Robert Fabian is a management and systems consultant in Canada, who has been in computing for many decades. Robert has been involved with CIPS, the Canadian Information Processing Society for a long time too, and they are moving to Drupal as a platform to manage their 30-odd sites, after evaluating other CMS/CMF systems.
I met Robert at the Ontario Linux Fest in October 2007, and then yesterday at the Drupal Users Group meeting in Toronto.
Robert has a unique view of Drupal, being in the information processing field himself.
He writes (slightly edited, mainly for formatting):
The big advantages that I see for Drupal are:
- the solid (and improving) basic architecture, and
- the growing body of developers who contribute to the community.
It's the developer's CMS.
This puts me in mind of the old IBM adage ... "If you can't fix it, feature it!"
Drupal could, unabashedly,
- proclaim itself as the developer's web content management system or web content development platform.
- Aim at developers.
- Encourage developers to package versions of Drupal aimed at specific communities [Khalid: already underway with install profiles],
- perhaps even encouraging or allowing them to charge a fee for such packaged versions.
This flies in the face of "How Drupal Will Save The World". That may be asking too much. If a potential user can't automatically recognize the benefit of a solid basic architeture, then nothing is going to directly convince them that Drupal is the CMS they should be using. They might see the benefit of a packaged version that strips out many of the choices, but not full bore, native Drupal.
Something to shake up things and stir up the pot ...
Comments
Author Comment
Khalid got it right. The quote is accurate.
The other important dimension of the argument, to my way of seeing things, concerns the reason developers get behind an open source project. With end user oriented projects, there is very little direct benefit to the volunteer developer. Maybe that's why the big open source end user oriented projects have corporate sponsors, ... who see benefit in that sponsorship.
With Drupal, there will be a direct benefit to the developer who contributes to the community. Many end users will find Drupal attractive, but daunting - there are too many options and to many new ways of doing things. The learning curve can be very steep. Many users will need help from developers who are active contributors to the Drupal community.
The developers who contribute to Drupal are positioned to reap a significant reward - they can deliver powerful and flexible web services at very attractive prices. Moreover, the open source nature of Drupal means that it's "safe(er)" for a larger organization to turn to even a very small developer.
It adds up to a win-win-win. The community wins by having a platform that gets stronger, more powerful, and more flexible. The end users win by being able to obtain web services that are unrivaled in terms of power, flexibility, future, and cost. And the developers win by being particularly well positioned to respond to end user needs.
The argument is strong enough that I think it makes sense to feature it. It's a win-win-win.
Bob Fabian
Drupal's Greatest Asset
I was just in the process of writing my own thoughts on all of this when I noticed this post.
Why a developer-centric Drupal is good for Drupal (the project) and Drupal (the product). Its a bit long winded but entirely inspired by Bob's talk.
http://becircle.com/drupals_greatest_asset
andre
Occam's razor of CMS
Drupal's current economic prowess is based on it's appeal to developers and site developers, so it's natural to target that community.
Businesses create web applications because they create value. Drupal allows developers to create those valuable applications quicker, and at the same time it's clean code, extensible architecture, and APIs allow developers to meet the unique needs of businesses.
However, at the macro-level we see at least 80 competitive WCMS's with relatively small technical differentiations. e.g. a well funded engineering team, such as Alfresco, have found it straight forward to produce a competitive WCMS. The future winners of web content management are not clear.
So Drupal must continue to compete on meeting the needs of end users. Drupal must remain at least competitive as a CMS, and that means having a good user experience on par with other leading WCMSes like WordPress, Joomla, Plone, Alfresco, and a long list of others. A focus on developers would make Drupal competitive in the web application framework market place, but likely cause it to fail in it's core market.
Drupal's future lies in being successful with a diverse group of programmers, site developers, and end users. If we fail to target the next audience, web site designers our competitors in web application frameworks or web content management systems will gladly meet their needs.
If proclaimed ourselves "the developers web content development platform" we would be confirming the worst rumors about Drupal, that we don't target end users or non-programmers. Worst-off we'd be missing the future audience, web site designers, who are key to our growth.
Cheers,
Kieran
To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield
New Drupal career! Drupal profile builders.
Try pre-configured and updatable profiles on CivicSpaceOnDemand
Core Audience/Market?
Points well taken.
I don't really think that this should be a discussion about proclamations (e.g. Drupal is the best X or Y). Its an acknowledgment of the significance of Drupal being a developer-centric platform and the benefits that result from that.
