 Okay, it's one o'clock. I think we're missing some stragglers from lunch-related stuff, but That bends the brakes. Either you eat or you do Drupal. You gotta choose one Hi I'm Jeff If you have run into me in the Drupal community, you'll probably know me as Eaton I will be your renter for today or at least for the next hour or so I'll try to be friendly as I rant, but I will probably gesture vigorously and make enthusiastic and sometimes exasperated noises, so Apologies or welcome Join in if you'd like whatever I'm with a company called Lullabot. Again, you may have heard of us We we do cool stuff and we work with Drupal. We've been doing it for Years and years and years and I lose track of just how long But we have fond memories of Drupal for which is sobering We work with large small clients We work with companies that are building large websites are maintaining hundreds of websites We do public training with individuals who are Building their own home sites or who've just been hired by a company who said hey We're doing Drupal and they have to learn how it works and all kinds of stuff which is Sort of like saying hey, we're awesome okay, it is but One of the things that I think has been interesting about the work that we've been able to do over the past five years is that we Have worked with a really wide range of people inside of the Drupal ecosystem We're a relatively large company in like the small to mid-sized world. We're about 25 people But we've worked with companies ranging from like, you know multinational conglomerates who want to roll out 200 plus site multi sites for Britney Spears and stuff or a guy who's literally running a local website for his small town's businesses so they can post specials and It's been a really interesting experience being able to on an ongoing basis talk with lots of people on both sides of that spectrum And that has at least to some extent helped shape a lot of the way. I see the Drupal community It's that there's a really really large spectrum in there also Of late we have launched video an online video training service called Drupalize me Which we find is getting in even more interesting mix of you know Different people who wouldn't even be coming to like training workshops and stuff like that But they say hey, yes, I would like to use views I would like to watch a video of views. Let's go So it's very very interesting Just as an FYI This presentation is going to be full of opinion There will in fact be several facts but if the stuff that I'm saying here is Anything that you disagree with or you feel that I'm missing something fundamental in the way that I'm understanding or Like seeing the Drupal community Let's talk about it come on to Drupal org Start a conversation ping me via email go to groups dot Drupal org or whatever. I mean we we encourage this kind of stuff For talking about code or for architecture or for you know What's our next big initiative or feature push in Drupal? but we really don't necessarily have a culture of Understanding ourselves we sort of have a culture of saying oh, I'm me. I do this with Drupal That's what we do with Drupal. We Do this thing that I do. I mean it's it's not necessarily conscious but I think we all have a very strong tendency of Projecting the way that we approach Drupal onto the whole of a really really large and extremely diverse community And the topic today that I'm going to be talking about is Technically about the difference between Drupal as a framework and Drupal as a product versus Drupal as like a platform that people build on But I think really the deepest question that underlies those things is who is Drupal for What kind of people what kind of users of Drupal are we really imagining when we try to build stuff? And we try to imagine a course for the future So to start off This is Bob He is my cheese monger, and he is awesome I can walk up to a little shop in the town that I live in and he will tell me oh a guy named Willie just brought a bunch of cheese wheels out of this cave in, Wisconsin and I got some I know you're gonna love this like oh awesome. Thank you Bob, and it's just great I love cheese I found out About two years after I started going to his cheese shop that he has a Drupal website I didn't even know he had a website, but then he was like yeah Yeah, I've got a website and a friend of his made it for him, and he's got one and I looked and I was like hey That's Garland That's yellow Garland, and and there's a cheese cart instead of the Drupal head, and that's his website He doesn't even know what Drupal is, but to some extent he is using Drupal He is an audience for Drupal, and there are actually a really really large number of people whose Experience with Drupal is at that level they use it as someone who occasionally knows they should like log into their website And update stuff or tell their customers about something And it's important to him because he wants to tell people about new cheeses coming in or specials that they can you know use It's not like he doesn't care, but for him. He's caring about a particular goal He wants to engage with people he wants to have a website because he knows that's important But it's just a friend of his that happened to recolor Garland and set up a website for him Sort of at a different point in the spectrum. This is somebody named Heather She ran on a blog that got really popular And it ended up getting its own sort of side community of people who commented on it And she started a forum for it and now people have lots of forum discussions And she wanted to sort of take this community website that she managed to the next level And she hired someone to help her build a Drupal website to do that and to sort of help with the technical side of managing it This is not Heather is not someone who's like a technical, you know, oh, I don't like technology You know just make me a website kind of thing. She she really cares about how it works But also building websites is not what she does. It's not what she is passionate about She wants to get to a particular place. She has a community. She wants to manage it She wants to engage with it and she wants people to be happy with it And she hired somebody to help her build a Drupal site to do that This is somebody that you may have actually seen wandering around a couple of different Drupal cons. His name is Eric Just out of curiosity. Has anybody here ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000? Okay, there's a couple of people. It's a Television show that ran in America for like seven years or something and got this cult following It's just like silhouettes of two guys or like three guys in a movie theater Heckling a movie and they run terribly bad like 1970s movies and they heckled them and that's the show and it's People love it. Well, the show got the show ended up ending and now they do digital sales They sell MP3's of the heckling so that you can say awesome I have a copy of inception and I want somebody to make fun of it and you can get the MP3 for the inception heckled track and bam you have your night with fellow geeks Set it's ready to roll Eric is the guy who manages their website. It's built with I think uber cart. It's I think running on D6 And they they love it. They really like it He runs an e-commerce site He has he writes code And he even donates back some of the modules that he's written for this There's community engagement going on But it's also in a different kind of way than we're you then