This document provides an overview of Drupal as a content management system. It discusses how Drupal can be like a jigsaw puzzle or Lego set, where individual modules can be combined to build different solutions. However, Drupal also has shortcomings like a complex installation process and lack of documentation. Initiatives like distributions, Drolutions, and community projects help bridge this divide by providing pre-built solutions, module combinations, and educational opportunities that make Drupal more approachable and usable for different projects.

1. Drupal as a Jigsaw
A birds eye view
John Kennedy (CommerceJohn)
Wednesday the 15th of May 2013

2. Agenda
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
About CommerceJohn (Me)
A little background on Commerce Guys
Drupal as a Lego Box
Drupal as a Jigsaw
Introduction to Drupal Commerce
Some upcoming Drupal initiatives

3. ABOUT COMMERCEJOHN

4. Contact
•
•
•
•
johnkennedy on Drupal.org
CommerceJohn on twitter
commerceguyjohn on Skype
john@commerceguys.com
• I try to get this out of the way so you can
tweet comments (I appreciate it) and email
me factual inaccuracies as we go

5. Background
• Linux Systems administrator for 10 years
• Worked for APNIC managing 50 servers
including reverse DNS for the Asia-Pac
• Worked in two tech startups both social
marketing
• Worked for Pearson Education, largest
provider of examinations in the UK,
replacing their core CMS – Not Drupal…

6. Drupal
• Started interacting with the Drupal world
about 6 years ago (we’ll get to that)
• Became a site builder on Drupal 6
• Built a site with 200,000 paid subscribers
(one of the startups)
• Ran a Drupal shop for 2 years
• Joined Commerce Guys last year in July to
open the UK office

7. Caveats
• I am not a great programmer
• I have not contributed much on
drupal.org
• I no longer have a technical role

8. Saving Graces
• I spend a lot of time talking to the
community:
– Melbourne, Chicago, Denver, Munich, Roma,
London, Sydney, Portland and Helsinki
• I run community projects:
– Drupal Campus
– Drupal Camp London
– Commerce Associates
• I get a good overview of Drupal by working
with a wide range of partners

9. ABOUT COMMERCE GUYS

10. Commerce Guys is the
COMPANY
Based in
Paris,
France
Ann
Arbor,
Michigan
London, UK
VC Funded, raised $6M

11. A Brief History…
2008: Commerce Guys LLC founded in Jackson, Michigan
2010: Commerce Guys SAS (the global company) is formed
2010: Seed funding from ISAI ($1M)
2010: Launch of the Drupal Commerce platform
2011: Business Insider - 20 Hot International Startups
2012: Round A funding of $5 million
2012: Named Gartner “Cool Vendor in eCommerce”
2012: Selected to join Microsoft BizSpark One program
2012: Judge’s Choice award at BizSpark European Summit

12. Commerce Guys’
Management Team
Frédéric Plais
Co-founder &
CEO
Damien Tournoud
Co-founder &
CTO
Kieron
Rob Douglass
Sambrook-Smith Director of
Non-Exec
Products
Director, UK
Mike O'Connor
Co-Founder &
Pre Sales Lead
Jean-Claude
Pitcho
VP, Business
Development
Ryan Szrama
Co-founder &
VP, Community
Development
David Mollière
Operations
Director, EU
Philippe
Lauprete
VP Sales,
EU
Scott Dahlgren
Managing Dir,
North America
John Kennedy
Director, UK
Operations

13. Familiar Faces
Ryan Szrama
VP, Community
Frédéric Plais
CEO
Robert Douglass
Director, Product
Ryan got his start in web development through an online sales company based in Louisville,
KY, his home of over 10 years. It was there that he nursed Ubercart through its infancy to its
use on over 20,000 websites as the Project Lead and community face of the project.
Ryan joined Commerce Guys in 2009 and continued to lead Ubercart until branching out into
Drupal Commerce, a new initiative focusing on empowering users to build e-commerce sites
with the best new features that Drupal 7 has to offer. He focuses most of his time developing
the code base, growing the community of contributors to the project, and training new users
online and at community events.
Frédéric has been working in the IT world managing teams and launching products for 10
years. Before Commerce Guys, Frédéric was General Manager of af83, an open source
company that specialized in social web and digital media that reached 5M$ in sales in less
than 3 years. Before af83, Frédéric managed the Music and Games business of SFR
(Vodafone Group) and started his career as Product Manager with L'Oréal after his
graduation from the Paris Business School of Management (ESCP Europe).
Robert has been involved with Drupal since 2004. He wrote the first book published about
Drupal and collaborated on the three editions of “Pro Drupal Development". A very proactive community builder, he led Drupal's involvement in the first Google “Summer of Code”
program and has been a member of the Drupal Association General Assembly since 2006.
He co-founded the German Drupal-Initiative in 2008 and joined Acquia as a consultant and
advisor. Robert's largest code contributions to Drupal have come in the form of the Apache
Solr module and the Memcache module, both of which were started in 2007. He joined
Commerce Guys full time in 2012, after being on the company's advisory board since its
inception.

