks professional, trustworthy and reliable.
2. drupalgardens.com looks great and works fantastically well (clearly a wordpress.com killer). But the URL sucks: too long and the 'gardens' association just... odd. Who is really going to promote: myfantasticsite.drupalgardens.com? Doesn't work. Would have been far better to have used drupal.com URL for this service, if it hadn't been earmarked just for protecting the brand.
Hope your session goes well tomorrow. Should be interesting.
You guys have done some awesome work with Drupal and if top notch professionals like you are worried then I am sure that reasons won't be unfounded for. However, the good news for rest of us is that the concern would certainly be overcome if the community (goaded/shown direction by good folks like yourself ) focuses on the problem rather than arrogantly dismissing it. I wish I could attend that session of yours "WordPress is better than Drupal ". Never the less I do look forward to your blog post on the same.
PS: Drupal.org may not look good (but that's ok for us geeks) but the Drupal.com does
I totally agree with this view point, because sooner or later the spoon feeding of Wordpress is not enough, no matter how CMS like they become. HANDS-DOWN Drupal is CMS. What Drupal does for the audience is create thinking about what you do with it and how it can be used to tightly secure the look and function of the site you have dreamed of rather then settled for. Yes, please tweak us, the audience, then the following will come and remain. My example is those of us who await D7, if we could have the basics all in one post it would be great, a D7, 101' instead of the scattered pertaining to Drupal 7 posts which must be clicked to get a piece of D7 information. For instance,in D7 is it sites/all/themes or sites/all/default/themes/files. We would just like to use the correct one for D7, and not what was designed for D6. Great Work Thanks Guys!
Hi, Jennifer -- nicely put. You seem to be talking of WordPress (the software) vs. Drupal (the software).
But just as important is WordPress vs. Drupal as hosted services -- i.e., WordPress.com vs. Drupal Gardens. Consider: Wikipedia says that the WordPress 3 software has received 12.5 million downloads. Now, we know that the number of active sites using that software is only a tiny percentage of that number, because people tend to download the software many times during development. Certainly there are fewer than a million self-hosted sites running WordPress.
On the other hand, Wikipedia says that over 10 million blogs on WordPress.com. That's a much bigger target! The competition there isn't Drupal per se, but hosted Drupal. The biggest player in that space is likely to be Drupal Gardens.
I've been examining Drupal Gardens heavily for some upcoming work and am impressed with how easy it is to create a simple blog site -- or a (fairly) serious campaign- or product-centered site. Will it give WordPress.com a run for its money? A lot of that depends on its marketing. But mark my words: At the next European DrupalCon, we'll be making such comparisons often. This should be a very interesting year. :)
Drupal is in a tough position of being a framework and a CMS. Wordpress is both llimted and easy to use but harder to extend as views + panels can tackle many scenarios. The advantage that Wordpress has is mind share. They can let others battle it out and then pick and choose what to implement - like content types.
Mindshare is not so much about the better product either. Are bloggers concerned about using hook_user in a module to extend the login process or panels new reusable content panes? Not really. They want what will get them going asap and what has a theme they feel is appropriate.
I think Drupal is very compelling and enjoy developing in it.
Essentially it all comes down to what we want to become. Do we want to be the CMS with a huge user base, do we want to provide a platform and via distributions reach a huge user base in niche markets, etc.
There are multiple paths that we are embarking in now via Drupal Gardens, Open Atrium, etc which will all help. But perhaps in the end it all comes down to marketing. And the new drupal.org website will be crucial in that.
Until the recent appearance of awesome Drupal distributions like Open Atrium and others, Drupal had no chance of keeping up with the growth of Wordpress or even Joomla. You couldn't simply download Drupal and do something useful right out of the gate. It's sort of like downloading the Linux kernel. A novice user is simply left with that "what now?" Feeling. Like a lot of you, I spent a week or more installing every CMS available in 2005 before deciding on Drupal. Drupal was clearly the least impressive default install. I was underwhelmed. But I took the time to understand that this is by design and that Drupal is infinitely more flexible than any of the competition. I don't think a lot of potential users are going to be motivated to understand the power of Drupal when there are systems like Joomla out there full of eye candy and a lot of preconfigured functionality.
But now, we are going to have the best of both worlds. Core Drupal + contrib for the hard core and more awesome distributions for the less patient.
Eventually someone is going to create the "Ubuntu" of Drupal distributions, and we'll have faster adoption.
But like someone else said above, is huge adoption of Drupal even something to be concerned with? Meh, I'm not so sure it is.
I've been listening to Jen Lampton's questions and suggestions in her presentation on why Wordpress is better than Drupal. (audio's a bit bad)
Jen's primary point is that we need to grow the community or we will get overtaken by Wordpress.
In this point I feel that we are similar to a bunch of zend or symfonie developers living in their own world still thinking that their framework is better than Drupal - and perhaps rightfully so - but not getting the bigger picture of what is going on and how fast momentum is overtaking them.
Now the major thing that is necessary for Drupal to get a bigger community is that it has to be able to just work out of the box. People have become accustomed to this through Wordpress and if these Wordpress savvy users are expected to switch to Drupal, then they have to encounter that same experience of a sensible prebuilt product that they can adjust easily.
