As is tradition at every DrupalCon, Dries Buytaert, creator of the Drupal project, has made a presentation to the community on topics that are of great importance to the community, communicating the vision of the project, past, present and future.
The Driesnote is undoubtedly one of the conferences not to be missed, which is why I wanted to make a summary of the topics discussed at this conference. This is a summary that is not intended to be a literal translation of what Dries said, but rather an appreciation from a spectator.
WHY DOES DRIES STILL PREFER TO UPLOAD HIS PHOTOGRAPHS ON HIS WEBSITE AND NOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA?
Dries began by presenting the well-known photograph that evokes his time at university, where he is seen wearing a very picturesque hat and sitting on a chair. That chair has a very important meaning in his life. His mother gave it to him as a gift. It is so important that he still has it, and although its color is now somewhat different, it is the same chair.
From that chair, not too long ago, Dries was uploading some pictures to his website and wondering why he was still uploading his pictures to his Drupal site, why was he still using Drupal for this purpose when there were so many social networks like Instagram already, even more knowing that it takes a bit more time to upload it to his website than to a social network.
Well, the first reason is that it allows you to have control of your own data.
Photos help you remember what you so easily forget, important occasions that fade from your memory. The truth is that having those memories in social networks is not really that safe, they can be lost and no one is responsible for this, we can see the case of NPR when it lost the music uploaded by its users from 2007 to 2011 and MySpace simply reported through an email that the information had been lost in a migration and there was no way to recover it, there was no backup; or look at the most recent case of Leica with its fan page on Facebook, they lost their fan page and with it all the material they had uploaded there, and Facebook just said they could not recover it.
The second reason is the way these platforms limit the creative capacity, these predefined structures all look the same and really the different is important, the details matter, they give identity and make it memorable, in these proprietary software we see that everything is standardized and, in a way, the details are removed because everything is done in mass. We see it a lot nowadays, a phone booth or a doorbell, they all look the same, however if we remember the beginnings of the web we can notice that websites were called home pages, because it was literally as if you were entering someone's home, their identity was highlighted everywhere.
The third reason is the way these platforms treat our friends, our family members. If you upload a picture to Instagram, everyone, including our children and our friends, is drawn in and not to connect with the family but these platforms want to get them to scroll for hours making them consume small pieces of content so through tracking codes they can learn a little more about them and improve their advertising.In fact, they are not social platforms but monetization platforms.
A clear example of this is as follows: since Apple launched its privacy protection on iOS to protect the privacy of its users when browsing the internet, these platforms included a proprietary browser in their applications so that they can continue to capture information from their users and thus evade the privacy mechanisms of iOS.
These are the reasons why Dries still prefers to upload pictures on his own website, he doesn't like what they do with his friends and family, all these proprietary platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Wix, Sitecore etc... you don't know how they treat the data and, at the end of the day, you have no control over what happens to it.
DRUPAL OFFERS THE FREEDOM ON THE WEB THAT PROPRIETARY SOCIAL NETWORKS CANNOT OFFER.
The reason we use Drupal is because we really want a software that gives us creative freedom, one that is flexible, that doesn't limit us and that is also privacy minded.
The most important thing of all this is that we have control of the code, of the data, and we can give the creative direction we want to our website. For example, I can make it more accessible and for them I can make all the necessary modifications without being blocked by proprietary software.
However this goes beyond Dries' website or ours, it is about all the websites that are on the Internet. Today the web is part of our whole life, it is in our work, in our family, in our learning and even in our entertainment.
We must do everything we can to protect the Open Web. Drupal is one of the most relevant open platforms in the market and it is a Good Software, with a big G and a big S, Drupal is very important in the preservation and growth of the open web, so if we take care of Drupal, we are also taking care of the open web.
DRUPAL ANSWERS THE NEEDS OF THE MODERN WEB, WE NEED TO TALK MORE ABOUT THAT.
We are not promoting Drupal well, in 2022 we are hearing a lot about “Composable applications” as one of the biggest trends in business development and this involves software, it turns out that Drupal is it, if we compare it with the definition we have:
- Modular architecture (we have thousands of modules)
- No-code / low-code (In Drupal we can build a website completely from the interface)
- Decoupled front-end and multiple points of contact with the client (Drupal does this very well, it contains many features for this ready to use)
- Package management (We make use of composer and with it a lot of goodies)
We should start to include Drupal in these conversations as a solution that meets these needs.
Although Drupal is doing very well, according to the figures we have from the last survey of agencies and developers working on Drupal, Drupal projects continue to grow.
Drupal is a platform that is used by a lot of high impact websites globally, I don't know if any other platform can say the same, we need more people to know this, we need to promote Drupal more and better.
FOCUS ON INNOVATION WITHOUT NEGLECTING GAINED GROUND
Our reputation in Drupal is very well earned in aspects such as scalability, reliability, stability, accessibility, ease of updating, flexibility, performance and security. It is an earned ground that we must take care of very well and yet, we cannot neglect the speed of innovation.
