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What Drupal contributors say about Drupal: 10 blitz interviews

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Our great “drop” keeps moving to the future. While we are enjoying Drupal 8’s benefits, it’s already time to start preparing for Drupal 9. And every single contribution makes Drupal move faster and get better!

We were interested in what Drupal experts and contributors think about Drupal. So we decided to ask 10 of them 3 questions in a blitz interview. We are very grateful to each of them for their answers and happy to share them with you.

These experts work with Drupal every day, maintain big or small Drupal modules, fix issues, speak at conferences, take part in code sprints, or mentor younger talents. Each of them contributes in their own way, but they are all united by the fact that they love Drupal and know it from the inside. This makes their thoughts especially valuable. So let’s go.

What Drupal contributors say about Drupal

Matt Glaman (mglaman)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

The greatest benefit using Drupal is the community and the opportunities the community brings. The community is not just the people building Drupal but all of the businesses using and building with Drupal — from freelancers, to agencies, to clients. Once I started working with Drupal, the community has opened so many doors.

Freelancing on the side brought me to DrupalCamp Atlanta, my first Drupal event — ever. I got hooked. Eventually attending the Milwaukee meetup and making connections led to a referral which let me move on from my agency work to a company building a web hosting platform using Drupal. Through active contributions I ended up with an offer to join Commerce Guys, now Centarro, and am looking forward to marking my fourth year with the company.

Through Drupal I have had the pleasure of making friends across the United States and the world. I have traveled to places I never imagined I would be, nor that I would have been able to visit Europe. Working with Drupal has changed my life and provided some amazing experiences.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

I am biased, but my favorite module is Drupal Commerce. My first Drupal site was an e-commerce site and I installed Commerce Kickstart. Drupal Commerce has been my point of reference for code since my earliest days. There is always an example for some kind of use case or problem solved.

Developing Drupal Commerce also provides interesting challenges. It has driven development of various popular contributed modules (Address, Profile, Entity, Inline Entity Form in Drupal 8 alone).

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

I expect Drupal to become the flagship open source CMS used for robust experiences. We are going to move up in the market and lose some users. But we are going to gain more at the same time. Drupal needs to — the bottom market is being taken over by static site generators, not just WordPress or Squarespace.

There also aren’t many open source eCommerce + CMS options out there. I am excited for the future of Drupal and Drupal Commerce for a fully integrated content, marketing, and ecommerce package.

Jacob Rockowitz (jrockowitz)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

Many people would say "Community", but I feel that the community's "Collaboration" to create great software is Drupal's greatest benefit.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

The module which I have installed on every single Drupal site I have ever built is Honeypot, which mitigates spam form submissions using the Honeypot method. It is a reliable module that does exactly what it is intended to do, with great support from Jeff Geerling (geerlingguy) and the Drupal community.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

To accomplish some of Drupal's ambitious goals and initiatives, we are going to completely rework some old, outdated APIs and code. While improving or redoing Drupal APIs, I am optimistic that the Drupal community can collaborate and devise solutions that impacts and solves problems and challenges affecting all Open Source projects. More organizations will have to step in to lead and fund different initiatives to help make Drupal and Open Source more sustainable.

Mateu Aguiló Bosch (e0ipso)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

It's difficult to choose one, but I think my favorite feature is the flexible yet robust way Drupal allows you to define any data model. It's the best content modelling tool for a CMS I have tried or heard of.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

There are many fantastic modules out there. All serve a specific purpose. My favorite is the one I need at any given time.

Among the ones I wrote, I have devoted a lot of time to JSON:API, but now that one is in core I'm turning my face towards Simple OAuth.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

To stay relevant for 20 more years. For that we need to make an effort to become more multi-channel and less web-specific.

Nick Veenhof (Nick_vh)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

The greatest Drupal benefit is the ecosystem that is thriving around it. It is a massive pile of code snippets and working proof of concepts that you can take inspiration from, and on the other hand it is full of really stable, mature modules to build your base application on. The fact that it is can output not just html but also json for every resource is mind-blowing.

