Dries Buytaert

Drupal Association community elections

When we designed a new governance structure for the Drupal Association last year, we decided that most of the board is selected through a nominating committee with the goal to carefully balance many factors like needed skills and geographical and sector representation. However, it was also deemed important that we have directors chosen directly by the Drupal community to make sure that the community is always well-represented.

I'm excited that we're holding our first open community elections. Two community "at large" directors will be elected to the Drupal Association Board of Directors. If you'd like to consider running, please have a look at the "At-large" nominations page. And if you're a Drupal community member, please make time to participate in discussions with candidates and of course to vote, starting January 26. (This process was vetted openly in the community by the Elections Committee and numerous community volunteers at http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-association.)

Your participation will help us take this next important step in implementing a new improved governance structure to strengthen the Drupal Association. Thanks!

Mollom 2011 retrospective

2011 was another excellent year for Mollom. We ended the year having blocked 630 million spam messages, up from 352 million spam messages blocked in 2010 -- and that doesn't even count some of our largest customers like Netlog and other large social networks. And, as in 2010, we ended 2011 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%, meaning that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom.

The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 28,000 at the end of 2010 to almost 45,000 at the end of 2011. Revenues grew by more than 50% with virtually no sales or marketing efforts.

Almost the entire Mollom team in the Mollom office in Ghent: sun, Ben, Cedric, Thomas, Johan and Vicky. Missing in the picture are Keith and Dries.

All our revenue is invested back into the company. In 2011, we used those funds to grow our team and to fund development on an entirely new product, which may end up rebooting or repositioning Mollom altogether.

Specifically, we have been worked hard on what will be a "hosted comment moderation interface". That interface will provide an optimized moderation environment that will make it easier to moderate multiple websites, either as an individual or as part of a team of moderators. To do so we introduced a new backend with a REST-based API to replace our original XML-RPC API, we rewrote the Mollom module for Drupal, and started to change our website.

We also faced some new challenges in 2011 -- our support requests increased substantially, mostly due to the variety of sites that are now using Mollom. Based on many of these user requests, we tweaked our classifier performance, which resulted in a dramatic decrease in how often Mollom presents a CAPTCHA challenge, and in doing so, solved a number of real-world issues our clients were having with Mollom performance. Rolling out changes without impacting our up-time statistics was no small challenge -- every change we made on the backend has to be weighed against the impact it has on the effectiveness and responsiveness of Mollom on the client side.

2012 may also bring us some additional competition -- some of the world's best venture capitalists invested $8 million in a company called Impermium. Investments like this validate our belief that the social web needs good anti-spam filtering solutions. Impermium is still building its first product but will definitely be a company to watch.

Regardless of what happens in the social web spam market, we'll be busy in 2012. The first half of 2012, you'll notice some new things popping up on Mollom. Our primary goal for 2012 will be to make the "hosted comment moderation interface" available commercially and to refresh our website. Along with launching a new product, we plan to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts. It is time to do so now the Mollom technology has matured after years of intensive investment. We've also got additional work to do to continue to improve accuracy, maintain our high uptime statistics, and work with other open source developers on improvements to Mollom clients for non-Drupal systems.

In short, 2011 was a great year for Mollom. We're happy doing what we do, and we feel that we're helping to make the web a slightly better place. We wouldn't have made it this far without you -- our customers, users and friends. Without you, we wouldn't be a company at all. Thank you for 2011! We're looking forward to sharing a great 2012 with you.

Acquia retrospective 2011

It's that time of year again! In good tradition, here is my retrospective on Acquia's accomplishments for 2011. (You can also read my 2009 and 2010 retrospectives.)

While 2011 was only Acquia's third full year in business (i.e. revenue-bearing year), 2011 was absolutely jam-packed. Starting with executing on our product strategy and vision, to a trip to the Caribbean for the entire company, to being selected by Forbes magazine as one of America's 100 most promising companies, 2011 was full of amazing successes, both for Drupal and for Acquia.

In this post, I'll provide some more detail on what Acquia accomplished in 2011; I'll discuss our business as a whole, our products, our relation with the Drupal community and my role within the company. I have a separate blog post to reflect on how Drupal fared in 2011.