we're often used to talking about at Drupal con It's not like he's diving in and working on new core patches for Drupal or he's a person Who is the maintainer of such-and-such module and he's not at a shop that's going out and you know Well, we've got these clients. We're building websites for he is a person who is the caretaker For a particular website and he curates it and manages it Both on a code level and like oh somebody's orders didn't get processed, right? I've got to take care of that kind of level day in and day out This is this is Larry You may have also seen him wandering around Drupal con Perhaps gesturing vigorously and arguing with other people He is a software developer. He works for a Drupal shop that builds large websites for large clients Palantir And he also is a very very heavily active core Drupal developer He is one of the people that actually makes Drupal like we download Drupal core and he has Been a part of me creating that thing From his perspective like Drupal is a tool that's used to build things for clients for the company He works for and it's also something that he pours a lot of passion into like the actual making of Drupal is something That he's very passionate about and he cares about both for professional reasons and I Think on aesthetic, you know as an aesthetic issue, you know, it needs to be good because we're making this I promise we'll we'll be through the bios in a little bit But I think I think it's interesting as I've started compiling some of these different things Realizing just how diverse people who care about Drupal and have a stake in it are This is John He's actually the editor of the Economist I'm I Would put money on the fact that he doesn't actually care what Drupal is He may know of Drupal. He may know about Drupal His magazine now runs on Drupal their website is a Drupal website But he doesn't care about it in the same way that Larry cares about it And he doesn't care about it in the same way that Heather who runs her community site cares about Drupal He wants his editorial staff to be happy and he wants the magazine's website to not go down and he wants it to be able to you know Do the things that their advertisers say they need to do. I mean, it's it's very pragmatic Interests that he has in Drupal. I'm willing to guess. I don't know him personally, but we can imagine his desires. I think But again, that's that's a very different set of needs and desires from any of the other people This is somebody else. It's a friend of mine. Her name is Emma She has actually been in the Drupal community longer than I would say a fair percentage of Drupal people like probably 2004 or so is when she really started getting involved 2003. Oh, okay. So basically she can she can shake her get off my lawn kids cane at all of us But she also works with Drupal at a level that is totally off the radar For the vast majority of the conversations that we have as a community She trains people to make websites for under a thousand dollars with Drupal and you know The whole concept of the long tail that you know Amazon and Netflix Instant and all that stuff have pioneered I think should at least have established the idea that There are a lot more people in that long tail of I need to make a website And I can't actually spend as much as I spent on my car for it There's a lot more of those people than there are editors of the Economist That's not that one is more important than the other. It's just they're very very different and Like this is one of the sites that she ended up either building or helped one of the people that she works with build It's Essentially like is it a food co-op? Something along those lines. Oh, okay. I'm I had a screenshot of the food co-op site. Okay That's the confusing thing about greens. You think oh greens sounds like a salad. Oh, it's a party Speaking of Americans This is this is Barack He he works at an organization whose office employs Probably several dozen people to build a website for him and it happens to be a Drupal website Again I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that he doesn't actually have a whole lot of personal vested interest in the new database API or Whether we not whether we ship a really good install profile with core or not On the other hand, he has a really huge vested interest in Drupal working and being good at what it does because as it turns out if Drupal is insecure and Something goes horribly wrong and you know a Giant picture of a kitten gets uploaded to the front page of the White House website Nobody's happy And being able to do the things that he needs to do in order to communicate to an entire Country essentially the way his website needs to support that it's a whole class of needs and desires and and Criteria for deciding whether or not this works. That's just in a different universe from a lot of the other people that we've been talking about before I think the really important takeaway with this is the idea that all of these people are actually really actively participating people in what makes Drupal both in terms of directly participating in our community and in these engagement kind of events like Drupal con but also In shaping the future direction of Drupal both in terms of hiring people to make things happen because they need them to happen or just Agitating and saying hey, we need this done or whatever all these people have an interest And their needs differ dramatically from each other The biggest challenge that I think we face is that all of these different needs that these people have We've spent a really really really long time working very hard to make all of them very very happy We can probably kill one of those varies well Maybe we've just made them very very happy instead of very very very but you know We are our goal has been to make everyone thrilled and We're actually hitting a point where a lot of that awesome low-hanging fruit the things that we can just do to make everyone thrilled we've harvested a whole lot of it and We're at a point where we have to start making difficult choices because the things that help one of those Constituencies the people who represent my cheese monger stuff that make him really really happy with the Drupal that he Experiences are very different from the things that make the editor of the economist very very happy or that make Larry Garfield Who wants our api's to be pristine and good and solid very happy? It's not that we have to decide who we like and who we don't like it's not that we decide which one is important or not It's that we have to start asking how do we prioritize these choices that we make Because our attempts to avoid making these hard choices our attempts just to help everybody Simultaneously have been killing us with complexity. I've spent probably the last year like presenting and writing about the complexity cost Of the way that we've been approaching Drupal and that's actually it's a really serious problem. I mean Drupal 7 I think is About two and a half times larger than Drupal 6 in just in terms of like the size of the download And the problem isn't you know, how many K you have to transfer over the wire to download Drupal It's we have a community that actually manages and maintains this piece of software and as it gets bigger That means it's harder for us to do that it takes more work This isn't like the end of the world, but it means that we can't just keep adding complexity to satisfy everyone simultaneously without killing