For most of my career, if a user was choosing an open-source CMS for their web presence, the choice generally came down to either WordPress or Drupal. Sure, there is still a fringe market out there for projects like Joomla, and I’ve seen several other CMS platforms come and go over the past 15 years (remember this one?), but the choice was generally so binary that there was a notorious debate that would spontaneously pop up whenever I was at networking events as to which one was better, with WordPress and Drupal enthusiasts firmly placing themselves in opposing camps.
I spent the first five years of my career doing a lot of work in WordPress, and was active in that community. Since then, for most of the past 9 years at least, I’ve worked fairly exclusively in Drupal. Even before I became active in Drupal, though, I never had much patience for the debate. I always saw the two giants of the CMS space to be different tools, each better suited to specific tasks. The answer to the question “which one is best,” I thought, very much depended on the parameters of the project.When the Gutenberg debate began to shake up the WordPress community, I wasn’t that active there any longer. Still, I remember the controversy, and certainly added my voice to it at the time. WordPress’ opinionated approach to the implementation of the block editor was too heavy-handed, and there were (and still are) well-founded concerns over the architectural decisions of the project. Developers and users in the community were divided, and the general consensus was that the Gutenberg project needed to be implemented in a more optional way, allowing users to choose an editing experience. Instead of listening to feedback, though, WordPress core developers seemed to just double down, with an attitude of “We know what’s best for you, you’re welcome.” The decision stopped being about the user, and became more and more about the profit of a single group.
I think that it was that conflict of interest that ultimately solidified my disillusionment with the WordPress project. I still use that stack, but with less enthusiasm or enjoyment, and am honestly thinking through the migration of whatever existing work I have on WordPress out of it. There was always a conflict of interest in WordPress that threatened to sway the project toward the best interest of Automattic exclusively, but I felt that that concern had finally been realized in Gutenberg.
At DrupalCon Atlanta back in March, I attended a session discussing the most recent drama between WordPress and WPEngine. This was an interesting discussion on what it takes to be a good citizen of the open source community. I’m no lawyer, and I’m not going to attempt to comment on that dispute, but I will offer the opinion that this is not a good look for open source. Whatever last vestiges of good will I held for the WordPress project vanished with that flashpoint, and WordPress stopped being a viable technical solution for any project in my mind.
Compounding this was that the Gutenberg project had already sent WordPress on a race to the bottom. It was obvious that the project’s leadership had identified their competitors as Squarespace-adjacent platforms, and that was the market that they intended to conquer. With flexibility all but gone in the interest of that pursuit, WordPress can no longer, in my opinion, be considered a scale-able CMS for anything beyond the most basic projects, and certainly not for enterprise-scale projects.
With all of this backstory in mind, I was quite dumbfounded with the discussion around DrupalCMS at this year’s DrupalCon. The project itself is not what confounds me…I think that DrupalCMS will be a well-thought-out and intentional implementation of the sort of project that WordPress went for and missed…but rather the discussions spinning out of it about a theme marketplace, potentially a paid theme marketplace. I left the Driesnote on a pessimistic note this year, thinking to myself, “So, we’re WordPress now? Just like that?”
My discouragement has settled a bit since then (it actually took me quite a bit to have my thoughts together enough to write this), but I’m still concerned that the Drupal community is letting the winds blow it in the wrong direction. DrupalCMS is, I think, a positive step that will make Drupal an accessible alternative for small businesses and users who need an off-ramp from the WordPress disaster. I just hope that, as it evolves, it does not become victim to the same sorts of decisions that the WordPress community made.
The promise of the open web was freedom…freedom to express ourselves, to start our businesses, to engage with each other around the world. As the flame of social media has (hopefully) began to die out, we need tools that strike a balance between giving the average user what they need to establish space on the web, while still possessing the flexibility to be the solution that is needed, regardless of it’s benefit to a corporation. Otherwise, the web is no longer open. Drupal has always positioned itself as standing in the gap to reinforce the open web. I sincerely hope that it continues to do so.