Bridging WordPress & Drupal: Open CMS Insights

Certainly! Here is the revised transcript with corrected misspellings, grammar, punctuation, and speaker formatting:

---

Courtney:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another Open Talk in Open Source. I am Courtney Robertson. Robert’s not able to be with me today, but I have a fantastic guest lined up for us. Today we’re going to talk with Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm, have I pronounced your last name correctly?

Malcolm:
You did great, yep.

Courtney:
Okay, fantastic. So a lot of the WordPress community knows Malcolm or has encountered working with Malcolm in various places, but these days Malcolm is in the Drupal community too. So we’re going to first start out with learning a little bit about your background and WordPress. Before we get onto that, can you tell us a little bit about your background with WordPress? I looked up your profile before when I was doing my homework to come up with some questions for you, and I saw that your WordPress profile is from 2005. So that tells me you’re not new to this space. Tell me a little more.

Malcolm:
So I originally started with WordPress back with version 0.72, which is kind of the first mainstream release of WordPress. I was not too long out of college at that point. I was all excited about PHP development. I did not want to reinvent the wheel and develop my own CMS, so I thought, well, geez, I need something. I have to publish online. I have all these things that I want to get out. I was using Blogger at the time and writing the rest of the code for my website myself. So my blog was on Blogger, and the rest of my website was PHP. Then I pulled in WordPress and said, wow, geez, I could do my whole website with this. I ended up as a full-time blogger writing about WordPress back around WordPress 1.0 on bloggingpro.com, which was actually in the WordPress newsfeed at the time. I did some podcasts with Charles Stricklin, co-hosted on the WordPress podcast with Charles Stricklin back in the day, and have done multiple different podcasts with Jeff Chandler. I worked as a project manager for 10up, doing support and marketing for Gravity Forms. I’ve worked with Canberra Creative as well as a few other WordPress agencies or multi-CMS agencies. Yeah, I’ve done a little bit of everything in the WordPress community. I’ve been very, very, very fortunate. It’s been a long career. We’re coming up on 20 years or so, which just seems outrageous, but it’s been amazing.

Courtney:
Yeah. So WordPress 1.0, goodness! I found it around version 2.4, so I was a little early into this, but my profile wasn’t made for a couple of years after that. I have to ask, you said that you realized you could build your whole website with WordPress. Those of us that have been in this space for a long time know that originally WordPress was just there for blogging purposes. There were no pages, no sidebars, no widgets. Those were all fancy new features that came much later along. When you began using WordPress to build your entire website, was it still when it was intended to be just for blogging? Were you much of a hacker?

Malcolm:
Yeah, so I think the other pages that I had were individual blog posts that I had listed on those pages. So my about page was a blog post about me that I just had on a specific page. So I had it in the navigation, and I think I did that for all the pages of content back then. So that’s how I built out my website with a blogging tool.

Courtney:
Hilarious. I remember those days, how to register sidebars and add widgets, and do things that it wasn’t really originally intended to do. It’s good to talk with people from that era of time. I should look up some of those old posts about WordPress from that era. Oh gosh, the screenshots.

Malcolm:
They’re brutal.

Courtney:
Yep. Wayback Machine is there for all of us, absolutely. So you and I last crossed paths at the first-ever WordCamp Canada. I think it was our second time meeting up. We met up originally, was it Buffalo I think?

Malcolm:
Yep, that’s correct. Two years ago in Buffalo.

Courtney:
So Canada was, I think, a huge success. It was a great camp. Can you tell folks a little bit more about your time at WordCamp Canada and also what you specifically were doing there?

Malcolm:
So I kind of dip my toe in and out of WordCamps from time to time. I find it a great way to reconnect, especially in this post-COVID era. It’s really nice to see some friendly faces that I know I share an interest with. And so when I heard about WordCamp Canada, I was all over that. One of the things that I kind of jokingly did was submit a topic of wanting to discuss working remotely for American companies in Canada. I’ve been able to do that for the majority of my career, so I thought, I’ll submit this. I highly doubt they’ll take it because a lot of WordCamps typically are more engineering-focused, how you can do cool things with WordPress, they have beginner tracks, but typically those are how to start with WordPress from almost a technical perspective. Some of these social topics or more career-focused topics usually get a thumbs down, so to speak.