While Dries thought about this in his chair, he realized that part of being a good software is to care about the end users, he remembered an anecdote with his father who is a doctor, one day attending a patient, she told him that she had a problem with her Drupal website and did not know how to solve it, Dries' father told him that his son was the one who had started with Drupal so why not call him and he would surely help her solve her problem, and she did. When she spoke with Dries, she told him that she was part of a non-profit organization that several years ago paid 40,000 euros for their new Drupal 7 website and years later requested a quote to upgrade it to the new version and again it was 40,000 euros, a cost that they could not afford to spend again. This is one of the reasons that drove Dries to support extending Drupal 7's lifespan because many like her need it to be extended a bit longer to make the transition less costly. That's part of caring about the end users, listening to what their needs and concerns are.
The Dries of the early days of Drupal only cared about creating software and including new features quickly; however, the Dries of 21 years later has a greater sense of responsibility taking care of the users. Today, as a community, we can achieve both things at the same time without sacrificing one for the other, without lowering the expectations of the proposed goals, but making them easier to achieve.
THE NEW TOOLS AVAILABLE TO THE COMMUNITY
One of the ways to achieve this is through the tools, for example with Gitlab it has been possible to automate a lot of things and the improvements that are coming will help a lot to reduce the friction points where most contributors lose valuable time, features like gitlab issues will be integrated allowing features like uploading images via drag and drop or the use of advanced tagging for user naming, relationship of issues among many other features, all from the same editor.
Many of the drop-down options that we see today in the forms for creating issues in Drupal.org will be transformed into labels.
The way we see the issues today does not allow us to see well the prioritization of the cases or even their classification, with the gitlab Kanban board there will be a significant improvement in that aspect.
There are many more features in the pipeline that are being tested and once they are ready they will be available for contributed projects. Some of them are:
- Signed commits
- Approval rules
- Code owners
- Push rules
- Multiple case assignment
- Dependencies in Merge requests
- Gitlab CLI
Some tools are already available:
- Merge request
- Code owners
- Gitpod
DRUPAL IS YOUR COMMUNITY, THE PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND ME
The next thing we must work on is culture and people, perfection can become an enemy of the good, we are fast when we lose the fear of making mistakes, making mistakes is not bad.
There are many decisions that are reversible, they are not that serious and we can venture, because they are fast and we can go back in case it does not work as we expected. The bigger decisions can be irreversible but for those we can take some more time and if we learn to distinguish them we can move much faster.This is an analogy that Jeff Bezos also uses, but he does it with doors, those that are in and out and those that are one way.
The third is capacity. We need more people to be part of Drupal and therefore part of the open web.
READY FOR DRUPAL 10
There is a great progress in the initiatives that the community has raised, to this day we have the following advances:
- The new Olivero theme is now stable and default in Drupal 10.
- CKEditor 5 is stable and default in Drupal 10
- Almost ready for PHP 8.2 (and it hasn't been released yet)
- We are upgraded to Symfony 6
- The core has get smaller with the removal of some modules from the core, this to facilitate innovation.
All of the above are included in Drupal 10. This is fascinating because many of them were planned for Drupal 11.
There are two projects that are still in process and will not be ready for Drupal 10.
- The project browser
- Automatic updates
However in intermediate versions of Drupal 10 could be included.
WHAT CAN I EXPECT FROM DRUPAL 10?
It is planned to be released in December 2022, after this release, Drupal 9 will maintain its updates for 11 months, time in which we must upgrade to Drupal 10 to keep us in the update cycle, the main reason for 11 months is that some third party dependencies as the symfony version will reach the end of its support.
For Drupal 10, to this day we have up to 3 times more compatible modules than what we had from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.This is a sign that the tools that have been created to facilitate the contribution are working.
We can see from the numbers, the great capacity of the Drupal community in the work done to achieve Drupal version 10.
- More than 1500 people
- More than 500 organizations
They have been part of the team that has helped to achieve Drupal 10 core and let's note that these figures do not include the many more who are part of the contributed modules.
Once Drupal 10 is released, the focus will be on innovation, which means:
- We will continue to research and advance headless technologies.
- It will continue to modernize the publisher experience
- Data modeling capabilities will be expanded and improved
- The possibility of applications based on React, Svelte or Vue in the core will be explored.
- Symfony will continue to be adopted in the Drupal project
- The core modules will be reduced and the initiative of recipes, also known as starter templates, will be adopted, which will be a modernization of the well-known distributions.
AT SEED WE ARE COMMITTED TO THE DRUPAL COMMUNITY AND ITS BRIGHT FUTURE
Of course, all of these great initiatives require a large investment. At SeeD we are proud to contribute funds each year to the Drupal Association to be used in these initiatives that greatly benefit the community. This is also part of our social responsibility initiatives and commitment to a more open web.
Video: DrupalCon Prague 2022 Driesnote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmit4ET-l3Q