Getting the drop on Drupal from Dries himself
Drupal. It powers two percent of the web, has more than 11, 000 developers, over 11,000 modules available, with 300,000 monthly downloads and 1.5 million monthly unique visitors. Drupal support 55 languages and most of all, it is open source. That was the number that Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert himself provided at last week’s Drupal Singapore meeting at Plug-in@Blk71, which drew a full house crowd not only from Singapore but also Indonesia and the Philippines.
“I founded the Drupal project about 11 year ago. I founded it sort of by accident because I wanted to create a message board and learn PHP and MySQL. I figured I’ll spend a few evenings building a message board, but then I ended up working on it for 11 years. The message board quickly involved into a content management system (CMS) and I released it in 2001 as Drupal. That was when Drupal was born, an open source CMS,” said Dries, as he recalled the history of Drupal.
Dries is on a short tour around Asia to scout out how the local Drupal communities are growing. He is also looking for potential partners and also evangelizing the use of Drupal in Asia. He will be heading over to India, after Singapore, to host some Drupal Camps, meeting with partners as well as with members of the press.
“Both in North America and in Europe, it [Drupal] is doing extremely well. They are hundreds of Drupal shops. Each of these shops have the same problem, which is finding more Drupal talent. Drupal is doing so well that the lack of Drupal expertise is actually the main thing that is holding Drupal back,” said Dries when asked about how Drupal is faring in the Western world. That is where Dries sees a big opportunity for any country in the world to churn out pools of Drupal talent. “It’s almost like wherever you are based in the world, if you are a Drupal expert, you can make money. Probably a lot of money, if you are good. And that is very consistent across the West,” Dries commented.
With the increasing adoption of Drupal worldwide, Dries decided to start his own company calledAcquia. The almost four-year-old venture provides commercial grade support, a scalable cloud hosting platform built on Amazon Web Services (platform as a service) and a software as a service called Drupal Gardens. Says Dries, ”We are trying to be to Drupal, what Red Hat was to Linux.” Acquia is now a US $35 million-dollar venture backed company with 160 strong based out of Boston.
Unknown to many, a lot of major websites are being powered by Drupal. One of such is the White House site. “It is a great example obviously because it is a high profile website. Security and scalability are extremely important,” said Dries, pointing to the strengths of Drupal as a content management system.
According to Dries, Drupal is unique because of its scalability. Scalability in terms of supporting websites of different traffic sizes and also in terms of features and functionalities. Because Drupal is open source and has an active community of contributors, there exist a large number of plugins, called modules, for Drupal. This allows almost any sort of websites to be built just by downloading and combining these modules.
On his thoughts about Drupal in Asia, Dries said, “Just like in the US and Europe, I think it can be extremely disruptive for the proprietary software vendors. Because it is actually the better technology, frankly. Because of the fact that we have so many people involved and the fact that we have so many modules, so the speed of innovation is much larger. But also because it is so well tested, it powers millions of websites. It is actually very stable as well. On top of that, it is free because it is open source. So Drupal tends to win on price, features and functionality. And I think that is very disruptive. And I think it can be equally disruptive here [Asia] just the fact that it is not as well-known here as it is in Europe as well as the US. So what I think needs to happen here is that we need to evangelize Drupal. We need to evangelize and train more people. We need to build a community around Drupal just like we have elsewhere in the world.”
You can catch the full video of Dries’ speech, recorded by Sven, below