Drupal CMS launched to much fanfare... to existing Drupal developers and customers. Now, Drupal comes with AI agents, visual page builders, one-click Recipes. It's genuinely impressive tech. So why don't students or developers outside the Drupal community care?

Prerequisite

No technical skills required. Only a desire to see Drupal succeed

Target Audience

The person who would get the most out of this is someone who loves Drupal, but realizes that there is a gap in the perception from people outside of Drupal.

Outline

Here's the uncomfortable part: we already fixed the technical problems. Drupal CMS isn't hard to use anymore. The learning curve is way better. We have actual innovation happening.
But new developers still aren't showing up. They're on YouTube, Discord, and Twitch learning JavaScript frameworks or the new hotness language. The ""Drupal is legacy tech"" perception hasn't budged.

I'm a Drupal developer who streams game and web development on Twitch to an audience that mostly doesn't know what Drupal is. I've built unconventional projects like using Drupal as a game backend, and I spend time in development communities across different platforms and technologies where Drupal isn't even on the radar. I've learned what makes someone outside the Drupal bubble actually get curious about a technology. And what makes them scroll past.

This talk uses Drupal as a case study to examine a problem every framework faces: what happens when you fix all the technical issues but developer perception doesn't change?

Learning Objectives

This session is a frank conversation about the gap between having good tech and getting people to notice. We'll talk about:

- Where developers actually discover new frameworks (spoiler: not official documentation sites)
- Why technical excellence doesn't equal excitement or adoption
- What we can do as individuals, not just ""the community""
- Real examples of what's working vs. what we think should work

Experience level
Anyone