Dreaming about Drupal its long term potential
20 years ago when I made my first website in html and css when I was student environmental sciences, I thought:"One day this internet might be something. Maybe I should do something in this field?"
A couple of years later I encountered Drupal and thought: "Oh this Drupal platform seems like quite something, this might be something, someday, maybe I should do something with Drupal?"
A couple of years ago I was thinking: "This DXP concept this might something someday. Putting the user central, personalising experiences. Combining the best of the open web with Drupal, Mautic and Unomi seems like 1+1=3" (that was in 2019 at Drupalcon Amsterdam: https://youtu.be/NUBnIys5JOk)
Lately I was wondering: "What excites me right now? Then I would say it would probably be data and AI". You know, that might be something one day :)
I know its kicking in an open door, there is a lot of hype around AI, doing AI for the sake of AI is like saying electricty is the new thing, lets do something with electricity? But what excites me is applying AI beyond what we are already doing. And then I don't mean (although useful) integrating openAI into Drupal to generate text, images, tags, ... or even to execute and automate CMS tasks but to really leverage AI so that it changes the way the user of the application is being served.
That is why lately I dropped a couple of hints in Drupal elections.
- Read more in the interview for the elections: https://www.thedroptimes.com/interview/42166/elevating-drupal-beyond-cms...
- Also checkout discussions about this on the open forum in the questions about the future of Drupal:
What is the TLDR of the vision? Why am I participating:
- Elevating Drupal beyond the CMS and bringing Drupal on the DXP level
- Making Drupal a stronger value proposition for SMEs
- Building bridges between different open source communities, connecting Drupal. with Mautic, Unomi, ... really open source AI
Short term this means more interesting projects coming to Drupal, creating a better value proposition around Drupal, strengthening the business ecosystem and strengthening the investment everone has made in building a career around Drupal. Just creating more opportunities to leverage Drupal.
Long term, it means much more, see further.
There is still 1 day left to vote. If you like this vision then there is still time: https://www.drupal.org/association/board/elections/election-2024-dates-a...
Anyway, what were the clues?
It's about Drupal its long term potential.
It is all about making Drupal a more capable data handling system, a true structured data engine, that leverages it beyond CMS.
See the original vision in 2019 for Drupal proposed by Dries:
However to fulfill this, Drupal is lacking a couple of key capabilities. Drupal is not a real time application. With new advances in PHP it becomes possible to make Drupal become a real time application. Drupal needs to move away from webserver's request-response model. If we want to elevate Drupal beyond the CMS into the DXP territory where the goal is to process data in near real-time to respond to user generated events, Drupal needs to be able to work Async. There are already multiple initiatives going on in the community. There is some interesting core work going on on making async possible. I'm also looking forward to this talk at Drupalcon: https://events.drupal.org/barcelona2024/session/why-big-deal-async-drupal
To make it tanglible. Dropsolid is applying to a 1M€ Eurostars grant with Open Social, also a Drupal-based product company with the vision to build a Community Experience Platform. We will be researching and prototyping how an open structured data engine should look like to be eligible for the basis of an open DXP.
Once things like this become possible you could see the Drupal core becoming the base for many products and applications. And Drupal will be handling all sorts of data, not just content and user profile data but event data. And then AI becomes really useful. Then you can use AI to enhance the user experience, to do recommendations, to personalisize, increase conversion, ... Drupal core could be the basis of much more than just a CMS.
With Starshot covering the CMS part the core has a tremendous opportunity to evolve into an even powerful structured data engine.
So you can see why making Drupal a real time app is so important. It also unlocks many possibilities to apply AI on and enhance the user experience. And then it would not be unthinkable that Drupal also will become a place where AI is being pushed to the next level. You could even imagine Drupal shipping with its own open source AI algoritmes. That could be really exciting.
The open web has always been about making communication between each other easier in an open way. Html & css made this possible, PHP made this dynamic, Drupal made it easier by packaging the best of content management and website building, DXP made it more personalised and now AI is going to make it super smart and enhance the experience for user in new and innovative ways. It's all coming together.
Contributing for the here and now is also important. I totaly support the current initiatives. Dropsolid is contributing towards Starshot, Drupalcon EU Diamond sponsorship, D7 security team support for the D7 EOL, Platinum certification, ... But the long term is also important. Let's dream bigger. Let's dream beyond CMS towards DXP and AI. Let's dream about the future of web experiences. Let's evolve from web to dxp developers, webmaster to dxp-masters and from web-agencies to dxp-agencies.
I'm pretty sure a lot of hard core Drupal developers are already getting their hands dirty with AI as we speak. I even know of devs leaving the Drupal ecosystem to go and work on AI. Why not bring it all together? The key I believe is to leverage Drupal from CMS to DXP and make sure Drupal not only handles content data but also user data and event data. Because this is what is needed to leverage AI to create the best possible user experience.
We have everything we need, a community of diverse talents, strong tech capabilities, visionary leaders, a large installbase, a strong business ecosystem, ... Everything is here. The possibilities are endless and Drupal will be one of the cornerstones of the open web for many decades if we succeed.
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