![]() They kind of frowned on commercial involvement, maybe it was confused with proprietary. In the early days it was a renegade movement, anti-establishment. Buytaert spoke to The Reg via Zoom "The second thing is less about the product but more about open source. Because of that Drupal is still considered as a bit harder to use than competing systems. In the last 20 years the world has changed, the primary end user for a content management system like Drupal is no longer a developer but a marketer, typically a less technical person. "When I released the first version of Drupal it attracted like-minded people, meaning other developers, and we got a bit of tunnel vision, it was for developers by developers. What would he do differently if starting the project today? "I would lead with a strong user experience," he said. Buytaert is now project lead for Drupal and CTO of Acquia, a cloud platform for marketing sites. Drupal is derived from the English pronunciation of druppel, Dutch for drop. When he graduated he put it on the web, intending to call it dorp, which is Dutch for village. That was at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2000. ![]() "When I started Drupal 20 years ago I built it for myself, for me with my friends," Buytaert told us. Drupal users running smaller sites typically don't have time to participate so download and go away.Interview Content management system Drupal is 20 years old, prompting its founder to talk to about its evolving role, why it shifted from a policy of breaking compatibility with each release, and concerns about JavaScript bloat causing issues for those with poor connectivity. ![]() People manning Drupal's issue queues and driving feature requests and bug reports actually come from bigger sites because their devs can take the time to contribute. Buytaert admits those participating and adding features in the past haven't necessarily been representative of the typical Drupal user. The desire to straddle both small and big users suggests there's a dynamic tension inside the Drupal camp. One of Gardens' first enterprise features will be Site Duplication – recently added to the private beta – for a site owner to clone an existing site's design, functionality, information architecture, and content onto a new site. "While there's a small performance hit for the smaller users, it's worth that penalty because small sites can grow big over time – you don't want people to migrate off the platform over time."ĭrupal Gardens also gets enterprise attention. If we want Drupal to grow it has to grow in the enterprise," Buytaert said. ![]() This will mean a performance hit for smaller sites – a calculated gamble for growth. Therefore, Drupal 7 will introduce a database abstraction layer, out-of-the box, so that big sites can use Drupal with multiple databases. Buytaert recognizes that for real growth – and we presume money too, given that Buytaert is chief technology officer and co-founder at Drupal software and services company Acquia – Drupal needs wider uptake among paying enterprise customers like Sony. There's one problem with going mass market. The results: there will be one-click access to features like creating posts and moderating content, while developer features will need a few more clicks to be uncovered, Buytaert said. ![]()
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