ourselves Which brings us back. I think to that first question that was the product slash framework Slash platform thing the question that at least hypothetically is you know, what this presentation is about I Probably not a big secret at this point that I think that Question the split of whether Drupal is a framework for developers or a product for end-users is event has been a really hot Topic and has come up a lot as a potential way of resolving some of this tension Before I take a strong position on that I want to at least like set some Ground rules for what I'm talking about when I use the word product and what what I mean when I say framework a Product is something that helps you do something Your goal. Well, okay. There's some people whose goal when using an iPhone is to use an iPhone It's like I just really like it. I like tapping on things. Yes But at the end of the day a product is Something that you use to get to an end goal that you care about that you value Wordpress is popular not because people really really love a piece of software named wordpress and clicking on it and typing on it Is just thrilling They use it because they want to communicate with people because they want to blog It's a product in the sense that it is focused Relentlessly on people who want to blog can use wordpress to blog It has a mission statement that is basically three words long. You should blog There's not really any confusion around that there are other kinds of products obviously I mean, you know games software packages stuff like that But ultimately even products that can be extended and built on top of them stuff like that The real key differentiator is that kind of focus on a specific narrow articulatable goal and Make everybody happy is not a narrow goal On the flip side you've got frameworks these are things that you use to make Products like a box full of tools. Yes There is enjoyment that you can derive from like woodworking and stuff like that But even people who are doing say woodworking and really love that are usually making a chair Or making a table or something like that. They are creating something that has a purpose not simply Shaving wood shavings because it's just really fun Again, I don't want to exclude anybody who just really enjoys woodshaving So I won't make that a 100% statement, but it's it's a big difference between that product mentality of Focus on an end goal beyond the tool versus a tool which is for making products for people it does get a little fuzzy sometimes because a Tool is a kind of product for people who make products, you know You could say like oh well my you know an IDE that I did that I write Drupal code in I bought that It was a product. I use it and I'm very happy with it, but you know, it's not like you know It's not a framework. It's it's code the distinction here isn't code versus design or UI versus the database or the guts of the program or whatever it's What is the purpose of it? What is it, you know, how narrow is the design and the purpose and can I even articulate that and if we look at a framework as Tools that you make products with I think that can help us clarify things a little bit I keep pointing my remote at the monitor not my computer. That doesn't work at all The third one that I don't think has gotten them as much discussion the Drupal community is this concept of a platform The idea of a platform is kind of fuzzy things like you know the lamp stack that we run Drupal on traditionally That's a platform People talk about the windows platform or you know the iOS platform for people who want to write apps for you know iPads and iPhones and I think ease and stuff like that But beyond just software and beyond just operating systems stepping back the idea of a platform is It's a thing that lets you use Products it's an enabling piece for those products that people actually care about So like the person who wants to blog Lamp is a platform that allows them to use WordPress which is a product and there's an end goal is still that Final destination that things they want to get to It doesn't necessarily have to be an operating system, but it's this idea of an enabling piece It's very important, but isn't necessarily their focus Then you know again people don't go out and buy a new version of windows or a new version of you know Mac OS or something like that just because they're thrilled about Changing the version number on a piece of software It's because of things that it gets them and things that will be built on top of that that they want to take advantage of Just out of curiosity. Does anybody remember a piece of software called a hypercard? I love you people It was launched in about like I think 1987 by Apple and it went out It shipped free with ever like every single Macintosh It had this metaphor of like stacks and cards That you could like you basically had a paint program that you could make things you could make the background And then you could make the foreground and then you could put little clickable transparent buttons all over it And it would take you from one card to the next and people ended up wiring up amazing things with it like the first wiki Like word Cunningham the guy who made wikis and it ended up, you know talking about patterns and everything the first wiki was actually a giant hypercard stack that he made and Eventually when like the web started taking off he made a website that was the equivalent of that Anybody remember the game mist? Okay, yeah, no mist was a giant hypercard stack that they had a little bit of custom code They jammed into it that let them use color Hypercard triggered a really huge explosion in sort of homebrew do-it-yourself Software because under the hood not only could you use paint tools? You could start attaching scripts to those buttons and you could learn its little scripting language And you could wire up behaviors with things in a lot of ways It's very similar to the kinds of The kinds of things that people end up doing with Drupal when they enter via that I just need to do a thing And I heard I can use cck to wire this stuff up and views to wire this stuff up And then they learn a little php because well they need to make this other thing work a certain way It's got a lot of a lot of similarities And I think the passion of the community around hypercard is very very similar to the kind of passion that the Drupal community brings to bear It ended up being cancelled in like 1992 essentially and until the mid 2000s there were still people Writing hypercard stacks and like having meetups and like just Figurous about how much how awesome this platform was that's staying power And I think Although i'm not going to go into a lot of detail about it. I promise myself. I wouldn't just use this as a memory lane nostalgia thing Um, I think there are a lot of very interesting metaphors in hypercard's history for Drupal's future One of them is how difficult apple found it to figure out who hypercard was for Was it for Managers who wanted to run the lighting systems for their skyscraper Was it for a kid who wanted to do a like stack of cards about the solar system? They didn't really know because it was kind of for all of them and that was a really really difficult challenge Um, which I guess brings us back to I think an underlying question of What Drupal is? Has anybody seen this optical illusion before? Okay, a couple of people Depending on how you look at it. It's either a rabbit Or a duck It's kind of like a