Nashville Drupal Con has just ended; They are already vacating the Music City Center and it was a refreshing experience. One of the things that remains after talking to old friends and new acquaintances is that Drupal is stronger than ever. There is a marked tendency towards decoupling and a strong tendency for Drupal to work hand in hand with React, Node JS, Angular and many others to make powerful combinations where Drupal is the platform that manages all the content and the front end takes care of the user experience.
There is also a clear trend towards verticalization; many companies that were once generic Drupal Shops are now specialists in user experience with innovative 3D tools such as Four Kitchens, others such as Acro Media have become experts in E-Commerce, Acquia is increasingly oriented towards value-added solutions "out of the box". Drupal is ceasing to be a single thing and is becoming many possible solutions based on the creativity of companies that are taking advantage of the flexibility of the platform.
It's clear that there is a very interested community in moving forward, almost 4,000 of us attended the event, encouraged by the great work that https://www.drupal.org/ is doing. The Drupal Association is organizing its ideas to move forward in making Drupal known on a large scale; the Drupal promotion initiative is something that will help leverage Drupal, so I invite Drupal end users and developers to participate as much as possible and make this initiative known https://www.drupal.org/promotedrupal
The community will work on four key points to improve Drupal's image:
- Improving the technical evaluation process
- Improve the editor or content creator user experience
- Improve the site builder experience
- Promoting Drupal to non-technical decision makers
These are strategic guidelines that have to do with Drupal's reputation for being difficult among some user groups. There is already an agenda to address each of these points so that by the arrival of Drupal 8.7 in 2019, all optimizations will have already been addressed.
The next Drupal Con will be in Seattle in 2019 and Minneapolis in 2020. It seems that Drupal and music cities are becoming inseparable companions.
Jairo Pinzon
Images: https://www.flickr.com/groups/drupalconnashville2018/