And I think WordCamp Canada was one of the first times I saw that there was a very heavy kind of social track related to accessibility, inclusivity, employment, and globalization. So all of those topics were really kind of focused on and highlighted. And so they said yes to my presentation. It was a really nice opportunity to share the experiences that I’ve had, and I hope that someone out there will look at international employment opportunities in a new way and stop limiting themselves because my career would be half of what it is if I hadn’t kind of pushed myself to deal with the ins and outs of working for American companies for the majority of my career.

Courtney:
I actually had a chance to be in the audience for that talk, which was great. And I was looking at it from the lens of I’m an American with many Canadian coworkers, and I like to understand some of the unique things that they might be facing that I just might not be aware of. What are some of the challenges that they’re facing in their line of work? And then also we’re allowed to, at my place of employment at GoDaddy, we’re allowed to side hustle with other things. And so if I were to ever contract somebody that is working in Canada, what things should I be mindful of that they’re facing? So I think it was a great talk even for those that were not able to be present. But I expect that the videos for WordCamp Canada will have been uploaded to WordPress.tv. I believe they’re all in the queue right now and just awaiting the publishing of a few of them. So do feel free, folks, to go check that out on WordPress.tv, look for WordCamp Canada and Malcolm, and I’m sure you’ll find it. So you took work at Acquia, which is outside the WordPress community completely. First of all, many folks in this audience, we’re the Do the Woo network here, and that means that people are keyed into what’s going on specifically with WooCommerce, which is a subset of WordPress. Acquia is so not WordPress. Can you tell us what Acquia is known for and what led you to consider work outside of the WordPress bubble?

Malcolm:
Yeah, so Acquia is the Drupal mothership in the same way that Automattic is for WordPress. Dries, the founder of Drupal, is the CTO of the company. So it’s a slightly different role than Matt Mullenweg has at Automattic. But the two companies have so many parallels. They’re very similar in so many ways. So if you know anything about Automattic, you kind of inherently know stuff about Acquia. It’s a product-focused company based around Drupal, and I never expected to work there. That was a strange coincidence. A lot of my career has been strange coincidences in terms of timing and kind of being bold enough to say yes to things that other people might say no to. So the company I was working for at the time had been acquired. I was their WordPress expert. I think the role was something like web strategist or something like that.

And they had been acquired and the writing was kind of on the wall. They were integrating multiple companies. They weren’t going to need multiple web people to help them out. I was doing the math and said, I’m not going to take a risk on my career and wait and see if I’m the one that survives the Hunger Games. I was talking to Ian Gupta, who I knew from way back in the day, and he had, not recently, but I was interested in getting my Agile certification. He had done that. He was in my contact list on LinkedIn. So I reached out and said, how did you find that? Next thing I knew, he was like, yeah, I’m working for Acquia now as a technical account manager. Would you ever consider working for Acquia? And I was like, I had never, but I would be open to that discussion. Through the interviewing process, the whole way through, I was like, they’re not going to hire me. They’re not going to hire me. I’m a WordPress guy for the most part, they’re not going to hire me. And so when the offer came in to actually hire me, I was kind of like, uh-oh, what have I done? This

is very different from anything that I had done before. And I was a little worried, a little concerned, but I mean, for those that have had the opportunity to work for Acquia and enjoyed their experience or some of the other large WordPress organizations, in a way, Acquia has that same kind of mentality, that same kind of mindset, and it has continued to be an amazing experience.

