At DrupalCon Copenhagen, Dries Buytaert gave a presentation in which he talked about his grand visions for Drupal and where it could be in the year 2010. Amongst some of the stargazing and looking to the future, Dries made many important points very relevant to the short – medium term continued success of Drupal. One of these points was regarding the Drupal community. He said that looking around the room, it was basically the same group of people from the first Drupalcon five years previously (with a few exceptions).
He spoke of how as a community the Drupal community was getting older and it is vital to ensure the next generation of Drupal developers get onboard with the CMS, but most importantly, feel like they can really make a difference to the community. This is a very vital subject for the continued success of Drupal. If newer developers to the Drupal community feel that it is only ever the same few faces that can achieve anything, people will not get involve, they will not engage, and the community will stagnate.
On top of this fact, many of us who are familar with Drupal will admit, that, as much as we love it, it is not the easiest thing to get your head round to begin with. Once you hit the top of the learning curve, it is an incredibly powerful CMS and (as far as we are concerned) the best content management system going, certainly for PHP if not every other web based language. But, to climb the learning curve, particularly with complex module or theme development, at least as recently as Drupal 6, is/has been a very painful process that takes months. I have been a heavy Drupal user (as a developer, administrator and a drupal consultant) for nearly 3 years now and there is still so much I haven’t learned or do not understand. But the signs are that Drupal 7 has made some of these fundamentals a lot easier thanks to some good decisions by Dries and the D7 team, and we can only be grateful for such things.
Anyone who’s looked at Drupal before and thought it was too difficult should take another look in the next month or two when Drupal 7 finally hits its first proper release, they might be pleasantly surprised. Or if you want to play with the latest release candidate, sign up for a Drupal Gardens account and you can be tinkering (at least with configuration from the GUI side) within minutes. Drupal Gardens is a thoroughly pleasant user experience and hopefully this is a sign of things to come (out of the box) for Drupal developers and maintainers. It is improvements such as this that will make the next generation take up Drupal, and just as importantly, not put it down for WordPress or Joomla or something else once they have picked it up.