framework slash product Um Drupal faces a lot of that problem I mean the the question of whether or not it should be a product for people who want to do a thing Or a framework for developers who want to build something um People can't even answer what it is now because it's both simultaneously Developers build stuff on it people download it and without writing a lick of code Assemble things with it. Um, which is cool, but also challenging. Um, it's challenging because We have to make compromises on every side when we pursue all those directions Drupal the product At its worst moments Ends up looking less like an iphone and more like An old 1998 era phone duct taped to a cell phone duct taped to a credit card and The real problem isn't that it's got too much stuff duct taped on it's just we need to hire a good themeer That's what we need to do That's a theming problem. We could theme it to look like an iphone just you know, just budget for a themeer um And then there's Drupal the framework this toolkit that we talk about all these apis all these You know things these robust things that you can build anything you want to on top of make web apps with Drupal anything um The problem is Once you actually start working with it heavily and really trying to customize it in those kinds of directions It ends up feeling less like a giant box full of tools and more like the world's most complex swiss army knife ever using that To untighten a bolt or something means that you also have to figure out what you're going to do with the Magnifying glass and how you keep the tweezers from popping out and all that stuff um And then the solution is you can just use hook knife altar and you could just hide the fact Oh, no one will even know there's a magnifying glass in there You know, we love it. I love it. It's what I use day in and day out But at the same time it ends up sort of being like the platypus of software It's a product Param work Something don't even really know what to call it. It's it's sort of a mutant amalgamation of The product needs and the framework needs and all of this stuff glomped together And the downside is is that everyone ends up suffering for that The guy who just wants an iphone to take pictures with and make calls with Is carrying around an old brick phone strapped to a camera and the person who just wants to carve something awesome Out of wood has to flip out that one tool from the giant el grande swiss army knife and everybody's a little dissatisfied I you know it's I guess it I guess it might be a little impolitic at drupal con to say god that sucks Um, but quick show of hands. How many people work like professionally day in and day out with drupal? Okay, how many people have felt that at some point Okay, there's like six people. We're like no. No, I'm pretty cool with it You know, but I mean it is a significant point of pain in our community that the choices that have benefited one group sort of continually Pull on the other group in uncomfortable directions and then they tug back and it it's it's difficult um So I think one thing that I want to want to step back real quickly and look at is how we actually got here How did we get to the point that we have this weird mutant amalgamation software that's being pulled in all these directions? um I'm everybody's like heard the drupal origin story, right? You know trees and you know a bunch of his friends had like a dorm in 2000 and they needed shared internet access And then they made a message board in php and they started adding features to it and they were you know messing around with it and And uh, that's trees in and I think 2000 or 2001 with an excellent sombrero in his dorm That is sort of where drupal actually originated like the classic We had a small community of people who wanted to communicate and share news and information And this was like the era when slash dot was like three years old and the hottest new thing And you know the coolest thing you could do with your software package was like add comment moderation Just like slash dot had and you know rss feeds were a bold new initiative Um, and the new york times's front page on the web looked like that Yeah, that was pain um Drupal evolved a lot during that period of time. Um drupal version one two and three Were released inside of a period about a year and a half and pretty much the whole thing got rewritten over and over It was it was an open source project It was people messing around with code and enjoying it and doing something cool and building something essentially for themselves Um, now, I don't know if anyone noticed but up there in the corner. There's a couple of little people symbols that's um that's a running tally as this time counter increments of how many active developers there were On drupal.org versus how many active user accounts Like the number of people who had accounts on do and were in some way participating versus people who were building drupal And we could say well was that core or was it contrib and 2003 there wasn't any contrib repository We didn't even have modules that people that weren't in core There was just drupal and you could turn stuff on or off And if you wanted to you could hack it by writing up some code and dumping it in a folder called modules That was drupal at this point But this is when actually things started taking off in interesting ways. Um, is anybody heard of kernel trap It's a site that basically followed like linux software announcements and releases and um, it was one of the very first sites To start using drupal. It was essentially as far as I know the first site launched on drupal that wasn't One of drupal's own developers doing their own site. This was like the first Transition out of yeah, I needed to make a site and I wrote the software for it. It's called drupal um other people were using it Um and right around this time a little later than that is when the onion ended up converting to it It's a satirical newspaper in the u.s. That like is relatively popular in the sarcastic geek circles They converted to it and it was a big deal at the time And even more interesting at least to me is the howard dean campaign. Is anybody Heard about the dean campaign in the ua? Yeah, yeah dean He ran for president in the united states. Um during the 2004 election campaign But what's really interesting is that um his campaign really wanted to leverage social media and leverage The grass roots connection concept As a part of their campaign and one of the things that they wanted to do is they wanted to have a turnkey Website that somebody who is running like a local dean campaign could just drop in and turn on And have a howard dean campaign website And they hunted around and a couple of people somebody named like neil Drum and you know a number of different people who were involved in it found a piece of software called drupal And they made something called dean space that Was basically a heavily heavily hacked copy of like drupal 4.2 or something like that That any one of their campaigns could just drop in and turn on and they had a campaign website And I think this is this is really really a part of this era of drupal sites It was still people who would have otherwise been writing their own CMS or hand rolling some sort of crazy php scripts or web code or whatever Um, but they found drupal and they said, huh, okay Well, we can use this as the starting point for our community site or our communication or whatever Um, and this is about the time when