Go where the
people are
Two and a half years ago Dries stood on a stage in Portland, worried Drupal had lost its ability to innovate, and launched Drupal Starshot. In Rotterdam he reports back: the innovation is back — and it’s shipping.
“I really feel that Drupal CMS has reignited our innovation. About two and a half years ago I stood on stage in Portland and launched the Drupal Starshot — the Drupal CMS initiative. I did it because I worried that Drupal had lost its ability to innovate; we had lost some of the speed we needed to stay relevant.”
“But today I stand here feeling very, very proud, because we did it. We have Drupal CMS, we have recipes, we have site templates, we have Canvas, we have Drupal AI, the core development team is kicking — so many great things are happening right now.”
“Some of you might remember the launch parties for Drupal CMS — it was an incredible buzz. So many different people, so many different contributions. To everyone who helped: thank you. Let’s take a moment to applaud everybody that contributed. It really exceeded my expectations.”
Applause, on the record. The room applauds. Dries calls Drupal CMS “a great example of what we can do when we organize ourselves” — when the community points its “invisible power” at big problems.
Growth means going to where the people are
Not waiting for people to come to Drupal. Rotterdam, again, supplies the blueprint.
🚢 The container lesson
- Rotterdam became Europe’s number one port by embracing containers — making it easy for people to ship goods worldwide.
- Drupal CMS does the same for ideas: recipes, site templates and Canvas make it easy to ship your ideas to the world.
🗺 Changing the map
- Rotterdam physically expanded into the North Sea — it changed the map.
- “Drupal is expanding too. We’re changing the map — bringing more people to Drupal. So let’s talk about how we’re doing that.”
Multilingual
“80% of the world doesn’t speak English — not as their first language, not even as their second. Multilingual lets us reach potentially billions of people.” Drupal, born in Belgium, has always been good at it — now Canvas is too.
Tutorial I → WAY 02JavaScript frontends
JS frontends have grown for 10+ years — and they’re where new engineers start their careers. Time to treat frontend developers as first-class citizens, with no Drupalisms and no tradeoffs.
Tutorial II → WAY 03AI
“There’s a massive, massive, massive growth in AI.” So much momentum in Drupal AI that demoing everything would take the whole keynote — so there’s a playground instead.
Tutorial IV →“Everything that I’ve shown you today is open source and is available today — you can go use it today if you want. If you want to learn more, there are three QR codes leading to pages with more information where you can try the demos.”
“I want to thank everybody that was involved with all of this hard work — the demos, but also all of the work underneath these demos.”
Up next: the three ways to reach more people, each with its own full tutorial. Tutorial I takes on the hardest one first — multilingual.