The Future of Drupal

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A perspective from DrupalCon, Baltimore April 2017

John Siciliano and I recently attended the Annual North American DrupalCon. This was my seventh DrupalCon and John's first!

A perspective from DrupalCon, Baltimore April 2017

John Siciliano and I recently attended the Annual North American DrupalCon. This was my seventh DrupalCon and John's first!

I was introduced to Drupal about 11 years ago and started building sites not long afterward. What really drew me to the project was the ability to quickly build things without coding, but rather using contributed modules. Granted it was and still is a bit of a beast to understand. Since Drupal is what we do here at net2Community, I have a tendency to look at the future of the project. (After 30+ years in technology, you can expect that I've seen lots of things gain and then lose favor.)

I came away with an optimistic perspective of the future of Drupal.

Drupal 8 is solid and improvements are ongoing with initiatives in each release. This version of Drupal was a complete rebuild on top of the Symfony Framework which leverages the tools supporting many open source projects. This provides the Drupal project to leverage the work of other open source projects now and in the future. 

Drupal 7 to 8 migrations should be the last time you will have to rebuild or migrate your data because of a new version of Drupal. Of course changing objectives and other improvements might still make a rebuild a practical step.

DevOps is becoming much more mainstream along with continuous integration, automated testing and deployment. Technology options are improving and are better documented allowing even smaller shops to take advantage of these tools.

Current trends demonstrate new methods to use Drupal as the back end offering the ability to provide decoupled, loosely coupled, and content-as-a-service sites. We will also see more SaaS Products built on Drupal.

Drupal is more that just a website! We often tell people to look at a Drupal as a robust system with much greater capacity to develop applications and integrations with other systems.

Accessibility is a thing, we need to address this better when building sites.

Recent events in the Drupal community have demonstrated that both the community and leadership can adapt to difficult conversations and events. The Drupal Association and Community Working Group are continuing conversations about governance and how to address community issues when they arise. We have a comfort level that the Drupal Project continues to be a place where "people come for the code and stay for the community." 

Other Stuff from DrupalCon

Find sessions of interest to you https://events.drupal.org/baltimore2017/schedule/2017-04-27

There is something for everybody.

Bob Snodgrass

Next Years DrupalCon is in Nashville, TN

April 9-13, 2018 

https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018