Courtney:
That’s great. It’s really exciting to be able to hear that. So in your role of technical account manager, my understanding of WordPress versus Drupal is that early on, in the before times, before we had sidebars and pages, Drupal traditionally led the way with more of the robust enterprise level of websites. They had a lot of inroads with higher ed and large-scale corporations, and WordPress was originally seen as though it’s just that blogging platform even after it could handle a full CMS. Is that still true for Drupal today? And what can you tell me about maybe where Drupal is going these days? I know a little bit about the Starshot initiative. I’ve read a little bit on what’s going on with that one, but what kind of users are selecting Drupal, and who’s the primary audience? We know that WordPress can do all of it, and WordPress is for everybody that wants to be able to publish. But do we still find that Drupal is primarily handling these enterprise-scale kind of websites?

Malcolm:
For the most part, that is still the expected use case for Drupal. That is changing and transforming because there are only so many enterprise companies that exist, which I think speaks volumes to the difference in market share between the two CMSs. I think Drupal is at around 1% of the web, where WordPress is at 30-some-odd percent of the web and 50% of the CMS usage, and Drupal is at like 2% of CMS usage. So very different goals and focuses. I remember early on when I started using Drupal in some project management work, the joke was, oh, if you wanted some quick and easy blogging system, you kind of tacked on WordPress inside a Drupal install. And that was the way you gave that functionality to people who didn’t necessarily have the technical chops or the ability to deal with the learning curve of Drupal. In terms of a cultural perspective, from my experience within the Drupal community, there’s still this assumption that WordPress is inferior in some way.

It’s not really good because there’s still a concern that the security isn’t quite there or the robustness in terms of translations and these kinds of custom field-related things don’t really exist within WordPress core, and so it’s just not as good. Then the second opinion that I see a lot of is that Drupal and WordPress are so different that they shouldn’t even be directly compared. Why even have that conversation? A coworker of mine likes to say Drupal is like a data relationship system with CMS functionality, and WordPress is a blogging system with CMS functionality, right? So he sees it from a completely different angle. I’ve showed him Advanced Custom Fields, I’ve shown him WE LOT, I’ve shown him some of the functionality that can be added to WordPress relatively easily to give a lot of those similar feelings and functions that they’re used to in Drupal.

I’ve actually been internally spending a little bit of time at Acquia pointing out some WordPress-related things from time to time to let everyone know that most of their knowledge is several years out of date. They’re still thinking WordPress is WordPress 2.0; they have no idea what’s happened in the last 3, 5, 7 years in WordPress. So their opinions are really skewed based on that historical memory of what WordPress was. I’m trying to bring them up to date with what it actually is today, and that’s been a really fun project. You mentioned Starshot, which apparently they’re going to call Drupal CMS, which I think is kind of a lame name because Drupal is a CMS. So calling Starshot “Drupal CMS,” I don’t understand that, but I’m not the decision-maker there. But its entire focus is improving Drupal from a skilled site builder perspective, which reminds me so much of what WordPress has done with Gutenberg, and I think it is the perfect direction for Drupal to go.

Courtney:
Yeah, I was reading a little bit about it on Dries’ website. I’m still a diehard RSS reader, and as I was reading through the direction of that, what the WordPress community may know of Drupal is that you can integrate Gutenberg into Drupal. You can have the Gutenberg experience in the equivalent of a post editor. Maybe what the Drupal community needs to know is that we are working on core fields. The table will be gathering at WordCamp US with Scott Clark at the helm on that one for the Core Fields API. Because of the data views that are going on inside of when you go to edit your theme, setting up the configuration that’s necessary there, it’s becoming apparent that we need that to the point where it was called out at WordCamp US last year during Matt’s Q&A. Oh, that Drupal has this core fields area.

So I think it’s pretty interesting though for a few reasons. Basically, it seemed to me like there were almost three flavors in Dries’ post about how one could select what variety of Drupal they would like to experience. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? And on this, which was actually put forward as the strategy plan? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a strategy plan as it relates. We see our big picture goals for the year-end WordPress, but I don’t think we’ve seen a strategy plan fully published in the WordPress space. Can you tell us more about those areas a little bit?