14. Drupal as a Lego Box

15. Characteristics of Drupal
- Easy to configure
- Looks great on install
- A conventional MVC framework
- Has a smooth learning curve
- Basic functionality works by default
- Is intuitive for content authors

16. Characteristics of Drupal
- Easy to configure
NO ONE
SAID EVER
- Looks great on install
- A conventional MVC framework
- Has a smooth learning curve
- Basic functionality works by default
- Is intuitive for content authors

17. Actual Characteristics of Drupal
- Requires significant server configuration
to run at a decent speed
– Memcache
– Varnish
– Php & Mysql optimizations
– MongoDB
- Is lacking essential documentation for
key modules and concepts
- Has no bundled WYSIWYG editor

18. Actual Characteristics of Drupal
- Many themes look good prior to
install, but end up being inflexible
- Has no official training program or
certification
- Has a myriad of conventions,
standards and practices that lock out
many commonly used PHP code
snippets

19. My introduction to Drupal – circa 2007
- A youth news not-for-profit had a
developer leave
- Their 6 servers were dying under the
load of a couple of hundred users
- What’s this software? Drupal 4.7?
- Deactivate all the modules!
- To Plone with you!

20. So why is it popular?
•
•
•
•
Over 25,000 Active Developers
Over 900,000 registrations on D.o
Over 630,000 sites on Drupal 7
Occupies around 3% of the web

21. An Expert’s Dream
• Over 21,000 pluggable pieces (modules)
• Each piece uses a standard convention for
administration
• Each piece respects coding standards
• One place to submit issues
• One place to download
• There’s a Module for that!

22. Rapid Development
• Build a proof of concept application in days
instead of weeks
• Has a built-in UI for database access: Views
• Can implement event-driven behaviors in
configuration UI: Rules
• Exposed web services:
Services
• Plugs into everything

23. Scales Well
• Some examples from our clients:
–
–
–
–
The Royal Mail > 200k transactions per day
Over 41 million transactions so far
Cartier > $50m in sales per year
OpenSesame > 200,000 products
• High Traffic Websites on Drupal
–
–
–
–
–
The Economist
Whitehouse.gov
The Linux Journal
Warner Music (Justin Bieber)
Grammy Awards

24. Strong Open Community
– Over 3000 People to US DrupalCon
– Over 2000 People to European DrupalCon
– 2,855 code commits this week
– 5,580 issue comments this week
– 9 Drupal events Today
http://www.drupical.com/
– IRC channels on Freenode
– Participation! If you can’t code:
• Test
• Comment
• Document

25. Expert led development
• Built by experts for experts
• Development funded by high end
projects
• Design decisions made to support
the goals of these projects
• Also true of Drupal Commerce

26. The Learning Curve:
By Dries
h#p://buytaert.net/crea1ng-­‐passionate-­‐users

27. The Drupal Learning Curve:
A Practical Look
h#p://buytaert.net/drupal-­‐learning-­‐curve

28. Actual Drupal Learning Curve:

29. Drupal As A Jigsaw

30. Routing around the damage
Wordpress is becoming a CMS
Magento is becoming enterprise
Commercial CMS are lowing their prices
New web applications are coming on to the
market
• SAAS is stealing the SME base of users
•
•
•
•
• If you are not routing around the
damage you are the damage

31. Routing around the damage
• CMS developers want:
– Fast ways to solve hard recurring use-cases
– Intuitive interfaces for their users
– Experts available at a reasonable price
– Ways to demo the system
– Standard MVC frameworks for development
– Enterprise scalability and security
– Advanced content workflows for staging
– A simple development to production code-cycle

32. Bridging the Divide
• Drupal 8:
– CMI
– Authoring
– Symfony
– Twig
• Distributions
• Drolutions
• Community Initiatives

