Drupal 9 - beginners need not apply?

Drupal fits an awkward niche in the web software world - it provides both an administrative system for managing content and an extensible GUI for managing the structure of that system. Very few other CMSes attempt to tackle both, most systems focus on one or the other. Web systems that focus on the latter tend to heavily leverage the command line to embrace the power and don’t provide a web GUI to manage the system’s architecture. To paraphrase an engineering saying,  “it’s easy to build a thing, it’s hard to build a thing that lets you build other things.”

Dries has mentioned in numerous Driesnotes that a long term goal of the software is to keep it easy to build with and easy for maintaining content. The long-held perception is  that Drupal is hard to build with, hard to manage content with, and hard to contribute to. While efforts have been made to improve these area, e.g. the huge amount of editorial improvements in Drupal 8, there is also an effort to make parts of the system more complicated.

On the other hand we have some basic details that show a significant portion of the community is not ready for a more complicated platform:

• Many core discussions around Composer usage have comments from people saying they only use Drupal because it doesn’t require knowing how to use the command line interface.

• As of November 2017 (https://www.drupal.org/project/ideas/issues/2845379#comment-12329860), approximately 40% of people download and update their sites by going to the appropriate project page and clicking the download links, while more than another 25% do so from within the update manager - almost 70% of Drupal site builders & maintainers are *not* using a command line.

This presentation will focus on some of the current project efforts that will make starting off in Drupal harder than it needs to be, will make some suggestions to avoid alienating those less well versed in the technical details of modern web development, and will hopefully open the discussion around avoiding driving more people away because of complexity, perceived or otherwise.

The presentation itself is intended to be short with a hope that the subsequent group discussion would be lengthy.