Drupalcon Europe gets going
The obvious highlights of the day were the Prenote and the Keynote address.
What is the Prenote you ask? You can check it out for yourself! You may even recognise some of the people who took part!
Where are we from?
Our friends over at Pantheon ran a “from the stage” survey of the community in the room (and I guess a few people who were watching the live stream). Inky, Dania, Lees and I are from Cape Town and Mostfa is from Tunisia. I’m fairly sure that Amazee Labs people account for a large portion of the 1% from Africa.
What do we like?
It starts with the community of course. There is meeting people, sharing food, learning, sprinting on the project. And friends!
… and of course, there is beer. And people, and travel, and connections, and OIDA.
… and there are stickers and hugs… AND beer sessions, and networking beer, and community beer. And if you keep an eye out and stay vigilant you might just spot a beer.
OIDA!
Dries took to the stage to the expected applause from the room. He spent quite some time going through the product stats and if you weren’t at the Driesnote it's worth checking out the full presentation below.
At Amazee Labs, we use Drupal all the time. It supports most of what we produce, and it underpins 100% of what we do. In my team, we support, extend, and maintain a myriad Drupal 7 and 8 sites. Soon we will be onboarding some of the more ambitious Fully Decoupled Drupal-React sites that the sprint teams have been hard at work on this year into the maintenance and extension project phase. It is really helpful to have someone like Dries stand up and force us to take stock of where Drupal is a product and to highlight some of the things that the people using the product should be thinking about.
“The CMS Vendor Landscape is changing”
The CMS vendor landscape is undergoing a transformation. With the rapid rise and adoption of various Javascript frameworks, and patterns, CMSs are increasingly becoming (or in the case of Drupal, being used as) headless providers of data and content. This will over time inevitably change things for the Drupal project.
“Drupal is for Ambitious Digital Experiences”
So what is the graph telling us? It maps different potential Drupal users in two dimensions along Reach (how many people will the system touch?), and Richness (how many features will the system have?). Perhaps the most striking piece is the explicit acknowledgement that the SaaS competitive platforms are now mature and feature-rich enough to make them more appropriate for blogs, portfolio, and brochure sites.
But we can also see that Drupal isn’t only for enterprise clients. To quote Dries: “Ambitious is much more than just enterprise”. In fact, enterprise clients are only a portion of the potential Drupal market. There is plenty of space (perhaps even the majority of the market?) for feature-rich sites to be built and deployed for customers who we would not consider Enterprise. And Dries’ talk suggests that we should think about this, and start to include this in our strategies, and to help our customers to include this in their strategies.