the first Third party modules started getting released. There was like path module and an amazon api module So you could link to products on amazon Yay, there are modules Um, that was about it The next sort of big wave came around like 2005 or so quick show of hands How many people here were in the drupal community around this period of time? Okay, so yeah, it's the numbers start growing where it's no longer like weird tails from the distant past There's people who remember this era Um, and as you can see from the little count of people symbols up there You know the developers, you know, we we like grew by 50% in that era But the number of people who weren't active developers also was growing a lot faster Um, this was also the first drupal con 12 people I think maybe 13 people met in the basement of a bar in antwerp and said, yay, it's drupal con I think we may have buffs that are that small here This is when like drupal 4.5 shipped and they were a staggering 300 modules In contribe just how could you even know them all there were 300 But you know, there were hardcore geeks who would like say, yeah, I've downloaded them all I don't know the what modules do you work with all of them? um And you know people talked about there being thousands of drupal sites at this point whole thousands um, and this is when the concept of drupal as more than just Code that coders wrote so that they could make their website It'd be more than just that that really started emerging here That basement of a bar meeting that was the first drupal con That's where people started brainstorming about something that they called the content construction kit Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to write a new module from scratch every time we needed a new kind of content Because new because kinds of content was a relatively new concept at this point Nodes had arrived on the scene about a year and a half ago and immediately they started thinking well We need different kinds and it needs to be easier to make them So as far back as 2005 the ball was starting to roll for brainstorming trying to build tools that would allow them to without writing code Do these things and build out a drupal site? This is actually when a lot of the Older shops in the drupal world started emerging like Advomatic Civic actions, um ping vision four kitchens lullabot You know this was like the era when some of those earlier shops started emerging because they realized Oh, well a couple of us could like actually, you know Get jobs building drupal sites for people crazy, huh? This was the when the concept of the site builder A person who wasn't a dev who could go and build a site really started emerging and started taking off We move forward to like about two years 2007 um Yeah, that's when things really started taking off and again These are numbers that I got from drupal.org like number of people working on contrib number of people working on patches for drupal core number of people active on drupal.org Again, we all we a little over doubled the number of devs in that period of time But I think we either tripled or quadrupled the number of people who weren't devs and were operating that site builder capacity People who would take who could take the tools like views and cck and just assemble a working website Now a lot of them would quickly run into gaps that they had to learn some php and figure out how to like Spackle in the odd, you know missing bits and stuff, but it really was a significant significant shift And that's when drupal 5 got released and a year later Drupal 6 got released and people were starting to grumble about how long it was taking because you know Man, it was actually longer than a year to get drupal 6 out the door and man I just don't know if we can put up with that kind of weight But we also saw a huge adoption of drupal sites in this period of time. Um, I think Some of the interesting stuff that went on like, you know popular science magazine in the u.s Fast company magazine in the u.s britney spears website You know was became a drupal website the first drupal book That was focused 100 on drupal got published and we're like hey, we're real printed matter talks about us Which is funny and novel now because you can actually die under the load of a full bookshelf of drupal books at this point But you know then it was like sweet paper And this is when niche shops in the drupal community started emerging Curve, um, most whitesman's company who they focused entirely on my drupal data migration Just recently acquired by aquia, but this is when they got started like this was when the idea of niches In development and site building started becoming viable top-notch themes. What they do is theming They got started around this period of time But at the same time we were also starting to face like Greatly increasing amounts of complexity The small pieces loosely joined concept of just assembling a website out of these 80 different pieces Started turning everybody who thought they could just click things together into like a drupal integration Specialist who had to troubleshoot whether or not a particular version of cck and these five field modules worked with a particular release of views And then drupal 6 came along and they had to rebuild all the views from scratch And then they had to figure out c tools because then there was a dependency and oh and there's token But what about it, you know, I mean this is when the actual complexity Of even just using the point and click tools in drupal started ramping up And we started having to deal with that as a real problem But at the same time drupal was really becoming popular and huge numbers of sites were converting to it And that's actually when the concept of drupal as like a really serious actual Cash flush market people with actual checkbooks Wanted to pay people to make drupal websites or to work on drupal This really changed a lot of things. Um, this is when aquia was launched They were the first venture capital funded drupal company, which was this sort of sobering Oh my gosh. We're really real now. Not only are there books. There are investors, you know, it's crazy Um, but again, it's this scaling up trajectory that we were on um, and then you hit 2009 and um Again the number of those little developer symbols still growing. Yay On the other hand, um The comparison in percentages to um the rest of the active participating site building Involved in drupal invested in drupal community is starting is getting really really out of whack here The issue isn't that like all of these people are somehow like free riders who aren't carrying their weight or something like that It's just the natural growth curve of all of these developers building something for themselves And then starting to build tools like views in cck that save themselves work And then suddenly this whole other crowd of people finds it incredibly useful I mean we can hardly blame people for finding it useful um, but The numbers are actually even a little more sobering because I had to change the scale of this group versus that group For there to actually be a filled in person On there the actual percentage is roughly one third of a little person symbol actively working on drupal development That's sobering to think about Um, but at the same time we were also starting to focus on things like usability testing This is when like the first round of real actual series usability tests for drupal putting like non developers in front