WordPress accounts for over 40% of all websites worldwide, so getting attention from and collaborating with them adds a whole new dimension to the work we do with Drupal Gutenberg.
But since Drupal is open source and driven by enthusiasts all over the world, it's equally rewarding to be recognized by the Drupal community as a whole. At DrupalCon 2023, where the future of Drupal is shaped by the developer community, Drupal Gutenberg became one of the winners of Pitchburg - a vote where the community chooses which modules should receive funding for further development. That's even more reason to be proud.
By a happy coincidence, we also just released the beta version of Drupal Gutenberg 3.0 and reached over 4,000 websites using the module! The future looks bright for Drupal Gutenberg.
Contributing to developing Drupal
In the workshop with the core teams, it was revealed that the work we have done, led by Marco Fernandes, exceeded all the team's expectations. We still have some technical challenges to solve in order to realize our vision for Drupal Gutenberg, but we were assured that the Core team is behind us in our future work.
Drupal has a clear strategy to be suitable for complex websites and organizations, and Gutenberg must also meet these requirements as an editor tool/UI. It is also worth noting that the Gutenberg/WP Core team wants broader use of Gutenberg in CMSs other than WordPress, and they assure the Drupal community that their contributions will be considered.
An important challenge discussed during the workshop is the need for knowledge about Gutenberg and Drupal themes in the developer community, as well as the transition to Gutenberg from CK Editor, Layout Builder, and similar solutions. Workshop participants arrived at good approaches to tackle these challenges, which will be presented in more detail later.
Gutenberg into the future
We are not resting on our laurels. Frontkom has the ambition to make Drupal the most user-friendly enterprise CMS in the world, and further developing Drupal Gutenberg is an important piece of that puzzle. Collaborating with Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress team indicates a willingness to join forces to promote usability and further improvements of Drupal Gutenberg.
To make Drupal Gutenberg as easy as possible to get started with, we have developed a starter theme that can be set up with just a few clicks. Here, users will quickly be able to explore the standard blocks in Gutenberg and also use the installation as a basis for further use of the module on their own installation.
Most modules in Drupal require generating a file, reading a manual, activating the module, etc., before seeing the changes. The new starter theme makes it easier for developers to get started and understand how Gutenberg works without much extra work and customization.
Our job now is to convince the developer community that Drupal Gutenberg is the way to go for developing user-friendly enterprise-class websites!