Now normally the suggestion would be: "well just allow the end user to activate a profile on the simplecore installation". That is a backwards thinking approach. It is the developers that need to activate a profile for simplecore on the default installation. Fortunately, this has been recognized. Ofcourse the idea caused lots of discussion but as a result D7 now has a much larger core with much more default features that improve usability - or in the words of developers, "much more stuff to turn off".
Nonetheless, the approach taken with D7 has the right prioritazion to make Drupal survive in the long run. It gets you more users and a bigger community.
Ofcourse, if you take this road, many developers will give you the finger. And rightfully so: developers may be a minority, but theirs is a privileged stock. These are our manufacturers. We should treat our manufacturers as if we were Obama.
So what i propose is a default Drupal installation that gives you a house instead of a box of lego, but - and here's how i think we can make everybody happy - if you consider yourself to be smarter than the average mom or dad who is not computer literate by upbringing, if you consider yourself to be an "architect", then instead of going through the default installation by browsing to (sub).domain.tld >>> (install.php) you, as a smarter user, capable of doing some more enhanced, architectural stuff, you browse to (sub).domain.tld/architect.php.
And this then gives you the traditional box of legos without the prebuilt Wordpress crap, so you can go right ahead and develop. Maybe we should put some install profiles in there to choose from during the installation process to give you a head start. Architect.php could start as a copy of install.php and later perhaps be integrated by redirect.
Now, the naming may be open for discussion but i suggest "architect" on purpose. It focuses on who the user is (the developer), giving that user this extra bit of class he or she so rightfully deserves for daring to take the road less traveled. That's why it's better than "advanced" or "develop", although develop would not break with install and upgrade as an action verb. But in this case that is less important. (And ofcourse you can't use developer because themers and content strategists and so on are cool people too.)
Excelsior!
Willem
I think Drupal is very compelling and enjoy developing in it. thanks
I don't like or dislike Drupal. I simply don't get Drupal and even tougher is I don't know why. I don't know if I'm not patient or that Wordpress and Joomla is more inviting.
But as much as I'd love to get into Drupal, how and where do you start? Wordpress and Joomla have quickstart kits. Does Drupal offer that or is it just more geeky?
Someone in the thread talked about drupalgardens.com and it looks pretty cool to me. But even that suggests I'm on the Drupal servers and not on my own.
You can start with Jacob Redding's new book: Beginning Drupal.
It is an excellent introduction to Drupal 7, and how to install and use it on your own computer.
You can use Drupal Gardens as an excellent online example, or working demo, of Drupal 7, and use Jacob's book to install and develop Drupal 7 sites on your own computer.
Jazmac, if you want to get up and running quickly with Drupal, Acquia has complete packages that you can download for all major operating systems. It is a quick way to set up your own environment. A "more geeky" option is the Drubuntu based Quickstart; Although the existing version is somewhat dated it can be easily upgraded with drush.
DAMP: http://acquia.com/downloads
Quickstart: http://groups.drupal.org/quickstart-drupal-development-environment
From Drupal.com -> "Bookmark it and check back often — just like Drupal, it's always moving. It might become something bigger in the future ..." I can't remember when that site was updated... And they need to remove "project of Dries Buytaert". Or at least 'project'. When I think project, I think unfinished, still in progress, etc.
Also, the performance of drupal.com is slow. Websiteoptimization list that it takes 11secs on a T1. This is vs 7secs for wordpress.com
Great point, Jennifer!
One important difference, scalability will become less of an issue as time goes by and computing power increases. The importance of user interface and user experience will also increase, as users become more savvy and start to demand better and more polished experiences. As service providers, we are stewards of that experience and need to make sure that the Drupal systems we setup make people (users AND administrators) fall in love with them.
I really enjoyed this session and it has had me thinking ever since.
Some of those thoughts have made it into a short blog post on acquia.com called The time is right for Drupal products.
Thanks for the inspiration; the thought and work you put into this fantastic presentation really paid off!
Cheers
- jam
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Senior Writer, Evangelist - Acquia Inc.
You have to remember to that users are demanding a more user friendly and easier to use system. Wordpress is preferred by many because of this.
John,
Direct Response Agency
Jen,
I am big fan of Drupal after investing a lot of energy to learn and survive the learning curve of Drupal. I must say it's way to difficult for people just to close to understand quickly how to get started with Drupal.
For example, take your blog as it is right now. For a newbie it's really difficult to make things like that happen, where as in Wordpress it's a question of how many clicks are required.
But it doesn't need to be like that, why not make a "Drupal Blog" or "Drupal Light" Package that works right out of the box for publishers and get people curious about working with the platform. Then slowly they will learn about more powerful stuff like "node", CCK and whatever makes Drupal so awesome. Themers would be thankful as well, as there is a clear trend for certain verticals so they can better provide great solutions specifically for these groups of users.
Drupalers are awesome friendly people and way higher level in terms of technical skills. But sometimes they miss to understand how to make it easier for people to just try it out and not to be scared by too much "quality" of the code.