33. Drupal 8
• CMI – Configuration in XML
• Authoring – CKEditor -> Aloha ->
CKEditor
• Symfony – Using components of a
good MVC framework
• Twig – A new theming framework
Bridging the Divide

34. Dries
Bridging the Divide

35. Dries – in 2006
Bridging the Divide

36. Dries – in 2006
Bridging the Divide

37. Distributions - Now
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
628 distributions on Drupal.org
CRM
Booking systems
eCommerce
Publishing
Government
Community
Experimental
Bridging the Divide

39. • A booking and room management solution
for hotels, vacation rentals and B&Bs
• Integration with Drupal Commerce
• Search by room type
• Manages advanced pricing mechanisms

40. • CRM
• Manage contacts
• Reach fundraising goals
• Track engagement

41. • Testbed for Drupal 8
• In Place Editing
• New Administration
• WYSIWYG

42. Pre-configured eCommerce software
built on Drupal Commerce

44. 28,000+
Active sites using Drupal Commerce

45. Drupal + Commerce
Workflow
Graphics
Cart
Content
Checkout
Products
User
Generated
Content
Pricing
Scalability
Currencies
Content
Management
Security
E-Commerce
Taxes
Sales
&
PromoDons
Social
Shipment
SEO
Search
Languages
/
Locales
AnalyDcs
RealDme
Monitoring
Flexible – Extendable – Enterprise
PCI
Compliance
Cross-­‐sell
/
Up-­‐sell

46. Drupal + Commerce
Workflow
Graphics
Cart
Content
Checkout
Products
User
Generated
Content
Pricing
Scalability
Currencies
Content
Management
Security
E-Commerce
Taxes
Sales
&
PromoDons
Social
Shipment
SEO
Search
Languages
/
Locales
AnalyDcs
RealDme
Monitoring
PCI
Compliance
Community – Content – Commerce
Cross-­‐sell
/
Up-­‐sell
+
More

47. A Selection of References
The cool
kids like us

48. Commerce Guys named a
“Cool Vendor“ in
eCommerce 2012” by
Gartner, Inc. - April 2012
…so did the
experts
Commerce Guys wins
Judges' Choice Award at
the BizSpark European
Summit - June 2012
Commerce Guys
recognized as an eTail
Rising Star - July 2012

49. But!
• Default Drupal
admin
• A complex process
for installation
• Mostly functions
and data models
• Terrible default
theme
• Long procedures
for setting up
discounts
• Need’s an Expert

50. Kickstart v1
• An installer
• A basic Theme
• Bundled Modules
• Still required a non-trivial effort
to configure a checkout

51. Commerce
Kickstart
Features
Commerce Kickstart v2 is a preconfigured store built on top of Drupal
Commerce, packed with eCommerce
best practices:
• Mobile-ready responsive design
• Enhanced product marketing (image zooms,
fancy attributes, slideshows)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Social Login
Faceted product search
Streamlined administration
Advanced commerce analytics
Easy-to-configure discounts
Built-in payment gateways
Intuitive product and order management

52. Commerce
Kickstart

53. - Fully configurable faceted
search solution
- Search also used for crossselling and
recommendation
- Fully configurable facets
Powerful Faceted Search
(Native)

54. - Fully configurable
check-out
- Web-to store –
purchase to store –
book to store enabled
- All steps fully
configurable (book and
pay elsewhere, pay only,
third party pay, pick up
at store)
Flexible Check-out –enabling multi-channel
(Native)

55. Advanced analytics
(with Jirafe)

56. Intuitive product administration

57. Intuitive order administration

58. Better content management

59. for
mobile
An iOS native mobile app

60. Commerce
Kickstart
Mobile App

61. Drolutions
• Sometimes you want less than a
whole solution
• How do we start a project with
novel requirements?
• We often suggest people install
the demo products and work
backwards

62. Drolutions
• The Basis of an Architechture
• Solutions focused
• Sets of modules installed and
configured
• Not a complete solution

63. Drolutions – From Acquia

64. Community Initiatives
• Drupal Campus
• Drupal Camps like this one
• Local Drupal Associations

67. A Jigsaw
• Has a goal
• Has structure
• Has suggestions
• Is satisfying!

68. Local Drupal Associations
Enabling events

69. Drupal As A Jigsaw

70. QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

71. THANK YOU!