Malcolm:
Yeah. So I think this whole thing with Starshot reminds me of the “learn JavaScript deeply” call that Matt made for WordPress. This is a call to everyone to say, look, we realize that the transition right now for CMSs is, how do we empower marketers and site builders to execute on their goals? They’re driving the decisions about the CMS, they’re driving the choices. It’s not the IT team. They’re managing the updates maybe, but they’re certainly not driving the decision of what CMS to use. And so how can we appeal to that audience? Even today, it requires a fair bit of technical understanding to install and run a Drupal site. There’s no five-minute install like in WordPress. It requires an understanding of Composer, it requires an understanding of YAML files. It is not simple, easy, or fun. Then when you get into the interface, it feels a little bit clunky.

It doesn’t feel super modern. If you compare it to Webflow and WordPress and modern Squarespace and Wix, while they’re not necessarily aiming for the same businesses, they are in a way aiming for the same end user, which is the site builder, the person publishing the content online. So there’s a couple of different pieces there. One is this thing called recipes, which is really cool to me. The idea that you could, at any point in the process during the installation or later on, pick and choose what functionality you want. So let’s say you want a marketing website with a form system and maybe a cool download section on your website. Maybe you think of some other features that you want in there. You want user-generated content on your website. With recipes, you’ll be able to select those things, and it will not just install the plugins, which are called modules in Drupal, but it’ll also help with the configuration.

Then once I have my site fully configured and ready to go, I can download that as a recipe and share it out. Recipes can be as small as passwords expire in 90 days, or they can be as big as here’s a full CMS system with all of these things pre-configured for you—all these modules pre-selected, the theme ready to go, user settings, additional fields, all this stuff just ready to go out of the box with this little special recipe file. You can then add additional recipe files on top of that and mix and match to your heart’s content to build up your perfect version of Drupal. I think that is such a really interesting way to go. I can imagine how something similar to that would be useful in the WordPress space, especially for those that are running multiple hundreds of sites, or maybe even for GoDaddy to come up with kind of like this is the GoDaddy install of WordPress.

So it’s not just the plugins and themes, but it’s even maybe the configuration options because out of the box, we all know that WordPress has some configuration options that we, by default, on autopilot, go and change because we know that’s not really how we want our site to be, right? We don’t want the permalinks to be like S equals 243. We want pretty permalinks, so we change that. We want our assets to be uploaded probably to year and month folders, so we go and change that. How nice would it be to have a way to just have those all set by default through this recipe system? And so that’s one of the many things that’s coming with this Starshot experience.

Courtney:
I really like that. I think that in the WordPress space for the DIY crowd, I would say what we have in the hosting space, coming from working at GoDaddy and knowing that my competitors are offering similar, is a lot of use of AI for the onboarding wizard experience. So you say, I want to open a pizza shop, I want to open a cafe, or I’m opening up maybe a fashion boutique or something like that. Based upon what you indicate you want, it will walk you through and create a basic five-page site. You need to change the content to be your own. It will give you some free stock images that you’re permitted to use, but ideally, you would swap those out for your own. It will help guide you towards selecting the appropriate color

scheme, etc. You could default to say, here is the font choice for my brand, here is the whatever.

I think about that at the DIY level, that’s pretty cool. But agencies tend to not want AI to get in their way at the spin-up phase. What I like about Starshot is that the agencies that are building the sites for customers have a means of selecting that. Perhaps it could be made more GUI or easier even for agencies, but I think the first step is to understand what the agencies need. I think Drupal tends to historically be primarily agency folks. Unless you’re a developer that just wants to learn Drupal, I don’t know too many hobbyists that go to Drupal and learn all of Drupal to get up and going, though I could be wrong—happy to be wrong about that. But yeah, it looks to be pretty interesting to see where that’s going. I really like tuning in to read Dries’ blog posts, like I said, but I also really enjoy when I get a chance to see his equivalent of the state of the word, his annual address to the community.

