ThoughtThought

Drupal contributors from Brazil to Australia have re-started and re-energized the Drupal Ecommerce project. My strategy tip for the Drupal community’s leadership: Strike while the iron is hot and help this project succeed in 2008.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to use Drupal with its Ecommerce package? (Or, similarly, with CiviCRM?) Those of you with hands raised — do you have any hair whatsoever left on your head? Or to put it in plain terms, was Ecommerce really worth the implementation hassle? The answer for most is no. But wouldn’t it be great if it were otherwise — if you could take advantage of all of Drupal’s Web 2.0 offerings together with a viable Ecommerce package?

I think it would and that’s why I am excited about the latest Drupal Ecommerce release, but I’m not sure the Drupal community is on board, and from a long-term strategy perspective, that’s a crying shame.

Ecommerce aside, let’s step back a moment and review a few of the many pros to Drupal:

• Free
• Relatively popular, in terms of buzz, users, and contributors. Momentum is there.
• Nice taxonomy system for categorizing content. [?]
• Built-in blogging/multiblogging (every user gets a blog) functionality. Some enterprise CMS solutions would kill for this functionality.
  
• Excellent role and user management system
• Extensibility, due to community-provided functionality, such as:
  • Content Creation Toolkit
  • Organic Groups
  • All kinds of APIs
  • Views
  • ImportExportAPI
  • 3rd party tie-ins: Google SiteMap, Akismet, OpenAds, Flickr, Service Links, PayPal, etc.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Drupal is one of the leader among the open-source CMS community in contributed functionality. But that’s not always a good thing, as I’d like to point out in cons to Drupal:

• Information overload and disorganization. The freewheeling, democratic nature of the Drupal community is its strength and its severe weakness. Try doing a search for ‘how to import products into Drupal’ The SERPs page alone gives me vertigo — many different modules, hacks, alternatives, 3rd party integrations, etc., are mentioned. You’ll run into this a lot with Drupal. Like to read? This information overload paralyzes not just end users like you and me, but the developers as well, apparently. Maybe that is why Drupal’s default installation gives you plain text boxes to publish content in, while Wordpress gives you an implementation of TinyMCE that, for the moment, is probably the world’s best WYSIWIG editor. Spend 6 hours monkeying with your Drupal modules post-installation and you might come up with something that matches your 5 minute Wordpress install….

• Taxonomy system doesn’t extend to users, just content (maybe the problem can be addressed thru workaround wizardry, but its not being addressed through Product architecture). Also, taxonomy is hard to get under control — Drupal forces you to use it in places where it just gets in the way. The genius of Kintera Sphere, Convio/GetActive, SugarCRM, and other CRM-enabled platforms, is that you can segment users with same categorization system you use to segment content.

• Blogging functionality not cutting edge. It’s built-in, hassle free, and multi-user, but it is not quite on par with Wordpress and its peers. For example, Drupal is thinking about building path-auto (SEO-friendly mod which turns your page titles into your url) into Drupal 7 (12 months off). Meanwhile, Wordpress and company have had this feature built in for quite a while now.

• Forms. Arrgh. Period. Drupal comes with a ‘Signup’ form that collects login name, email and password. That’s it. To get more out of it you basically need a programmer. Terrible. Or, if you can afford the time and investment, you need CiviCRM, which is a whole nother story.

• Ecommerce, like CiviCRM, is the great frustration as well as the great hope. The Drupal ecommerce package has been a piece of garbage for a long time. Why? Because it’s always assumed, structurally and semantically, that your stores sells 5 t-shirts. (If it labelled itself ’small t-shirt store’ package, I wouldn’t call it garbage). It’s as if the community rested on its laurels once they initially integrated ecommerce functionality into the platform and never bothered to improve it. But this may be changing, with the November 2007 release of Ecommerce 4.0. Fingers crossed.

The success or failure of the Ecommerce (and CiviCRM) packages during the next 6 to 12 months could make or break Drupal in the long term. For it to be successful, two things need to happen:

• The module needs to be used and tested on live stores. I encourage all other online store owners out there to join me in publishing a small Drupal Ecommerce store. Don’t bet the farm but just put try a single product line up there. If you have the time and resources, this investment could pay off big time.
• The Ecommerce development team needs executive support. The donation button in the sidebar is not enough. But Drupal is not a corporation with an executive and a product budget, so where does the support come from? It comes from the the wise and beloved core-developers, consultants and evangelists who make their living on Drupal-related enterprises — Bryght, the Lullabot group, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, and some of the other prominent Drupal community members.

Why should these people care? Because they can help effect an Ecommerce solution that approaches Amazon: SEO-friendly, smartly segmented, commentable/ratable product pages, with built in one-click shopping. Granted, if you have the money and expertise, you could do this through customization, but only when the product itself does this will Drupal truly win.

Right now, I don’t think the odds are in Drupal’s favor, at least as an Ecommerce solution. I think that Wordpress will stay smarter and leaner. I think that Wordpress’s ecommerce plugins will just keep coming. I also think (hope) that the Cforms II plugin will morph into a viable mini-CRM (instead of scaling CivCRM down for Wordpress, KISS and scale CForms up…). I also think that 3rd party packages like UberCart and Magento will continue to provide attractive, integrable Ecommerce alternatives to the native product.

I hope the Drupal community proves me wrong. I’ll do my part to contribute by using and testing the Drupal 5.X compliant versions of Ecommerce, and I know a few very smart developers will work very hard on it. But I’m afraid the larger Drupal community is not poised to make the smart move and put their chips into the Ecommerce basket during 2008.

In the long term, this is a strategic oversight that could contribute to not just the continued failure of the Ecommerce package, but to the gradual attrition of Drupal itself.