Making Drupal Easier for Beginners
Alejandro Moreno López
Innovation, Technical and Solutions Architect, Developer Advocate, Speaker, Writer, Passionate about Life, #OpenSource and #Drupal
What Makes Drupal Hard for Beginners?
Drupal is an incredibly powerful and flexible CMS. But let’s be honest—introducing new users to Drupal has always been a challenge. The "first experience" often falls short, especially compared to other CMS platforms.
Traditionally, evaluating Drupal meant navigating forms on Drupal.org and being directed to environments that didn’t really showcase Drupal’s potential. Even Pantheon, with its streamlined environment setup which in my opinion is ahead of the competitors, often left users with a vanilla Drupal site—not exactly inspiring for editorial teams or first-time users.
Why does this matter? A vanilla Drupal site doesn’t "wow" anyone. It’s like handing someone Linux Debian when they needed Linux Ubuntu. While Drupal Core is a fantastic tool for building custom applications, it doesn’t always provide the best starting point for evaluating the platform.
A New First Experience: Try Drupal
To address this, Pantheon collaborated with our friends at 1xInternet to create a new Try Drupal experience. This initiative takes the first impression of Drupal to the next level.
Here’s what’s new:
As Christoph Breidert from 1xInternet highlighted here, this custom distribution is a game-changer for user experience.
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Now, when you visit the Try Drupal page on Drupal.org and choose Pantheon, you’ll be directed to this new experience—a result of the collaboration between 1xInternet and Pantheon.
The Bigger Picture
This initiative isn’t just about Pantheon and 1xInternet—it’s about improving Drupal adoption as a whole. As I discussed with Baddy at DrupalCamp Berlin, the first experience has been a major pain point for far too long, limiting Drupal’s reach and appeal.
While this new Try Drupal experience is a fantastic first step, there’s still significant room for growth. Imagine if efforts like this were supported across the broader ecosystem—with contributions from Acquia, Amazee, Platform.sh, and others. Together, we could redefine what it means to evaluate and experience Drupal.
And yes, Drupal CMS is coming soon, and we also have the trial experience—but more on all of that in the near future!
What’s Your Take?
If we want Drupal to grow and thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape, improving the first-time user experience must be one of our top priorities. It’s not just about showcasing Drupal’s capabilities—it’s about making it accessible, intuitive, and exciting for new users from the very first interaction
Do you think the new Try Drupal experience is a step in the right direction? What else could be done to improve Drupal’s first impression? I’d love to hear your thoughts—share them in the comments!
PHP developer and Drupalista!
3 个月I can think of at least two new initiatives trying to mend that gap right now in different ways: the Open University Initiative (https://www.drupal.org/project/open_university) and the IXP-Fellowship (Initiative for onboarding inexperienced developers: https://www.drupal.org/community-initiatives/ixp). Not to mention the Starshot Initiative and the Marketing Initiative. I feel like the community is very aware that it's hard to get started with Drupal, and is working hard to remedy that; so personally I'm pretty confident in our ability to level the field for newcomers :)
That's a bit sad. Thanks to the partners for showing up, but the wasm version was powerful. No sign ups required. Every time I was doing a demo, it was very satisfying to see people pull up their phones, scan the QR code and have fun playing with drupal admin. I understand it was not generating any leads, it was hardly useful when exporting the data, I guess it was also costly to maintain and push forward. I hope someone picks it up and keep it alive...
Known as the LocalGov Drupal guy, I'm on a mission to enable local government organisations to offer better digital services while making the most of their resources.
3 个月I'm on the Drupal home page and I can't find a link saying "Try Drupal". Is there one? If not, maybe that's one more thing holding us back. Update: I found it. It's the button that says "Demo". But when you click on it it does nothing. You need to scroll down to the link that says "Demo online". I think we could probably do better with our terminology if someone as used to Drupal as me is getting confused about our homepage.