of it And actually recording what the heck confused and angered and baffled them This is when we started doing that and it was really sobering I think dris um did a keynote in which he had a video of someone doing eye tracking tests on like one of our admin screens And there was this For like the first 30 seconds as the eyes went around trying to find the button. Where's the field? I don't know what's going on and then it was like minutes Of this person just staring trying to figure out where just a single field was and that's when we sort of getting serious about usability Because we didn't want to have an an ugly uncomfortable eye tracking video like that again um But again, the rest of the community is also sort of humming along at this period of time too Using drupal, which you know shameless plug I co-authored It it was a book that was written 100 for people who were site builders not developers There was not a lick of php in it. It was just site building recipes for people who wanted to assemble sites out of drupal That's also when the webs the white house website went on, you know barack obama's website launched and It was a huge huge deal But again this same trajectory that we were dealing with two years earlier of The nice little cul-de-sac that we lived on where all the people who made drupal could walk out and wave to each other As they got their newspapers and go in write their patches Was turning into like a a nine level, you know Multi-turn pipe highway. We have infrastructure problems. We have infrastructure problems Managing our infrastructure problems. I mean it we're big We're big and our community has grown massively This is around the period of time where tools for managing drupal complexity Started becoming really popular things like features Agre to manage multi-site deployments Real attention on the role of install profiles, which had actually been talked about as early as like 2005 or 2006 And went into drupal really early This is when it actually really started bubbling up in people's minds. It's like my god. We really got to do something about this And oh, and I'm running long. So I got I got a cruise through this. I apologize but then All of these big infrastructure problems all these big challenges going on But at the same time the percentages of who seemed to be really Sunk deep into the guts of drupal and working on it and building it Was really out of skew for how many people who had a stake in it The people who you know the results of what that little tiny group of people were doing ended up rippling out and mattering to all of these folks So what's the point of all of that? The tension between all of these different groups is not a new thing in drupal People who want a site building product to assemble a website Versus people who want to write code on top of a nice little framework Those tensions aren't new. In fact, they go way back to the early days when the first non Drupal developers started building websites in drupal in like 2003 and 2004 and a lot of the themes just keep reoccurring This devs versus builders thing is one of the issues that we keep perennially referring to As like a big conflict in drupal Like the drupal 7 upgrade Builders are incredibly frustrated that contrib modules aren't ready that suddenly their toolbox for working with this awesome new version of drupal Has actually gotten dramatically smaller and they have to figure out how to make it happen But devs on the other hand are incredibly frustrated that so much of core has changed and it's so much work to port their old modules And suddenly there's that 80 gajillion people clamoring at the door saying why is it your module operated? And meanwhile the core developers are saying hey look core is much bigger You know, why don't you help us instead of working on your talk like a pirate module? Hey, I love talk like a pirate module. Um, I mean it this is this is a classic Challenge of lots of different groups that care passionately about something and it matters to them having different needs and different struggles But there are a couple of other things beyond just devs and Builders too. There's this concept of like newcomers to drupal versus those old timers people who Say, oh, yeah drupal. It's a community. You know, you just go into irc and you say hey And you toss out an idea and somebody says yeah, that's great. Let's make a module Yeah, well, but that was also like 2004 They were like a hundred people in irc and everybody complained about how busy it is And then we split into four channels and each of them has 600 people now. That's not the same kind of thing You know Getting a grasp on those kinds of changes It's really hard for the people who've been around for that long whose formative concept of drupal was Some devs building software because they needed it and the newcomers are saying hey, this feels exclusionary Why can't I make a dent in this community? I come into a room full of 600 people and I wave my hands and I shout and I've got a problem and I can't even get anybody to answer me and Maybe nobody noticed because it was just loud. There were 600 people in the room. This is a challenge They've got different needs and different even views of what the underlying fundamental problem is another interesting one that Blake Hall one of the developers at lullabot has mentioned is the conflict between shops Like drupal companies that build sites for other companies or for other people And then move on to the next website that they're going to build Versus site owners the people like eric at that at the beginning of the presentation who their job is to own A site and carry it through it's like raising a child not, you know, babysitting somebody That's a big difference because the needs of those site owners, you know, the whole don't hack core Well, yeah, that's a big problem for shops that are moving from site to site to site to site Because the next site that they come and work on if it's been hacked Well, how are they gonna? Oh, it's it's going to be a huge pain But for a site owner, you know, look, I'm babysitting the site for the next six years If I need to make changes to it, I'm going to make changes to it. I mean It's not that one is better or worse. It's just that the dramatically different perspectives on what the challenges and the needs are Um enterprise versus like independent websites and independent developers. That's another one like, you know Who can even really define enterprise other than like really really big and important? I mean, it's it's a challenge Um, and again the needs of the white house's website are very different than the needs of my cheesemongers That you know, that shouldn't be rocket science But it's like those are two significant pools inside of the community that are at odds And then there's the classic like hippies and capitalists, which is my favorite one This sometimes corresponds to the newbies and the old timers thing But the idea that you participate in Drupal because it's an act of love And we all are this community and we make our code and we give each other our code and we dance around the Drupal con Costume guy and we have a good time and you know That's awesome, and we've built tons of stuff with that too, but there's also a significant pool of very pragmatic Yeah, but I also need to eat and my kid needs to eat and I've got two people working for me Who are writing that code for you and love to do that dance around the Drupal con guy and I need to