Anti-Marketing of Drupal

Hi, I met with Austin after his talk on observer.com moving from Drupal to Wordpress at Wordpress Camp San Francisco. The primary driver for switching to Wordpress was that the new boss at observer.com was an experienced blogger, and a big fan of Wordpress. The deal was, re-build it in Wordpress or we will find someone who will. Despite being a Drupal shop, they chose to go ahead with re-building the site on Wordpress. There were lots of technical challenges because Wordpress is optimized for a single developer to develop and modify a site. There were also some scalability issues that they also needed Automattic to step in and help with.

As millions of bloggers and small website owners move into organizations they will champion Wordpress successfully as the CMS of choice. However, for organizations with more complex application development built by larger engineering teams Drupal's architecture and modular development lifecycle make Drupal the better choice. In the meantime, we should anticipate that tens of millions of websites of the hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet will switch to Wordpress and have success.

When thinking about Marketing Drupal it's best to think about how we in the Drupal community convey the value of Drupal to different audiences. In the case of Observer.com, the content editor audience loves the Wordpress User Experience. Drupal's answer to that is that Drupal doesn't have great content editor experience out of the box because the developers who build Drupal sites find that the UX and workflow for content editors at organizations is different every time. Therefore the emphasis is on not getting in the way of the developer while trying to customize the content editor UX. Obviously, there's still a long way to go for a better default UX in core and Drupal products.

For web application developers Drupal's strength's are the rich APIs of Drupal core, the huge library of contributed modules, the rich pool of talent in the PHP and Drupal community. For architect's Drupal's ability to integrate into an enterprise and the solid track record of Enterprise "ilities" (scalability, maintainability,etc..) features are key. The fact that Drupal can be a web platform from the simplest to the most complex sites is key for organizations with dozens or hundreds of sites. For the IT executive, access to a large competitive talent base, platform support, the agility Drupal provides to respond to the business, the innovation of the Drupal community are the key value propositions.

For the business owner, total cost of ownership, training for their content editor and technical staff are key, and having a platform that can be customized to their business needs and goals are critical.

We also have to acknowledge that the legitimacy and demand for Drupal talent worldwide is driving salaries up, and that means there are going to many instances where competing for Drupal talent is no longer viable. I know the background on many of the sites that moved off Drupal, and in many cases the fundamental problem was that they couldn't hold on to their talent either due to competitive offers or because the work and the organization were declining in interest. When that happens, we should expect to see new teams brought in and for there to be a re-platforming to one of the many viable completing web platforms.

Let's acknowledge losses, but also recognize that the largest organizations in the world are standardizing on Drupal as their web platform and that we are seeing explosive growth of Drupal in strong markets like North America, Europe, and India.

Kieran