As well as, I really enjoyed the video that I saw where Matt had invited Dries and Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, to Automattic’s Grand Meetup. So Automattic, as a company, has an annual grand meetup where they invite everybody together. I thought that interview or that time was actually quite unique. I really love to hear from what other open-source projects are doing and how we can benefit each other in the open-source space. Sure, we have competitors. I could say, yes, I’m at GoDaddy and I know what my competitors are doing, but also my friends work at those places. As a whole, it’s on us to care for the shared customers and community. Included in that are things like, oh yes, we do make Drupal hosting available to our customers. And in the process of that, I think about issues like what’s going on in PHP and the push as PHP continues—it’s under both of our projects, right?

So as PHP continues to push forward with how quickly they’re iterating upon the language compared to historically in the past, well, our customers are all going to face the challenges and the struggles of that. Working at a hosting company, it’s on my mind. I might think about it from the WordPress lens first, but certainly, it applies across the board. What do the other things that we offer that are also very PHP-based deal with, and how do we address those needs too? So that leads into the next question or the next topic. There are some of the overlapping roles of open source in both of our ecosystems. I’ve met several folks in the Drupal space. Some of them I’ve actually got lined up coming in the near future. AmyJune Hineline has overlapped in both WordPress and Drupal.

AmyJune is one of the mentors of mentors. There is a mentorship program in the Drupal space, and I have several friends that have been a part of that in their early web dev learning journey. It’s more about learning to use and implement Drupal, whereas in WordPress, our mentorship program is primarily more around getting up and running as a contributor if you would like to be a contributor. We have a mentorship program specific to contributors to all of the teams. We both have really big user bases across both WordPress and Drupal. What are some of the other interesting challenges that you’ve seen? What role does Acquia have in that? For instance, with the WordPress mentorship program, we see a lot of Automattic staff primarily facilitating and leading that. What’s Acquia doing to help foster contribution to Drupal? What’s Acquia doing, or what is Drupal as a project also doing related to any kind of challenges in the open-source space?

Malcolm:
Yeah, I’ll be honest, I haven’t really dived much into this yet. Primarily at Acquia, our focus is on the products and services we provide. While Dries and others talk about open source and are the lead drummers of that ideal, I think, like many of the bigger WordPress companies, there’s a lot of kind of closed or proprietary things that are happening that’ll probably never be spun off and freely given to the communities as open-source versions. That isn’t to say that there are no contributions to open source, and actually, TAMs are recommended to provide time back to open-source projects or help resolve issues with different modules. In my opinion, the open-source community across the board has really taken a backseat to profitability over the last couple of years, especially as the number of subscription-based themes, plugins, and services for both continues to grow. There’s less of that tinker, hacker, freedom fighter mentality of the early days that both of these CMSs used to have.

Courtney:
Yeah, that makes sense. I do aspire to bring some of the learnings of what’s going on both in one project to the other. One of those that’s on my radar right now, I’m actively working on the contributor dashboards for the WordPress project and how folks are being recognized—I’ll say it that way; I don’t want to say tracked. It’s more about are we recognizing the various efforts? One of the things that I really responded to a lot about Drupal is that Drupal has a means of logging your contribution efforts. It’s a bit of a manual process at this time, whereas some of the tooling that we’re looking at for contributor dashboards in WordPress would be rather automated—getting activity on how many Slack messages one might be sending that are in public channels, specifying that, or GitHub activity. Whereas there are folks doing a lot of hidden labor like reading posts, somebody might scoff about that.

But for those who want to have a deep historical knowledge about the project, the act of reading posts and researching—there’s no way to automate tracking that activity. So Drupal has a really interesting way of doing that. I’ve thought about bringing something akin to that. For those that do more of that hidden type of work, wherever it is never going to be practical to get activity metrics, anywhere that we could get activity metrics, let’s build an automation for that. But if it does not make sense to do activity metrics, some means of logging that time in a more manual process—I feel like the more that we can continue to recognize the value of contributors in open source, the better we are as stewards of various open-source projects. I think we can serve as examples to how open source should be for other projects probably yet to come.

