From content management to digital experience management
Happy 13th birthday Drupal! It's hard to believe so much has happened with Drupal when it really just started as a little hobby project. I'm super proud of what we accomplished. After all these years, it continues to be a passion and labor of love to grow, maintain and sustain the larger community.
A birthday presents us with a great time to look back and reflect. Though there are many things we could reflect on, I'd like to use this post to look at the bigger picture and share my perspective on the market. This means this blog post mainly offers a business perspective rather than a technical perspective.
From web to digital
Drupal was grown out of my own interest in the web. Today, it is a critical component of many organizations' operations. For most organizations, having an online presence — like a website or mobile application — is an essential part of running their business, and it only continues to grow in importance. The rise of mobile and social media means we no longer talk about having a "website" or having a "web application;" instead we talk about the totality of the "digital experience." Providing visitors or customers with a great digital experience is no longer a nice-to-have; it is a make-or-break point.
From content to experiences
For Acquia, creating high quality content and driving traffic to our site was the #1 way to generate new leads in 2013. This is true for the vast majority of organizations; high-quality, valuable content remains important. Five years ago, this meant if you had a business, and you didn't have a blog, it was time to start one. Today, it involves so much more than creating pages or cranking out new sites; you create and manage your content, and find ways to promote and reuse it across multiple channels to generate awareness and reach more people. You track and measure all of your efforts and try to optimize the content for different users. Content is gold, but delivering the right content to the right user at the right moment in the right format is platinum. It's no longer just about publishing content; it's about managing the entire experience of a site visitor or user over time.
From mobile to context
Just like in the last half decade or so, "mobile" has completely redefined the internet, in the next half decade or so, "contextualization" will redefine it once again. The next big challenge, and opportunity, for Drupal, is figuring out how to make it a platform not just for content creators to deliver essentially the same content to users in their preferred language on their preferred device, but a platform for content creators to deliver the most appropriate content to each individual user.
Digital experience platform
The short of it is that Content Management Systems (CMSs) have evolved into technology platforms that manage complex, contextual digital experiences. Managing the totality of a visitor's interactions is complex and requires an array of tools. Just as creating optimal mobile experiences involves multiple approaches and technologies, from responsive design to native apps, from leveraging browser capabilities to leveraging best-practice javascript and PHP libraries, so too creating optimal personalized digital experiences will involve a mix of approaches and technologies, from building some APIs and capabilities into Drupal itself, to integrating with other tools.
As the Drupal community, we need to stop thinking of Drupal as a "content management platform" and start looking at it as a "digital experience platform" used to create ideal visitor experiences. This means publishing content that is easily accessible on multiple devices, and ensuring the site can be easily integrated with other tools, such as social media sites and customer relationship, e-mail and campaign management systems. We've been doing this for many years but it doesn't hurt to recognize the trend, double down on it and evolve our vocabulary.
You may have heard me talk about Web Experience Management (WEM) in the past, but we should move away from that term. The fact is that "web" doesn't capture all the possible touch-points for Drupal, be it a website, mobile device, game console, wearable device, or something else.
Creating better interfaces to develop structured content, and delivering that content to a variety of devices and channels, is an important part of creating ideal customer experiences. Another important part is the ability to personalize what content to present to a user. Though it will be interesting to see how CMSs facilitate this direction, it seems imperative that CMSs deliver tools to empower content creators to not only create great content, but to also help them make decisions about what content to deliver to whom, when and in what format. Over time, these content decisions will become more data-driven and automated, and less opinion-based and manual.
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Few CMSs are actually growing in market share; our industry will continue to consolidate further in 2014. The fact most CMSs become less and less relevant isn't a surprise since CMSs are becoming more complicated. The CMSs that will survive are those that (1) are able to keep up with the speed of the Internet and (2) offer the least amount of friction to adopt. Open source CMSs that foster a healthy community are well positioned to win in the long run. Drupal's biggest challenge going forward is to create a user experience that gets out of a user's way and lets them do their business regardless of how simple or complex their task is. This is why I'm so passionate about in-place editing, and usability in general, but also creating a great developer experience. It's important that we continue to focus on those goals in 2014 and beyond.
For a long time, there has been somewhat of a misconception about Drupal's viability for the largest, most complex deployments. Analysts, technology decision makers and proprietary competitors such as Sitecore and Adobe will claim that Drupal is great for simple sites but lacks the scale and depth of features needed for enterprise deployments. They're wrong! They only have to look at how GE, White House, MSNBC and many others are using Drupal. Drupal 8 is in a great position to take this "digital experience management" to the next level and to further cement Drupal's reputation; from the mobile improvements, to the authoring experience improvements, to APIs, to getting even better at structured content, Drupal 8 is set up for growth.
We've come a long way in the past 13 years. I'm immensely proud of our community for making this awesome contribution to the betterment of the internet for everyone. But we also have a lot of work ahead as the internet, just like the drop, is always moving. Drupal 8 will continue to help democratize web publishing and digital experience management. This is exciting since we can bring these tools to the masses (including individuals, small and large organizations) rather than only being available to those that can afford the million dollar license fees sold by proprietary software vendors. Happy birthday, Drupal!
— Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert is an Open Source advocate and technology executive. More than 10,000 people are subscribed to his blog. Sign up to have new posts emailed to you or subscribe using RSS. Write to Dries Buytaert at dries@buytaert.net.