Acquia business retrospective

In 2011 we saw record bookings and continued momentum. We finished the year with 11 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and beating our plan.

Acquia, along with our partners, had more and more engagements with big and well-known organizations, like Paypal, Twitter, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, the U.S. House of Representatives, and many more.

Most importantly, customer satisfaction and renewals continued to climb, and are best in class compared to other companies in our industry. Rapid customer growth has resulted in surging ticket counts, now numbering in thousands each month. Sustaining high levels of satisfaction and servicing these tickets has proven to be challenging at times. As a result, we significantly evolved our customer on-boarding process, customer communication, and account management, and we've continued to invest in hiring many great people.

Because things went so well, we decided to accelerate sales and marketing and raised more money mid-2011. We raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding. Our previous investors affirmed their confidence by participating in this round, and they were joined by Tenaya Capital.

In January 2011, we also launched Acquia Europe and overachieved our goals there. We now have about 20 people in Europe.

We ended up growing the company from 80 full-time employees to 175, and growing our bookings by 230%. Mid-way through 2011, our existing office space simply couldn't contain us any longer, so we burst out at the end of August and moved to a bigger 35,000 square feet (3,250 square meter) office where we have had a lot of fun.

Despite our success in growing our staff, the availability of quality candidates continues to be the number one challenge for our continued growth. We're trying to help change that. Together with our partners, we delivered 200 training classes worldwide and we've launched an internal training program called Acquia U, to provide immersive training to a select group of new entry level employees (recent college graduates and career changers).

We've also grown Acquia through the acquisition of companies started by talented people within the Drupal community. This year, Acquia acquired two Drupal companies: security specialist Growing Venture Solutions and migration expert Cyrve. We wanted to do these acquisitions because they create a win-win-win situation for the Drupal community, our partners, and our customers.

Acquia product retrospective

On the product side, Acquia achieved everything in line with the product strategy and vision that I outlined in early 2011. If you're not already familiar with Acquia's products, it's worth reading that post first for context.

We rebooted the Acquia Network. We added two of our own services to the Acquia Network with the new Insight and SEO Grader tools, which provides active site testing for security, performance, and search engine optimization best practices for all of your sites.

In addition to adding our own services, we also added complimentary services and tools from our partners, including New Relic (performance monitoring), Drupalize.me (over 200 hours of Drupal video training from Lullabot), Blitz.io (load testing), Utest (crowd sourced manual testing), and Mobify (mobile delivery of Drupal sites). Lastly we re-built the Acquia Library, our knowledge base on everything Drupal and Acquia. Everything combined, we made massive improvements to the Acquia Network.

We also launched Dev Cloud, a single-server version of Managed Cloud. We now deliver over 4 billion page views a month and 70 terrabytes of data from our Drupal-tuned cloud platform. Our operations team now manages over 2,500 servers through Amazon EC2, up from 500 servers in 2011 and 100 at the end of 2010.

A major low-light was the famous Amazon outage in April 2011. Even though only two enterprise customers were affected, out of a couple hundred at that time, we made fairly significant changes to our roadmap to limit future outages. We've since added features to Acquia Cloud like multi-datacenter failover (both multi-region and multi-availability zone across continents) to increase the service level agreement (SLA) we provide to levels beyond what Amazon provides directly.

2011 was also the year that we commercially launched Drupal Gardens at DrupalCon Chicago after spending considerable design and engineering time on the new Views 3 user interface. Since then, Drupal Gardens has added many requested features and now is hosting over 75,000 Drupal 7 sites including some really large enterprise customers, though we can't talk about them quite yet.

We also did a lot of other things; from relaunching Acquia.com on Drupal 7, to adding support for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 to Acquia Dev Desktop, to improving both Acquia Commons and COD.

All in all, 2011 was a very productive year for our engineers and product managers.

Community and Acquia

In everything we do, we try to raise the tide for the Drupal community at large. In 2011, we continued our long track record of giving back to the larger Drupal community.

Roughly 30% of our engineering time flows back to the Drupal community and resulted in numerous improvements, including core bug fixes, contributed module porting, and usability improvements to modules such as Date, Media, and Views. We participated in the University of Minnesota usability testing, in addition to performing more than 20 internal usability tests on Drupal and Drupal Gardens whose results have been fed into the community.