The reason why I stayed with this technology, and it sounds like a cliche, is the community. I’ve been involved in the Drupal ecosystem for over 12 years and it is has been a guide in my life. I started in Belgium and was welcomed in this community. Not much later I moved to Spain and was welcomed with the same open arms as I encountered before in Belgium. I repeated this pattern 2 more times in Portugal and Boston and from all these encounters I made quite some good friends. Not only in the community events but also as colleagues.

Drupal not only stays relevant when it comes to technology, it also thrives because there is more to it than technology. This is unique.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

I do not have a favourite module but I have a favourite ecosystem within Drupal. If you look at my profile you will see a pattern arise and that is Search. I did my Master-thesis around Drupal and Solr and if you look deep enough in my github account you can still find some gems in there. I’ve helped with upgrading Search API and Search Api Solr and all others to Drupal 8 and it is dear to my heart. I love the interoperability that it offers you to connect Drupal to Solr but also to connect external datasources to Drupal. It acts like a gate that reaches way beyond just search. Due to this reason and the people that have been crucial in this ecosystem this set of modules are my favorite. Also, not to forget, because of these modules I’ve been involved early on in Drupal 8 and got ahead of the curve in terms of knowledge and gave me a boost in my career for sure. I can recommend everyone to not just have a favorite module but to actively participate in an ecosystem or a specific module.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

My expectations are that extending Drupal for Content Editors/Marketeers will have to become a lot easier. Automatic updates are a massive pain but will have to be solved someday for Drupal to break out to the masses. What I think is that site builders can somehow have access to an App-Store’ish thing to more independently add functionality to their website. This will be supported by either a DIY solution or by companies like Dropsolid, Acquia or others. The work that is being done for the automatic updates, or even the work that is in the works from the association (Drupal Steward) leans very much towards these mechanisms already. Automatic updates first, adding of functionality next.

Balazs Janos Tatar (tatarbj)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

“Come for the code, stay for the community.” After being in the Eastern part of Europe, visiting DrupalCamp Belarus and right after the DrupalCamp Kyiv ‘19 conferences, I couldn't be more happy to see how local communities make this saying an unquestionable truth. Sometimes people don’t fully understand what is written in the code, because of having less experience or just simply being a newcomer on the field: the Community behind Drupal is one of the strongest arguments that we always can use when promoting the project and involving newer pair of eyes and hands.

For me personally, working in the Mentoring Team, helping first timers to step up and start their contributions, guiding experienced ones to mentor others and supporting event organizers to shape a ‘Contribution day’ at their local camps always give me the joyful moments.

Earlier this year we started to promote mentoring activities by asking local events and their contributors who help others doing dev or non-dev contribution to the Drupal project to step up and let the Community know what did the do! In the Mentoring project in drupal.org, we have dedicated issues for all Drupal events this year. One of our goals is to get in touch with mentors who we might not yet know personally and hopefully meet them at DrupalCons, being part of the Mentors and have a truly unique experience when we all show our passion: Staying for the community.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

It’s a quite tricky question :)

Being not a coder for a while, but a security researcher, helping the Drupal Security Team with reporting issues and also acting as a regular speaker, wearing the (apart of many others) hat of a provisional member, my favorite Drupal modules are the ones that have a stable release and hosted on drupal.org.

You might ask why? It’s easy to answer: These are the contributed projects that have coverage by the Drupal Security Team.

Whenever someone finds a vulnerability in them, it’s going to go through a procedure and will be released in a coordinated way, one of the coming Wednesdays. Out of the security team members, the reporter(s) and the maintainers of the project, no one else know about the issue before it gets publicly disclosed, following our Disclosure Policy.

