Apr 30, 2018

DrupalCon Recap

DrupalCon Recap

Another DrupalCon in the books and with Nashville being the most gracious of hosts, people from around the world joined in on everything Drupal. If you attended this year’s DrupalCon, making the trip across hundreds of miles of the Midwest from the colorful state of Colorado, then you know that Tennessee Hot Fried Chicken was not the only attraction that we know many of you sought. Of course, Nashville is Music City and we hope that between all of the sessions and great speakers, you had the chance to listen to and explore all of the history and music that Nashville has to offer.

The Future of Drupal

Although the Music City is filled with lots of music and history, this year’s DrupalCon was focused on the future of Drupal. Dries Buytaert, our fearless leader and founder of Drupal, has expressed that however developer driven Drupal has become, it is evolving into a powerful framework for ambitious digital experiences. Many complaints about Drupal have been that a common best practice method of installation and use, along with easy-to-find and read official documentation were difficult to find. But Buytaert and the Drupal community are, and already have been, making great strides to make the official documentation easier to use and a lot easier to find. These updates have already made Drupal a lot more accessible by both developers and content editors alike and makes Drupal available to a broad range of projects, most notably, a lot more accessible to large enterprise projects.

No Longer a Comparison

As compared to other content management systems, most notable being WordPress or Joomla, Drupal has a rich history and highly-involved community of developers and people, who’s new initiative is to market Drupal better to businesses looking for comprehensive but easy to use and maintain web solutions. This year’s DrupalCon was really a call to all Drupal community members to focus on improving Drupal and making it accessible to CMOs, developers, marketing teams, and enterprise businesses. This has already been seen in many Drupal core additions like the most recent “Layouts” functionality, meant to further the vision of the UX initiative.

Selling Drupal

Ultimately, it is all about selling Drupal. We have, for a while now, been driven on a basis of the programming and development involved with Drupal, which in itself it great, yes. But if you are a car salesman trying to sell a car, you would not lead off your pitch with the specifics of a vehicle, such as the torque, gear ratios, etc. You would want to sell a particular vehicle based on what a potential customer would want to hear about a car, such as, “... this car involves little to no maintenance and pretty much drives itself” or “... this truck can pull a house off of it’s foundation”. Okay, maybe not that last example, but you get what we mean. It is time for you, as a valued Drupal community member, to get out in the world and promote Drupal as this great content management system that can quite literally be molded into whatever you need it to do and it will always perform to the highest standards available.

The Drupal community here in Colorado is thriving and supportive and along with the rest of the world, we should get out and spread the word about the advantages of utilizing the Drupal content management system. DrupalCon Nashville was about just that and how the system has an unlimited number of use-cases and how we should be marketing it as such.