We participated in and organized many sprints, including the Drupal 7 media sprint, the Drush Code Sprint, and Multilingual Drupal Code Code Sprint.

In total, Acquia sponsored over 58 community events in the last 3 months of 2011 alone, and covered travel and accommodation costs for dozens of Acquians to contribute in person to the success of these events around the world. We also took the lead in organizing and running several of them.

Our marketing team contributed great sales and marketing collateral to the Drupal Association (creative commons-licensed), to help others in the community to promote and grow Drupal.

In addition, we also had some struggles …

Acquia is obviously interested in helping to make Drupal the best it can possibly be and we're proud of major contributions we make to the Drupal project. For example, due to concerns about the lack of Drupal marketing, we launched the Drupal Showcase site as a resource to enable the community to help market Drupal. And since the adoption and growth of Drupal is vitally important, I, supported by the rest of the Acquia leadership team, made a decision to fund a major usability initiative during Drupal 7's development.

However, some of these community investment decisions have backfired on us, and caused community backlash and criticism. Sometimes over smaller things that are easily corrected, as in the case of the Drupal Showcase (moving it from an acquia.com sub-domain and adding a field for attribution), and other times because of questions and concerns about Acquia's influence, as in the case of Drupal 7 usability.

Acquia is in a position where not only can we give back, we want to give back. And furthermore, I feel that corporate sponsorship (not just from Acquia) is important to Drupal's continued growth and success. But when major investments into Drupal like these backfire, it definitely gives us pause in continuing to make these kinds of large investments. Nevertheless, I'd love to contribute more and bigger changes to Drupal, particularly Drupal core, in a constructive and healthy way. As Acquia, we'll continue to refine how we work with the community to find the right balance. As a community, we need to figure out how to better embrace corporate sponsorship. Something to brainstorm about together in this new year.

Drupal 2011 retrospective and 2012 predictions

2011 was a tremendous year of major growth for Drupal, and also a year that kept me very, very busy.

Drupal 7

At the beginning of the year, thanks to the efforts of nearly 1,000 contributors, we released Drupal 7, celebrating the event together as a community with over 250 parties in over 90 countries. An incredible achievement for all of us.

A map of all the Drupal 7 release parties around the world: over 250 parties in more than 90 countries.

With a new release comes a fresh round of evangelism. I traveled 412,000 km (or 256,000 miles) in 2011, up from 300,000 km (190,000 miles) in 2010 and about 100,000 km (62,000 miles) in 2009. Given that the world is about 40,000 km (or 25,400 miles), I flew around the world approximately 10 times, or roughly once a month. Or put differently, I traveled an average of 1100 km a day (or 680 miles a day). Needless to say, that is a lot of evangelizing! And although it may not be visible, I believe this evangelizing to be very effective in promoting Drupal and creating local communities around the globe.

Three of the places I visited that I'm most excited about were Brazil, India, and Singapore. There is a large and growing Drupal following in these places with a lot of opportunity for Drupal.

Today, Drupal 7 is a roaring success. Drupal 7 is being adopted at least twice as fast as Drupal 6 has. Expect to see Drupal's adoption to grow throughout 2012 thanks to Drupal 7.

Drupal 8

Drupal also turned 10 years old in 2011, and we had a big birthday bash at DrupalCon Chicago, where we also kicked off development of Drupal 8, and started work on major core initiatives, to help ensure that Drupal stays relevant in the ever-changing web. At DrupalCon London, I presented the results of a community-wide survey with over 3,000 participants, which both reinforced the strategic importance of the existing initiatives, plus added a few more, which I hope to announce in 2012.

These initiatives are being led by Greg Dunlap (Configuration Management), Larry Garfield (Web Services), Gábor Hojtsy (Multilingual), Jacine Luisi (HTML5), Jeff Burnz (Design), and John Albin (Mobile), and are happening in conjunction with other great community initiatives for Drupal 8. A huge thanks to everyone who's been working hard on improving Drupal 8!

