Drupal goes into high gear again

This beginning of the year is an opportunity to take stock of the Drupal solution, the spearhead of the Contraste Digital teams. The multiple announcements of the last few months suggest a year 2020 rich in innovations, with many benefits for users.

Since September 2019, Dries Buytaerts, founder of Drupal, continues to publish announcements that will transform the world of Drupal and take it to the next level. His strategy is simple: success lies in focusing on the things that will not change.

This is why, at the heart of the concerns of the publisher Acquia, there is the improvement of the user experience for site visitors, but also the optimization of the experience for developers and marketers who design sites based on the Open Source CMS solution. To achieve these objectives, Acquia has decided, in particular, to buy back existing solutions.

Acquia acquires Cohesion and AgilOne

It is clear that making website development faster and easier will always remain a priority for businesses. This is why Drupal decided to invest in the acquisition of Cohesion. This solution allows marketers and designers to build Drupal websites faster than ever. Using its style designer, web developers can create templates directly in their browser, and see the result immediately.

The integration of Cohesion will obviously also reduce the cost of ownership for customers. And, good news, companies which use Drupal 7 today and consider migration to Drupal 8, will also benefit.

Acquia also invests in improving the customer experience. Last December, the publisher announced the acquisition of AgilOne, a Customer Data Platform (CDP). If a company lacks a 360 ° view on its customers, it cannot deliver a good experience. A CDP extracts customer data from multiple sources, cleans it, and combines it to create a single customer profile. This unified profile is then made available to marketing and sales systems to improve the customer experience.

"I believe that every organization will need a CDP (although most organizations don't realize it yet)" said Dries Buytaerts. " One of the reasons we really liked AgilOne is their machine learning capabilities — they will give our customers a competitive advantage."

Thanks to a better understanding of customer behavior, AgilOne makes it possible, for example, to target and personalize marketing campaigns, increase visits and sales to a website, or even improve customer service. According to Dries Buytaerts, for most organizations, “the real challenge is to drive relevant customer experiences across all the different channels — including web, mobile, social, email and voice — and to make those customer experiences highly relevant.”.

Innovation at the heart of Drupal 8 and soon 9

Acquia has also made good progress on the product itself. The progress made by version 8 is significant and prepares the whole community for the long awaited version 9.

"Drupal 9 will be the easiest major update" reassures Dries Buyaerts but his strategy is no less ambitious:

Reduced development and maintenance costs of Drupal sites through more automation
Better user experience for beginners, sometimes put off by a bad first impression. The new front-end theme project, named Olivero, will give new users a much better contact with Drupal, while also reflecting the modern backend that Drupal has under the hood.

Stay on top in the management of content, always more important. Drupal will have to be ready for ever more content, integration, devices and channels. It's about putting content and data at the heart of every digital experience.

If innovation is a priority, supporting the development of an open and independent web is another one for D.B .. “In these early days, the Web looked like a free space that belonged to everyone. No company dominated as an access point or controlled what users saw. This is what I call “Open Web”. 1 site out of 40 in the world runs on Drupal. It's enormous. This is why he considers that Acquia and Drupal have a real responsibility in the future of the Open Web.

More info : https://dri.es/