One of the most popular content management systems (CMS) Drupal turns 20 years old. Its founder recently shared his views regarding its evolving role and what prompted them to shift from a policy of breaking compatibility with each release. drupal buytaert api javascriptanderson theregister. They even discussed the concerns about JavaScript bloat that can cause issues for those with poor connectivity.
Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, revealed that he built it in 2000 for his personal use, with the help of his friends. Back then, he was a student at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
The story behind the nomenclature of the CMS is interesting. He said that he wrote a small message board to put on the web after he graduated. He intended to call it dorp, which is Dutch for village. He, however, mistyped it as drop, creating drop.org. Drupal was then derived from the English pronunciation of druppel, Dutch for drop. interview drupal dries api javascriptanderson theregister.
Currently, Buytaert is the project lead for Drupal and CTO of Acquia which is a cloud platform for marketing sites. When asked what he would do differently if he was to start the project today, he said that he would lead with a strong user experience. Initially, Drupal attracted like-minded people, like developers. Thus, creating a bit of tunnel vision that it was for developers by developers. Today, the primary end user for a CMS like Drupal is a marketer and not a developer. In short, the users are primarily non-technical people. Because of its initial vision, Drupal is still considered less user-friendly than that of the competing systems.
At the same time, Buytaert insisted that Drupal is written in PHP which is still the number one language on the web. Hence, Drupal doesn’t deserve the reputation of being a little hard to use. He added that the mindset of people needs to be changed as the Drupal that existed 10 years ago, even five years ago, is not the Drupal there’s today.