Apart of having a few contributed modules where I’m the maintainer (everyone loves their own children, right?) I would highlight the modules where I’ve reported issues and say thanks to all maintainers who helped fixing vulnerabilities and acted super professionally in the private queue — it’s never a blaming game when there is a security bug in a contrib but a great possibility to learn how it could be fixed in a secure fashion.

So overall, I would say my favorite Drupal modules are where I could have been involved to make them more secure: Facebook Like Button, Skype status, Yandex.Metrics, Mosaik, Cloud, bootstrap_carousel, Feedback Collect, Node feedback, ComScore direct tag, Taxonomy Term Reference Tree Widget, FileField Sources, Entity Reference Tab / Accordion Formatter, SVG Formatter, Entity Delete, XML Sitemap, PHP Configuration, NVP field, AddToAny Share Buttons and Back To Top - Thank You All to be responsive and kind with me during the period of remediation and even later, meeting in real life at Drupal events!

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

I see many local communities that work hard to be recognised and their core teams to show why they love Drupal.

The Community Working Group (CWG) states they are present to maintain a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal project (source). They appreciate the work that individuals do for the Community by maintaining the Aaron Winborn Award. This year I had the honor to give the Mentoring t-shirt to Leslie Glynn at our Mentor Booth at DrupalCon Seattle before she got the Award and it made my eyes wet seeing her on stage the next day. She is a perfect example for all of us about humanity, respect, kindness and overall commitment to the Community. Congrats and Thank You, Leslie!

Apart of many successful stories that I see in the Drupal project, one of the best is to see people stepping up and helping each other to contribute. AmyJune Hineline is one of the many Mentors who is not a technical person, shows us an awesome dedication to the Drupal Community. It makes me believe that the future of Drupal depends on individuals and their activities: come and be part of it at DrupalCon Amsterdam this October and “Get ready for another level of awesomeness!”.

Bram ten Hove (bramtenhove)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

Being able to serve both site builders and developers. This is a tough balance to maintain, but Drupal seems to be doing this quite well.

On one hand site builders are able to create Drupal sites that are relatively easy (once you get the hang of it) to set up and configure. And on the other hand there is a lot of freedom and extensibility available for developers, making it a great choice for many organizations.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

I like the Group module. I’ve been using it extensively over the last years and I like how the architecture is designed. It’s also good to know that the maintainer, Kristiaan Van den Eynde, has been working on some core issues to make the module much better. These core issues should also have a larger development impact.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

There are a few features I’m eager to see added to Drupal. Having Automatic Updates will make it easier for, for example, site builders and smaller organizations to have a secure website. It will definitely decrease the maintenance burden. The Workflow and Layout features will add quite a bit of value to Drupal out-of-the-box, and having the Configuration Management 2.0 roadmap goal delivered would be pretty cool as well.

Furthermore I expect to see more work going towards making Drupal API-first, several huge steps have already been taken which have led to an increase in decoupled Drupal sites. And the Drupal ecosystem will hopefully more and more make use of modern web APIs, like what you see with Progressive Web Apps.

I also hope to see more (standardized) Drupal integrations happening with the Internet of Things. For example Drupal and voice-based services sound pretty cool.

Drupal contributors from our team

Andrew Zahura (shkiper)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

I think Drupal's main advantage is its community, because it’s the people who support and develop Drupal. They share their work, knowledge, and experience. Thanks to the very large and developed community, Drupal has gained such popularity and has such a large number of modules, features, and themes. Due to the fact that the Drupal community is very open and friendly, anyone can easily find information about a topic of their interest or ask directly on the forum. It is also very easy to promote your ideas and achievements.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

It is impossible for me to choose only one module, because there are thousands of them and each does an important job. Every year, more modules are added to the Drupal core, which shows that all modules are an important and useful part of the system.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

Programming, and especially web development, is changing very rapidly. We can see the emergence of new areas of development, frameworks, and libraries. So I expect that Drupal will continue to grow and develop, use the best achievements in other fields, and engage more talented and active people in the community.

