Feature

Few developers in the startup community would recommend making a product with Drupal. If you are building a web or e-commerce site, sure, but if you want to build a SaaS product there are plenty of technologies that are easier to productise. Installation profiles and features were added onto Drupal 7 as an afterthought, not as a central design principle and, as a result, have plenty of shortcomings. It looks like this will get better with Drupal 8 but, for now, by design, Drupal is not architected for easy redeployability.

Sounds pretty damning? It may be, but a lot of work has gone into remediating this problem, and Drupal is still better at redeployability than most other CMSs. CMSs are designed to be products themselves, not to be used to build products. Drupal however, is hyper-configurable. As a tool it is made for infinite extensibility, to keep as many options as open as possible. Compared to other CMSs, it’s easier to extend even if you don’t yet know what you will want to do in the future – which makes it great for one-off tailor-made projects. And this is a strength for some types of products and for certain parts of the development cycle.

In our consultancy, we started building “products” with Drupal because it was the right thing to do: all our products had some technically challenging component that we could contribute back to the community. Our developers were able to grow their skills significantly through the challenges they overcame and get an opportunity to build their reputation in the community. But these initial products didn’t make much business sense, except maybe as cost-leaders to promote our services. Most were not really sustainable as standalone products.

It has taken a long time, but after many iterations, we’ve learned a lot from these experiments. The projects we launched in the past two years have been much more successful. We still need to keep on fighting to get through what Seth Godin calls “the dip,” but we’ve gained a key insight; we now know the types of products we should be using Drupal for. In this article I want to share with you the most important of these insights.