Drupal is a pretty big deal

Angie, we are definitely not deep in the weeds on Drupal, so we’re coming to this show in high hopes that you can catch us up on all things Drupal. I think I can go back to potentially when Leo Laporte started TWiT; I recall that brand new site they launched, and this was maybe 2006 through 2008 range, somewhere in there; that’s where I really saw Drupal be really well used… But at the time I was using WordPress, was really getting into front-end development, CSS, design and things like that, and I just never find myself getting into Drupal very far… But Drupal has such a rich, rich history, great people; you’re obviously a core contributor and core committer, co-author of books… The list is long, so help us understand. We have an audience who’s not very familiar with hearing more Drupal news… Catch us up. What is it? What are we missing?

Yeah, sure. Well, I try to explain Drupal in a couple of different ways. The biggest way that I find to explain it - I call it a “framlication”.

A what?

A “framlication”.

Yeah. There’s a lot of projects that are frameworks, and they’re for developers, and they expose APIs, and they are meant to be used by people who’d write code for a living and they’re fine with that. And then there’s applications that are meant to be used by non-technical users, who don’t know anything about the code, but they know how to fill in forms, and press buttons, and make things happen that way. Drupal is kind of at this interesting intersection where it is an application, it’s a content management framework, there’s buttons to click, there’s forms to fill out, there’s content to be modeled, this kind of thing… But then at the same time, it offers robust APIs and extension points that allows developers to really get into it.

So it kind of started as a project that was by developers for developers. At the time - this project started in 2001, so at the time, cutting-edge things like RSS, and stuff like that… It kind of attracted this developer audience, who then wanted to make it as flexible as possible.

[04:11] So there’s extension points for everything under the sun, there’s 30,000 modules that you can use to add different types of functionality to it, and the whole thing is done in a really well-architected way, so you kind of use the same concepts throughout.

An application like WordPress, if you want a photo gallery, there might be 70 or 80 different photo galleries you can pick from, and you pick which one is closest to what you need. In Drupal, you will build your photo gallery up, and you build it by using an image field module that will add images, support to upload things, you’ll add a view, which displays images in a grid or in a listing, or something like that, you add a pager, and you add these other things… So you really customize it to be exactly what you want. For the most part, all of that is done without writing any code. But if you want to take what’s there and then extend the crap out of it and make it really custom, or have it integrate with some external system, or you want it to output all of the data as JSON, so you can use a decoupled front-end, or a mobile app, or something like that in front of it, you can also do all of those things.

I like to say that Drupal is for – if you were a VCR kid back in the day, you know your parents’ VCR would blink twelve and they didn’t know how to fix it, so they’d call you over… And every VCR is kind of different, but you can kind of figure it out, like “Okay, well I’ll press buttons, and there, it’s fixed.” So if you’re okay tinkering with things and you kind of get a charge out of that, and kind of figuring out how stuff works, I think Drupal is a really great solution. It is not at all a good solution if you want a website up and running in five minutes that you never have to touch again. That is not what Drupal is for. For that, lots of other things - WordPress, Squarespace, other types of things would be a better fit.

Sure. I have just a little bit more experience Drupal than Adam. I had one experience on a client contract where I was basically extending an existing Drupal installation; this was probably in the 2010 range… And my takeaway then – first of all, I had a successful install and extension, so I accomplished what I needed to accomplish… And everything seemed like it was pretty well organized, it wasn’t that hard to understand, but there was so much there. I was like, “Wow, this is like you walk into a library and you see all those books.” It felt that way. It felt like, “Wow, this place has a lot of books.”

I’m always curious or I’m always interested in the architecture of things and why things are the way that they are, and like why WordPress is the way WordPress is, and why Drupal is the way Drupal is… A lot of times we can tease that out of its history, and especially with open source projects, it’s like “Why does it exist in the first place?” and sometimes you can kind of tease why the architecture or why it is the way it is because of its original goal… So can you help us understand that genesis story of where Drupal came from? I know it was around the turn of the century; it’s been around for a very long time. By the way, also, 40k contributors… This is maybe the best-kept secret in open source. This is a huge community, right? But where did it come from and why did the creators create it?

So I wasn’t around for these days. I came into the project more like 2005, but back in 2001, basically how it started is the project founder Dries Buytaert basically wanted a website thingy so that people in his dorm could communicate to one another about what types of things were going on. So he built this thing in PHP and MySQL, because at the time that was the cutting-edge technology… [laughs]

It really was, yeah.

[07:48] Yeah, and kind of like built this thing, and then others of his friends - because he was in a computer science type of program - contributed to it. Then he was very inspired by what Linus was doing with Linux, and kind of the open sourcing of that, worked a bunch on Linux stuff as well, and so he really wanted to make his project open source. And at the time, the only other real open source CMS back then was PhpNuke, and I don’t know if you still have the battle scars from dealing with that whole mess, but…

I definitely had a couple of run-ins with that one…

Yeah, yeah. So PhpNuke was this very monolithic – it was driven by one developer, monolithic, did all the things built-in, and it was kind of a big mess… No offense to the people who – I’m sure they worked hard on it… I used it, it worked, it was THE thing to use back then, but it was really large and clunky and insecure and all of these different kinds of things. So Drupal came in to be the opposite of that. We wanted something that was modular, and flexible, something that had a really solid architecture, something that was well-documented, something that was easily extensible by developers…

I remember PhpNuke had these websites, like PhpNuke hacks, and by that what they meant is “Find this file, go to line 119, and start editing it, and then make it say something different than what it does.” And then God forbid you use two different hacks and they collide with each other, and the god forbid again, you upload…

And 119 is no longer the hack line. You’ve gotta act accordingly.

Right, yeah. And then a security update comes out, and then you have to figure out how to get the security update with your hacks… It’s just kind of a mess.