So I’ve been doing some deep thinking around that lately in my specific day-to-day work. I’m excited to see where that one goes. Looking ahead, what do you think the future for Drupal with Acquia leading some of the major initiatives will look like? In WordPress, we see Automattic generally leads the way with what we are doing with Gutenberg, with the community team as far as events go, and we’re grateful for that ability, but we also see that there is a need for more organizations to step up and step in to facilitate some of that. How do you see that shaking out with Acquia in particular as it relates to Drupal? Do you see the same tensions in the community perhaps about the direction of the project?

Malcolm:
Very much so. Again, there are mirror images of each other in so many ways. It feels like right now, especially the Drupal community is taking pages out of the modern WordPress playbook. I will say that with WordPress, there isn’t the same kind of marketing team with Drupal that some of the closed-source hosted enterprise CMS systems have. So in some ways, expansion for Drupal will come from trying to entice more people to work on the project. I think that we have a very similar percentage of third-party companies working on it, but I think we’re struggling. I think, just like the WordPress community is starting to as well, where a lot of the contributors are—no offense—they’re getting a little older. I had someone once say to me, the biggest mistake that Drupal’s made was turning away from being a CMS option for the local mom-and-pop shop.

Because once that happened, young developers had a hard time getting started with Drupal, and the project lost some important continuance of fresh, young, and new ideas. I’m seeing that as I’m participating more and more in this community, they’re trying to go, oh shoot, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot here about the future of Drupal. How do we fix that before the old guard all sail off into the distance, so to speak? Making it more innovative, reducing the friction in using the software, I think, will be a big part of that. One of the major changes that I have a lot of enterprise customers lament is how quick Drupal is versioning right now. It’s just constant new versions coming out. I think there was only a year and a half between the first version of Drupal 10 and the Drupal 11 release that came out, which is incredibly fast for the Drupal community.

For those that don’t know, there are still a lot of sites running Drupal 7 and have been running it forever and would love to just run it forever. But the goal now is, how can we iterate on Drupal in a way that it can innovate while maintaining some of that backward compatibility so that we don’t break things, so that we can release more often, and have upgrades more often, and just make that a seamless part of using Drupal? Again, that reminds me a lot of what WordPress has done. It’s a lot of versions—I think three to four a year. I don’t think Drupal’s going to iterate that quickly, but that is the goal. Again, it reminds me so much of what WordPress is doing. Then from an Automattic versus Acquia perspective, I think it’s very similar. We try to point the direction that we see based on the clients that we have in hopes that we as a company are helping lead the project well.

But there are still definitely a

lot of different voices with different interests and focuses as we move forward. I think there are a lot of people out there that don’t see the value in Starshot, that don’t see the value in appealing to the experienced builder, who think that it should remain a very developer-centric CMS platform because that provides the comfort and security that they’re used to. But I think there’s a diminishing market for that kind of CMS, and I think that this new project or this new direction is such a breath of fresh air.

Courtney:
I would agree there. That kind of reminds me a little bit about the needs of the users, not just from the contributor space, but also from the user space, how the needs of the users of projects are evolving. It used to be that we were just asking for pages in WordPress or sidebars back when I remember that. That’s how I learned PHP—registering a sidebar to stick a widget in the side, and I had to learn a lot about PHP. I didn’t really have any mentors or anyone to help me through that experience. Oh boy, was that a challenge, especially when there weren’t nearly as many materials online for teaching me this as there are these days. So one of the hot issues that I see right now across these are areas like accessibility, the need for improving accessibility. You mentioned the hot-button word of backward compatibility and where that stands. I know that Drupal has had some differences compared to WordPress in pushing updates when we have releases and the cadence of the releases. It’s funny that in WordPress, folks so much lament, why does it take so long to get whatever? And also lament, oh my goodness, you’re shipping so many releases in a year. Meanwhile, Drupal’s like, oh, it’s only a year and a half. We could do it. And that’s making waves in a year and a half. I don’t know enough about Drupal to know if in that year and a half they’re shipping many features in that change. I also don’t know which versions are or are not backward compatible. Where do you see that shaking out in the different communities?

