To ensure Drupal continues to offer the best platform for web design and web development, Drupal's parent company Aquilia conducted a series of surveys prior to their conference late last year.
Not many people know too much about Drupal’s history and key differentiators,
- A strong open source community actively working to support our product
- A framework for the delivery of feature rich online content
- A full CMS that scales to your needs
- An active security team that ensures the Drupal platform is protected
Drupal has a very large community of people working hard, loving what they do and they meet regularly at Drupal conferences (DrupalCon) held interactively online whilst at specific locations throughout the world.
As of December 2019, the Drupal community comprised of more than 1.39 million members including 117,000 users actively contributing; that's a big group considering Google has 99,000 employees and Microsoft 144,000. (Wikipedia)
Measured within the latest survey was an interesting metric, it gauged the impression of Drupal's usability amongst all web users comparing Drupal to other content management systems available.
There are many blogs and opinion pieces mentioning the challenges of Drupal for new users, and the results for new users were understandably expected, what was enlightening was the change that occurred as experience increased.
The survey by Drupal's UX team, found most users starting had a relatively poor initial experience with Drupal, though if they stuck with it, their impression of Drupal improved significantly over time. This was unlike any of its competitors, whose impression decreases as experience is gained.
Drupal's sentiment curve goes in the opposite direction of WordPress', AEM's and Sitecore's. This presents both a big challenge and opportunity for Drupal.
As a result, Drupal established two main strategies
- Strategy 1: Reduce cost and effort to start
- Strategy 2: Prioritising the beginner experience
New users want site development to be low-cost and zero-maintenance.
As a result Drupal has introduced a focus on making the system easier for new users, and an effort to decrease the barriers at entry level so new users can enjoy Drupal earlier in the learning curve.
After the presentation of slides at the Amsterdam Drupal Conference the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert said, “I believe these slides to be among the most important slides in my entire DrupalCon Amsterdam presentation
The result is clear, Drupal continues to deliver features and solutions that continue to make a difference as your online needs evolve.
The team at Koda can assist, we have overcome the early adoption challenge the survey highlighted and are true believers in the value the Drupal content management system can deliver for our client's businesses, we continue to deliver a wide range of online solutions for a diverse range of customers operating in a variety of sectors.
If you want to see the benefits of the platform in action feel free to contact us for a demo of Drupal 8.