They key differentiator to an audience of businesses or organizations considering adopting Drupal is not that Drupal is developer-centric. The differentiators are a result of Drupal being developer-centric.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'web designer'. But, if you mean HTML and CSS ninjas (that masochistic breed that wrestle Internet Explorer's insanity in a quest for cross browser beauty) we really are talking about another kind of developer - the theme developer. And Drupal 6 is much more theme developer friendly than ever before (thanks to developers making it so). But that's neither here nor there. I'm curious about your other statement.
I have to ask - when you consider Showcase sites by type or Showcase sites by Industry what is considered 'core market'? How is Drupal failing its 'core market[s]'? And which of the 'core market[s]' needs are actually being met by Drupal?
andre
Web designer, core market definitions
I differentiate at least 4 audience types in my comments. 1) End user, 2) Web Designer 3) Web site developer 4) developer
2) Web designer is the person responsible for the aethetics and user experience of the site. Traditionally this is an HTML, CSS, Graphics, IA, type person. This is a person who finds the learning curve for Drupal a little too steep. They find that it's too difficult to understand how to change Drupal core, or Drupal modules to get the CSS classes and IDs to come out of Drupal. As a result, they hack at the surface of Drupal to get the job done, rather than utilize Drupal as a design tool that enables them. Currently, Drupal enables content producers, site developers, and developers more than it does designers.
3) Web site developers are the people who use Drupal to build sites, and know how to file issues, use a snippet, possible code a little PHP in the template or a block, but they are not yet a full Drupal module developer. But with Drupal they can mostly assemble a very nice site.
To address the statements about Drupal failing it's core market, I mean the content producers and site developers as the core audience. I should have said audience, instead of market. I apologize for the confusion.
I can research the numbers but most Drupal users are not web site consultants. They are people who want a website, personal blog, community web site, corporate site, intranet, etc. This group of people represent the bulk of the community, and contribute the most by adding documentation, filing issues, posting in forums, subscribing and posting on mailing lists. But as individuals, their contributions tend to be smaller, because Drupal isn't the source of their livelyhood, merely a tool used in their professional or personal lives.
The links you pointed at are an attempt to identify where Drupal excels and also to identify what market segments Drupal has penetrated. We should have another showcase by Audience wiki page to show how different types of users are using Drupal.
Cheers,
Kieran
To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield
New Drupal career! Drupal profile builders.
Try pre-configured and updatable profiles on CivicSpaceOnDemand d
The power of the development community
I do a lot of public speaking at journalism gatherings all over the world -- conferences, seminars, workshops -- because right now one of the hot topics is the shift from one-way communication to interaction and community process facilitation.
I'm there to talk about journalism, not technology, but technology invariably comes comes up as a question: How do we do this? How can we compete in a world dominated by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo? What vendors will save us?
I find myself explaining open-source software development process (which I think has very close parallels with the shift that's taking place in journalism) and recommending open-source solutions, especially Drupal.
There are a lot of approaches to open source software development. MySQL is at one end of the spectrum -- source code is free, and presumably the MySQL developers get some help from the user community because of that. But MySQL looks to me like a closed-source, corporate process that happens to create an open product and depend on an open business model. I don't hesitate to recommend MySQL, but when I talk about Drupal I point to a completely different set of strengths.
If you're going to base your business on somebody else's software, your due diligence should include an examination of the process that creates that software and the likely future of that software.
Here is where I think Drupal shines for the reasons Fabian identifies. Drupal has a robust open process for core development that makes the platform very developer-friendly. The frequent release cycle and policies regarding backward compatibility can be challenging, but the result is rapid improvement in ways that support growth. The modular architecture incents developers to contribute components that can enable Drupal to grow in unexpected directions without upsetting the apple cart.
Part of my job is horizon-watching. Often -- not always, but frequently -- when I see something that needs strategic attention, someone already is working on a module that applies.
brand identity
I believe that "Drupal the developer's choice" is the most powerful brand a CMS could wish for. What's more we can go stand on our heads, but that is really what Drupal is, that's where it's roots lie. Differentiation is what it's all about in marketing and if we are differentiated in this way we should embrace it.
Even end-users see the value of "the engineer's choice". This doesn't mean that we have to lose all the other end-user markets. In fact with the wave of distributions that is now coming we'll start to see more diversification like Civicspace with "build on Drupal" brands. That way we can stay true to the core of Drupal which is a developers community and still go after an ever expanding range of end-users.
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