Oleh Raban (Zemelia)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

Its benefits are the community, a relatively easy learning curve, the object-oriented programming approach in Drupal 8, a great selection of tools in the core, and plenty of ready-made contributed solutions.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

This the Admin Toolbar module. Anyone who works with the Drupal admin dashboard will have tough experiences without this module. So I recommend it to everyone.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

I would expect the improved UI support for JS libraries out-of-the-box (for example, React). This would mean full-fledged “frameworkness”, if I may say so. But generally Drupal's trends are very cool. It keeps pace with time and with all that multitude of technologies. Perhaps it would even be interesting to see Drupal in some other programming language than PHP. Of course, this sounds unreal, but who knows :)

Ivan Tibezh (tibezh)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

I think that Drupal’s great benefit is its architecture. Drupal’s architecture (here I mean version 8) is very well thought-out in terms of scalability. You can replace any item with your own one or, in some cases, replace the existing functional elements with your own ones. Of course, Drupal has a foundation that cannot be modified. Still, Drupal is very versatile if compared with other frameworks or CMSs/CMFs.

Even more, due to scalability, Drupal is a versatile system that is not limited to particular tasks (for example, like Magento is only specific to online stores). With this versatility, we can cover a large market. One experienced Drupal developer can easily make business card sites, catalogs, online stores or even social networks based on Drupal. This is also supported by a wealth of Drupal modules for any industry.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

A simple answer to this question will be “the Views module.” After installing Drupal, every beginner, almost immediately or in the very near future, begins to learn this module. This module can display any information from the database on the website, and it has the flexibility to output anything, in any way.

If you take something "fresher," then it will be the Commerce module for Drupal 8. Everyone knows that the module consists of submodules with a large code. I like Commerce because it gives me inspiration for interesting tasks. There are cases when you need to implement a certain functionality, and something like this already exists in Commerce. So you look into the module and take a similar example, the coding style to solve your task, or just interesting solutions/functions for yourself.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

I expect, although I'm not quite sure, that Drupal moves in the direction of React. React is a pretty good thing that will make Drupal even faster and, in some cases, more flexible in development. If this happens, it is necessary that everything is implemented well on the backend part (as is the case with Drupal Ajax framework). Here I mean that the vast majority of Drupal developers know PHP and can use jQuery but do not know JS well enough to work with React, and do not even know React itself.

And here is not an expectation but rather a wish. It would be nice to have a built-in Donation system for modules. I am the maintainer of some projects and there is always too little time to deal with then. And if there will be a little incentive system (for customer, a customer needs some feature in the module and can invest, say, $50 into this task) this would be a great system to motivate developers and develop Drupal. A project like this already exists somewhere, but it is specific to the GitHub repository, if my memory does not fail me.

And finally, I expect the 9th version of Drupal :)

Oleksandr Chernyi (BlacKICEUA)

  • What do you think is the greatest Drupal benefit?

In my opinion, Drupal's greatest advantage is its comprehensiveness and extensibility. To me, Drupal, this is primarily a CMF (Content Management Framework), or even rather a pure framework. With custom modules, you can implement virtually any task, from content management to AI applications.

  • Do you have a favorite Drupal module?

I can’t say for sure that I have a favorite module because I'm trying to create new modules — albeit in the context of client projects. The following modules are often used: Paragraphs, Field Group, Selectize.js, Select 2, Chosen, Admin Toolbar, Devel, Configuration Split, Config Ignore, and Config Filter.

  • What do you expect from Drupal in the future?

I am looking forward to switching to Symphony 4 or 5. It works with PHP version higher than 7.1.3, which will lead to the cutting out the outdated methods and functions from the core. I think, this will speed up Drupal.

I also think that there will be a complete transition from hooks to EventSubscribers, which in turn will lead to greater structuring and flexibility when used.

Final thoughts

Hopefully, you also enjoyed reading this blog post with the thoughts of Drupal contributors about Drupal. We would like to emphasize again how valuable they are to us. We wish them all the luck with Drupal development!

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