Malcolm:
Yeah, so the learning curve for Drupal is steep. I’ve mentioned that before, but one of the reasons for that is there are some externalities that both CMSs have. Drupal depends on CKEditor for its editing experience. So when CKEditor 4 went end of life, Drupal had to upgrade to CKEditor 5. When Composer upgrades, Drupal needs to update to the new version of Composer. There are some other projects within Drupal that also push that along. Then of course, we have the upgrades of PHP, the upgrades of MySQL. So there are all these externalities that have to be managed through this process. So it’s not wholly on the CMS to determine when these releases happen in some ways, right? Because we want to continue that secure, performant, and accessible tool. In terms of accessibility, I will say a lot of people in the Drupal community have this strong belief that Drupal is much more accessible than WordPress.

Again, I think it really comes down to the company that’s developing. With the additional things that you add on top of it, like WordPress core on its own is very accessible, but you add a really crummy theme and some crummy plugins, and guess what? You can’t use it anymore. And that’s very similar to Drupal. There are agencies that are not as good at accessibility, and when they develop a theme for Drupal to publish a site online, it’s not accessible. Or when they create a module for Drupal to add some functionality and they don’t do it in an accessible way, guess what? The admin panel is no longer accessible. There’s been some complaints about CKEditor not being as accessible as some people would like in terms of the version that’s integrated with Drupal. So again, there are always these ebbs and flows, and it really depends on these third parties. So I really dislike the conversation of is WordPress accessible or is Drupal accessible? And if we take it down to the core, the answer for both is yes, but as soon as you change anything or add anything, then the answer might be no.

Courtney:
And the answer for a logged-in user that is in the edit interface as opposed to the front-end website visitor also could be vastly different about that too. And that’s just even with core for both of them. Yeah, so it’s something that I think we all could benefit from learning about for sure. So let’s skip ahead to what advice do you have for others in the community? Those who have been longtime contributors and are considering branching out like you have. I know some WordPress people that are itching to look beyond the WordPress experience itself. I am quite happy here. I think there’s a lot of learning to do, and I love to get into shenanigans where I learn from other open-source projects, and I hope that we can share our knowledge together and benefit all of our communities through that. But I know some folks that are looking to different shores, we’ll say. What advice do you have for them and how could they start preparing if they’re interested in jumping ship to somewhere like Acquia? Or leaving the standard CMS space for other kinds of flavors of web dev?

Malcolm:
Yeah, I will say hopefully through this discussion, anyone, no matter which open-source project you’re on, especially if it’s a PHP, MySQL-developed CMS, you can easily transition from one to the other. And there are some amazing opportunities there. I would highly recommend if you are a WordPress developer or you’re a Drupal developer and you’ve been in that space for a long period of time, take a short break and go check out what the other is doing. You might be able to contribute some important refinements due to your experience. You might be able to identify a path that your CMS choice went down only to find a dead end, and you could save countless hours of tinkering by dozens of people by bringing that up. You might see features or functions or ideas that you could bring back to the tool that you favor. So there’s a huge amount of opportunity there, and especially right now with all of the transitions and changes that have happened in WordPress over the last couple of years and the ones that are being queued up for Drupal over the next little while, this would be a great time to just kind of peek in and see what the other is doing and take some learnings from that.

Because while both CMSs typically target different types of customers, so to speak, I think that there’s a lot to learn from each other. There’s a lot of opportunities for time savings, and there’s, I don’t know necessarily that it’ll become one homogenous CMS someday, but I think that there are advantages that each has that each should be looking to incorporate into their own right. And so we should be hoping to see those kinds of opportunities and transitions. I will say from someone who’s been in the WordPress space primarily for the last 20 years, going to a more niche CMS means that there’s a little bit less competition in a way. So your opportunity for contribution, in a way, is larger, right? Your potential impact is larger, and sometimes the salaries are higher. So explore those things, explore those opportunities, and push yourself to learn new things. I know that if and when I ever come back to the WordPress community and work in WordPress again, the things that I’ll have learned through this process will be so valuable in that effort. So no new knowledge is wasted.