pay them And we need to figure out how to make this make money Again, it's not that that's like oh the soulless people have invaded It's just it's become large enough that they are actual genuine stakeholders And they're actually helping pay for the hippies So it's a big it's a big crazy mix And again, it comes back to this idea of different people with different perspectives and all of them being heavily invested in Drupal All of us are invested and we can't actually afford to just jettison Any of the people who are a part of that mix because we need all of them We need to actually have real difficult decisions in the Drupal world About what we're targeting and who we're trying to serve and how we're going to actually serve that broad mix of people I think there are a couple of different options and thankfully now the slides are moving a little faster So we should be good, but One of our options for this Is from the perspective of the people who actually build Drupal we could just stop And we could just like say Drupal is officially mature software Drupal core has the features it will have It's done. We will do security releases. We will you know, maybe You know do some minor updates if it stops working with a new version of ie or something like that But everything else it happens in contrib and it happens in the world of Developers building on top of that and the enterprise clients who need to customize it in some odd way or whatever It's mature software Now, you know the downside of that is Um It's hard to actually get people energized and engaged about something that you've officially said isn't going to change And you know in the world of the web, it's hard to get new developers Super jazzed about something that you said you've just poured concrete over and it's just going to stay that way forever But at the same time, you know, it it's that's a valid possible solution to this Instead of killing ourselves to keep doing more and more and more and more to satisfy that broad range of people We can just draw a line in the sand and say everybody gets to build stuff on top of that whatever you like I'm not actually in favor of that, but the daiquiris on the beach sound like an awesome awesome option um another another possibility is just Say forget it We pick one of those core constituencies and we say that is who Drupal is for Forget site builders They've served us well and they've been a strong part of the community for you know seven years or whatever But forget it. We are a development framework We're going to be like jango in php or we're going to compete with cake or alternately We are now an enterprise level Like content management solution for your intranet or your extranet I'm not hearing like thrilled noises from the I didn't need but the thing is is like these are valid choices We can just say That particular pool of stakeholders in the world of Drupal That's who we're for and we're going to focus on that and we're going to actually be good at helping them Instead of trying to help everybody at the same time and everybody else can use wordpress or jango or whatever The thing that we need to keep in mind is we're not doing anybody any favors by just saying no no no It's for you and it's for you and it's for you and you and you and it's for everybody Um because that ultimately gets us to the other option, which is just keep working harder The real problem with Drupal is that angie doesn't put enough hours in Yeah, no I I actually think that angie may have acted angie byron web chick Has actually developed working time distortion technology And she does work for 29 hours per day before napping That's my working theory And there's actually a lot of people in the Drupal community who pour that kind of insane energy into this And ultimately that's what it takes if we say that the solution is just keep targeting everybody and just work harder Or work smarter or whatever more of what we're doing Is not sustainable. It's not scalable randy fey Is doing a really really good core conversation on the problem of burnout in Drupal core development and Drupal community development It's a serious issue now because I mean You can't infinitely please an infinitely expanding group of constituents with one pool of people. It's really hard Um, it may be theoretically possible for the smartest people in the universe to come up with a Single solution that satisfies everyone But you know, that's like in the realm of what philosophers argue about over beers not things that I think a sane And healthy community can try to tackle effectively. You can't just keep that going It's just adding more and more and more plates and that dude is just going to get fried um A fourth option and this is again one of those terribly terribly ugly things for our community is we could say just fork it Github has a button for it. It can't be morally wrong um Except the fact that there are different Instituencies out there and some of the people who are most frustrated by certain kinds of things Developers they have the skills to just go and write their own They could write fruple or whatever they want to call it just fork it customize it. They've got a different vision They can go in a different direction. There's not anything fundamentally evil about that We've talked about it like it's evil, but really it's just a management headache for the droopal world We could even encourage it say hey if you don't like the direction We're taking with our catering to dog walking businesses in droopal then you can just fork it. Hey, it's cool um There are however significant downsides to this We've got this problem of multiple constituencies in our community depending on each other And we can't just jettison one of them You know if the enterprise people leave a huge a huge source of targeted funding for major improvements leaves And huge high profile sites that demonstrate to us that yes, we can scale and yes We can do really complex design tasks and stuff like that that goes away But if we totally say forget you to the huge pool of one-off site builders and small in small fish I want to make my cheese blog types on the other hand Well the numbers that drive droopal in a lot of ways the adoption Curve that makes droopal appealing to lots of developers and even lots of large businesses that goes away And if the developers leave well, we're back to sitting deckeries on the beach Because how long is it going to take to train a completely new batch of people? How to keep writing patches against form api, you know it We all kind of depend on each other and saying just fork Ultimately is a way of telling other people. Well, we're not going to kick you out, but you're welcome to leave That can be problematic too Ultimately, I think the best solution that is there for us the most promising solution is to accept That the needs of the developers who want to build stuff those old school people who would probably be writing their own cms If they hadn't found droopal and discovered that it did 80 of what they needed Those people do need a framework for building software that happens to be a web cms But at the same time that huge pool of people that giant mass of little gray person symbols that we saw They don't need a web app building framework What they need is tools to build certain kinds of websites or tools to manage their communities Or tools to say Run a web comic or whatever they need those kinds of things The good news is that we actually have the capability