The Future of Drupal

*Cross-posted from Millwood Online. 

Over the past month there has been a lot of focus on Drupal, the community. More recently it seems people are back to thinking about the software. Dave Hall and David Hernandez both posted eye opening posts with thoughts and ideas of what needs doing and how we can more forward.

A one line summary of those posts would be "We should slim down core, make it more modular, and have many distros".

To a degree this makes sense, however it could cause divergence. Core is not great at all following the same pattern, but contrib is even worse. As part of the Workflow Initiative specifically there is a lot of work going on to try and get the Entity API aligned, get many more entity types revisionable and publishable, using common base classes, traits, and interfaces. If we maintained Node, Block Content, Taxonomy, Comment, etc all as separate projects then there's a chance less of this would happen. Also by doing this we are laying out foundations and setting examples to be followed.

One solution to this may be to follow Symfony (yet again), they have a monolithic project but then split this up into the various components, which are "read only" repos. It's be pretty awesome if we could do this with Drupal. From there we could make Drupal downloadable without many of the core modules. People with the right skills can create a composer.json file to pull in exactly what parts of Drupal are needed, others could use a form on d.o to select which parts are wanted, which downloads a compiled zip.

What would be more awesome is if we could abstract more of Drupal out of Drupal. Imagine if the Entity API was a PHP generic library. Imagine if you could create a Laravel or Symfony app with Nodes. This would be really tricky, especially since Dries announced the plans to make Drupal upgrades easy forever, but possible.

Currently most Drupal sites are still on 7, and here we're talking about what would be Drupal 9? Maybe we need to take step back and look at why sites aren't being upgraded. Dave mentions "A factor in this slow uptake is that from a developer's perspective, Drupal 8 is a new application. The upgrade path from Drupal 7 to 8 is another factor." Although another reason is also why would a company spend the tens of thousands upgrading to Drupal 8? It looks at works (from a users point of view) the same as Drupal 7. Drupal is a CMS, a Content Management System, and the management of content is more or less the same. Yes, with initiatives like Workflow and Media this is changing, but even then similar functionality can be achieved in Drupal 7 with contrib modules. Will Drupal 8 be the version to skip? go straight from 7 to 9?

As Drupal is now pretty firmly an enterprise platform we need to look at this from a marketing point of view. What is going to sell Drupal 9? Why are people going to upgrade? What do they really want? Is a slimmed down core and more modular application really the selling feature that's wanted?

Drupal is a CMS, quoting Dave again "do one thing and do it well". We need to focus on making the authoring experience awesome, and the workflows that go along with it awesome too. This should all be done in a consolidated way to make managing Node content, Block content, etc just as intuitive as each other. If during this process we can also make things more modular, and less Drupally, that'd be awesome!