In our recent blog post, Why Drupal? What’s Great About It and Why We Use It, we discussed how Drupal transitioned from Drupal 7 to becoming more of an enterprise-level tool in later versions by taking advantage of world class development practices. Drupal 7 was designed in a way that made it easier for non-developers (site builders) to create complex sites using contrib modules and views with little to no code at all. Subsequently, the fundamental changes introduced in Drupal 8 required skilled developers to utilize its full power, moving away from the DIY website building model seen in platforms like Wix, Squarespace and Wordpress.

History and experience have revealed that many of the old Drupal 7 sites built with contrib modules by site builders ended up being hard to use and maintain and suffered from poor UX for site administrators. This seems to have led to the unfortunate impression that Drupal is hard to use. This is not the case, of course. Remember the Spiderman principle: "With great power comes great responsibility." It is the development team’s responsibility to use Drupal’s great power to build good admin UX. We have built many powerfully configurable Drupal sites that are very easy to use by site administrators and content editors, as our clients will attest. Reach out to us if you would like a demonstration.

But now, with the announcement of the Drupal CMS product, internally code-named Starshot, the power of Drupal will again be available to website creators that are not professional PHP developers familiar with Object-Oriented Development, who can use the command line and the other advanced components used in the context of enterprise Drupal. This new version of Drupal is designed to simplify website installation, development and maintenance with an approach that has become very popular in the past years with products such as Squarespace and Wix. The new Drupal CMS is expected to provide an intuitive, drag-and-drop and plug-and-play experience. Easy configuration, out-of-the-box drag-and-drop page building tools and automatic updates will allow non-developers to create fully functional Drupal websites. The new Drupal CMS offering will open the powerful existing platform known as Drupal Core to a client base that would not necessarily be able to take advantage of Drupal before.

The big question is: what does this new product mean for agencies like Monarq and for our clients?

We are enthusiastic and optimistic about this evolution and receive it like a breath of fresh air, a new wind to power the sails of our Drupal flagship. We think that the renewal of energy will go a long way to repair the damage to Drupal’s reputation caused by poorly designed administrative interfaces from the Drupal 7 era, coupled with the tough migration road from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

This reimagined Drupal CMS will dramatically reshape the market for small to mid-sized businesses, marketing teams, creative agencies that currently must limit themselves to selling Wordpress and non-technical users looking for a robust yet easy-to-use platform. It will attract a larger audience by providing world-class admin and editor experiences and out-of-the-box hosting combined with the power, flexibility and scalability that Drupal is known for​.

What we envision is that by removing the steep learning curve, Drupal will again become appealing to small and mid-market companies as well as end users like marketers, content editors, and decision-makers. To a certain extent, while being great accelerators to get started, platforms like Wix and Squarespace can lead to dead-ends once a project reaches a certain level of maturity and complexity. Drupal CMS, being built on top of the Symfony framework (like Laravel is), is much better suited to the development of powerful web applications than Wordpress. By allowing entrepreneurs to get started with the convivial Drupal CMS, once a project reaches a certain level of complexity and requires more powerful application features, it will be possible to augment existing projects by drawing on professional Drupal development resources in ways that are not possible for the other platforms.

This is a very promising avenue that makes Drupal the best solution for a wide spectrum of requirements, and the platform of choice for clients that want to make sure to choose a product that will accompany them from their beginnings all the way to the stars.

Here is a message in a bottle to anyone from the future that was rewarded with success by choosing Drupal CMS to build their site.

Do you need a development team to help you grow your Drupal project to the next level and build advanced functionalities on your current project base?

Give us a call! We are Monarq, Drupal experts.

We are also here for you if you want to use Drupal CMS and need a quick consultation to make sure you are setting yourself up correctly for the long term.

Further reading: the Drop Times