In addition to celebrating our future, we also tried to learn from our past. We held a development process retrospective discussion on Drupal 7's 3-year release cycle and the lessons learned: what went well, what didn't, and what we should hook_process_alter() in Drupal 8. As a result, we implemented numerous core development process tweaks (a hard cap on the number of critical and major issues, worked with the various Drupal core team leads to develop "gates" that document how to review patches for accessibility, performance, usability, testing, and documentation). We also made a number of improvements to the collaboration tools on Drupal.org (e.g. issue summaries, image uploads, and subscriptions).

Due to our community's initial focus during the release cycle on stabilization and bug fixes, Drupal 8 development really only recently came into bloom, around the time of DrupalCon London. However, since then, a number of exciting improvements have gone in, including patches to convert Drupal 8 to HTML5 and clean up Drupal's multilingual system, a new object-oriented entity API and cache system, and numerous documentation and API clean-ups. Additionally, there is some promising prototyping going on for the web services and configuration management initiatives.

Drupal Association

Another aspect of Drupal that took a front seat for me in 2011 was the "rebooting" of the Drupal Association: moving to a US-based 501c3 organization, changing the structure of the organization to one of a policy-making board with supporting committees, and electing a new board of directors.

Understanding the importance of these changes requires some familiarity with the Drupal Association's history, as well as the background of the changes. But the key goals are:

1. Move the board away from essentially unpaid "staff" positions (infrastructure manager, event manager, etc.) to a policy-making board. This allows the Drupal Association's activities to scale with the exponential growth of the community and not be hamstrung by what 7-9 individuals are capable of doing.
2. Increase the diversity and effectiveness of the board through targeted outreach of new members via a dedicated Nominating Committee.
3. Increase direct community representation in board decisions through the inclusion of community-elected, "at-large" board members.
4. Empower the community to get directly involved with the Drupal Association's activities through participation in focused committees, such as an Infrastructure Committee and Events Committee.
5. Move operations to the US, where most of our income comes from (which can now be tax-deductible donations), and where most of our staff is located, in order to help increase the efficiency of running the organization.

While these changes took a lot of time to implement, and a few are still ongoing, I believe they will set a very strong foundation for the future of the organization.

In fact, the Drupal Association 2012 planning has already kicked off. Our primary goals for 2012 are to make Drupal.org awesome, and to help address Drupal's talent shortage issue.

Despite the growth and opportunity, finding Drupal talent still remains really, really hard. It continues to be Drupal's most important challenge in my opinion. I'm really glad we decided to focus on it with the Drupal Association.

Community

It certainly hasn't all been rosy, though; 2011 was also a year with challenges, particularly within the core development team. We've certainly struggled with morale issues following nearly two years without a development phase in Drupal core, misunderstandings about the relationship between "official" initiatives and community initiatives, concerns about the balance between adding new features and cleaning up existing technical debt, as well as even more existential questions like "Is Drupal a product or framework? Should Drupal be a page generator or a REST server?".

Much of the growing pains are normal. We're now one of the largest Open Source projects in terms of active contributors -- if not the largest. That growth requires us to evolve how we work. We've grown from a 100% volunteer driven model to a model where there is increasingly more corporate participation and influence. This model is not new to the world. There comes a time when a volunteer-based project needs to foster commercial involvement to help the project advance and compete. Linux is our best example. Without Red Hat, IBM and Dell, Linux would not be what it is today. One of our biggest challenges for 2012, is to figure out how we can get more commercial organizations to get involved with Drupal development in a bigger way while respecting the needs and desires of our community.

Although I also want to do a lot of evangelizing in 2012, I feel like the pendulum has to swing back. I want to re-balance how my time is spent and focus more on Drupal 8 and the Drupal community, in order to spend focused time and energy on overcoming these growing pains.

As a community, we shouldn't forget about the evangelizing though, and this is something a lot of people can help with. It sometimes frustrates me that we spent 3 years working on Drupal 7 with almost a thousand people, but don't properly tell the world about all the great things we've done. Especially because over the years, Drupal has built up a reputation of being hard to use compared to some alternatives. A lot of that is changed with Drupal 7, but it isn't necessarily reflected in how people think and talk about Drupal. To change that, we need to continue to educate people about all the great improvements we made to Drupal 7 and encourage those that gave up on Drupal previously, to give Drupal another try. Drupal 7 is a giant step forward compared to Drupal 6.