Courtney:
Absolutely. What kinds of things right now, in a more timely fashion, we’ve talked about our Drupal community and the WordPress community and the learnings between them—what kind of things in open source, whether they be new open-source projects, any kind of dependencies—you mentioned PHP, MySQL—being aware of what these things that we depend upon in our open-source projects are doing, or any other kinds of trends, things that are on your radar that are more news related?

Malcolm:
Yeah, I love full-site editing in WordPress. I remember when the idea first came out, people were saying that at some point, maybe WordPress would only have one base theme and we would all just install different block and patterns packs or style packs. I still believe that could be a long-term direction for themes in WordPress. I think that the Experience Builder in Drupal is potentially trying to develop something similar. I know Webflow has really kind of focused in on the freedom of design in an interesting way. I think being able to easily implement an idea on the web will empower so many people, and I’m really excited about that. Personally, one of the things that’s impacted me the most at work is there’s an open-source tool called Rooney, which allows me to scan Drupal websites and get an understanding of what’s going on with them.

I’ve been able to start writing my own policies and profiles, which allows me to take data that I think is valuable or interesting about the Drupal install and the server configuration and the traffic and the logs, and parse that out in valuable ways for my customers. I wish I had that back in the WordPress world because being able to type in a command in the command line and get a really nice HTML report that I can then tease little details out of has just been—oh my goodness, it’s the chef’s kiss of my job in a way. So I really love that and would love to see someone take a look at that and maybe generate something like that for WordPress before I go back to that space. If I do someday, that ability to analyze, to take in all of these various data sources and turn them into graphs and charts and stats in a way that is useful and actionable—it’s so empowering and I hope to continue to see those kinds of tools get more time and attention. I’m actually trying to push Acquia to really spend some money—basically some people time—and say, hey, look, we’re actually going to sponsor this project because it’s

so important internally to our team that we want to make sure that it never goes away and that it continues to be developed, supported, and grown. So Rooney is my thing that I think is really cool from a technical perspective.

Courtney:
I think I might need a link for that. Thank you so much for the past 40 minutes or so here that we’ve been together. Is there anybody else that you think we should have on the show?

Malcolm:
I have two quick suggestions. Brent Schultz from Third and Grove—he worked with me at 10up. He has a deep knowledge of both WordPress and Drupal from an engineering perspective, and I think that would be super interesting. Being a VP of a large multi-CMS agency, he can provide information on the keyword “composable architecture,” being able to take a bunch of different tools and combine them and create them into these custom solutions. I think he would be amazing for that. Then my second one was—I asked my boss this question: if I’m asked who should go on the show, who should I mention? He said Ron Northcutt, head of Developer Relations at Appsmith, would be great. He had a deep interest in trying to bring more e-commerce functionality into Drupal, something that is often pushed off to third-party tools. I think the conversation about the difference between why did WordPress think it was okay to have WooCommerce, but Drupal thought that having any kind of commerce functionality was the wrong approach when Drupal was supposed to be focused on big business and enterprise. And WordPress was supposed to be the mom-and-pop blogger. So I think that conversation would be a lot of fun as well to be able to listen to.

Courtney:
I think that would be fantastic for a Do the Woo show of all places. Absolutely, yes. And one little bit of a plug back—Bob did not ask me to share this, but there is a new show on Do the Woo that is specific for WordPress in the enterprise. That one might be really interesting also for some of the Drupal folks to take a listen to because it is a lot of the top-tier Fortune 50 type of websites, the enterprise agencies behind those, sharing about their experiences and what they need in the WordPress interface and also the WordPress community as it relates to serving their customers. So I’ll make sure I share a link back for that one with you. Thank you so much, Malcolm, for being with us today.

Malcolm:
Thanks for having me.