in droopal of building Those kinds of products on top of our framework. We call them install profiles We did the redheaded stepchild of droopal everybody says oh, it's install profiles. Yeah, go play. Hold on. We've got stuff to do We could do this and I honestly think it's one of the most promising approaches that we have Allowing us to divide Our software down the middle inside and say these are products for people And this is the toolkit that we use to build products I think that's really promising in part because One all of the other choices that are available to us that I can see alienate other groups inside of our large conglomerate community that we actually need That whole we can't afford to just kick out 50 of the community issue Well Treating it like a platform is at least a way To figure out how we can appeal to multiple constituencies without just building one monolithic thing that tries to make everybody happen and The other issue is you know We can kind of say we've got our cake and eat it too if we start moving product focus and Oh, well, if only we made the wizzy wig editor 15 prettier then Well, you know, maybe that's the kind of stuff that goes in a product that goes into an install profile that Customizes and configures the droopal framework for a particular class of end users who have a particular actually Describable use case that we could build against those kinds of things sort of They let us have our cake and eat it too because we can build those products using the toolkit But they actually get treated internally as separate things not just a big bundle So I believe I have negative three minutes somebody can yank me off the stage with a hook if they want to But I've got like three more slides um The first thing that we need to do is agree on the actual goal I've been saying what I think our goal should be, you know that framework with products built on the framework as install profiles I think that's a legitimate goal having an ecosystem of that kind of approach I think would be really useful But we have to agree on a goal some critical mass of us have to get on the same page about that Because we've always as a community been great at tactics and horrible at strategy Because we refuse to acknowledge that there are all these different constituencies pulling in different directions So we treat each little tug On the rope in different directions as a specific tactical issue that oh, well, it's this patch That was just that was a hard patch or oh, well, there's just arguments between these two modules We don't acknowledge that it's a higher level strategic question that we need to address And I think doing that and being honest about what we're doing that we are trying to answer these questions is really important the other part is Basically stepping back and organizing ourselves internally like the actual Drupal software We have to figure out in this thing. We call Drupal core and Drupal contrib and stuff like that What are the pieces that are really products and what are the pieces that are toolbox things that we use to build stuff pole module is not A piece of framework infrastructure It's a feature for a product that I think a lot of people like But it's one of those things that lives in that. Oh, you want to do community engagement. We've got polls to go with that It's not so I need an api. Yeah, but i'm gonna need polling You know it lives at a different place in that layer and I don't mean to pick on pole module But it's a really good example things like forums blogs, etc I'll live in that area And I actually kind of I I finally conceded this I used to champion something called small core Which was basically, you know, we we wanted to trim Drupal down to size So it was manageable and then profiles would just emerge in the wonderful future And I'm willing to acknowledge that I think that's not going to happen that way because we need to actively Cultivate and grow those product focused profiles They don't have to be like massive open atrium levels of customization and tweaking But even just saying yeah, we ship with a profile that's preconfigured for single user blogging And that's what it's preconfigured for nothing else or we have a user We have an install profile that core ships with that is for a small community website that wants to post news for members and is managed by four to six people Things like that that we can describe as products if we can cultivate those both in terms of the work to put them into core But also encouraging and actively Promoting and encouraging the people working on them in contriv and treat that as a very legitimate Piece of the Drupal ecosystem and a critical one I think that cultivation is something that's going to be very important for us because we need to do that Before we can ever afford to start shaving stuff off of what we think is Drupal core Cutting off features that site builders need is not going to magically make something for site builders grow over here But if we build something that appeals to them And work on the framework and our purpose is to sort of work on figuring out where those lines of separations are for now Well, we kind of have to accept that there's going to be temporary bloat in Drupal core because it's going to be getting features It's going to be adding profiles. We're building more on top of Drupal core in that period of time But that's temporary The long-term goal is to be able to say okay three years from now four years from now That community management profile that ships with Drupal core. Maybe that becomes a separate distro that can get its own three or four customized modules and Not just have that as something that's jammed into core Or maybe there's a large number of other profiles that are actually people's on ramp into Drupal rather than just downloading Drupal core And doing other stuff on top of it The idea of spinning off viable products that can survive as legitimate standalone downloads that people want to use for their own purposes And then keeping the framework as this toolkit that we use to build those things. I think that's really really promising Ultimately the question of whether or not Drupal is a product or a framework or a platform I think is really easy to answer at least for me Drupal is a platform It has a framework internally We build products on top of the Drupal platform either for ourselves Because we're devs who want to make websites or for our clients or for our peers or for our family members But the sites that we build and even the reusable models for sites that we build those are products And they're built on top of it Drupal is a framework or Drupal's framework is the shared toolbox that we use to make those products Right now our core download is both in one But I think if we try we can actually see what parts are what and begin to improve them as what they should be not just Terribly duct taped together things that we pretend are one We don't have to abandon one group. We don't have to abandon another But we need to at least acknowledge that there are different needs And start treating it like that frame like that platform with different internal components That's all I got Drupal's a framework Drupal's a platform Drupal's a product. Let's Those words are too easy to mix up Drupal's all of them But if we treat it like a platform we get a lot of benefits And I think we can make a lot more headway to pleasing people without killing ourselves So let's treat it like one. That's it