Overall, I'm confident that we can overcome these challenges. I really believe in the people that make up our community and the core development team, and our ability to collaborate together to get through tough problems. Drupal will be much better in the end, as a result. We'll have different challenges at the end of 2012.

More predictions for 2012

Here are some more prediction in addition to the predictions and plans above:

1. As Drupal gains in popularity, the number of developers/shops getting involved will increase, and the Drupal ecosystem on the whole will expand greatly. However, there could be a danger that individual companies who don't invest in marketing may actually see fewer clients as a result. Marketing will be a much larger focus of the business community in 2012.
2. I hope 2012 will be the year of the Drupal entrepreneur. Drupal companies who specialize in one particular aspect, such as Pantheon, Drupal Commerce, and Tag1 Consulting have seen a lot of success or promise in 2011 (specialization is a form of marketing, after all), but there are many more niches to fill, and many niches that have plenty of room for multiple companies -- something we sometimes seem to forget. I'd love to see more entrepreneurial spirit within the Drupal community.
3. Another thing I'd love to see is more young people engaging with Drupal in 2012, and have this be a measure of Drupal's success. Some of us old farts are busy raising kids these days. ;-) New, vibrant energy in the community from young people is a hallmark of a great community.
4. I predict more distributions will be created than ever before. We still haven't fully cracked the code on business models for distributions though. That is important because they are expensive to build and maintain. We're seeing early traction with the support business model around distributions, but in 2012, I think we'll see people experiment with more of a client/server model. That is, people will use distributions as a way to sell different kinds of hosted services.
5. Usability is still the number one reason people choose competing solutions to Drupal. Not because the existing features are hard to use — usability of Drupal was vastly improved in Drupal 7 — but because of lack of out-of-the-box features, such as content workflow and content staging tools, accurate content previews, WYSIWYG, media handling, and scheduling. However, I predict that very little significant work will happen on many of these fronts without multiple companies investing a lot of resources into it. In any case, we will need to make Drupal core bigger, as we try and make it smaller.
6. We're going from a pure web world, to a world where there are increasingly more mobile applications. A more diverse world with web sites and web applications. Current website developers will be forced to adapt. Fortunately, Drupal will be well-poised to handle this, both in contrib in Drupal 7 and in core in Drupal 8. I also predict that a number of Drupal shops will re-position themselves to be strong players in the mobile-Drupal world.
7. Someone will fly a Druplicon shaped hot air balloon.

To finish things off, I want to end with a sincere, heart-felt "Thank you!" to the many members of our community who work so hard and passionately to make Drupal the great success and fun project that it is. So, let me just say from me to you, for making Drupal what it is today, and for working with me to make it better day by day, you ROCK! Here's to 2012!

Anouk - Lost

I just love this song.

Drupal fireside chat #1: core development process

It's no secret that I travel around the world, evangelizing Drupal to new audiences and connecting with local communities, as well as contributors, from all over the world. In 2011 alone, I traveled more than 400,000 km (250,000 miles) and talked to thousands of Drupal people. Every day, I answer questions that many in the larger community would benefit from knowing as well.

To help facilitate holding these discussions on more of an international scale, I’d like to experiment with doing monthly, informal chats. In terms of format, I’d like to choose a general topic of discussion, then hold an hour-long phone call that all could dial into (with IRC for back-channel discussions and questions) where I can give an update on major Drupal happenings and allow plenty of time for Q&A from the community on the topic for the month. A moderator will help with voicing/unvoicing people during the Q&A section, and the chats would be recorded and put up for download for those who couldn’t make it.

If this idea sounds interesting to you, please join me for the first Drupal Fireside Chat on Friday, December 16 at 10 am Eastern US time (registration recommended so click 'register'). The topic I’d like to focus on for the first session is the Drupal Core Development Process, including sub-topics like a general status update on what is happening with Drupal 8, what role Drupal 8 initiatives and initiative owners have in the development of Drupal 8, and what process changes have been put in place to help improve Drupal 8's development process over Drupal 7's.

Feel free to post additional questions/topic ideas here, and hope to see you on Friday!

Louvre using Drupal

Big news! The world's most visited art museum in the world is now using Drupal for its website: http://louvre.fr. Très cool!