Drupal Managers

Drupal is a game-changing website development platform. Its built-in features include user registration, comments, blogs, collaborative books and forums, personal pages, and many more components essential to social networking and community websites. Integral to Drupal is the assumption that human beings who come to a website should be able to help build it.

Content Managers?

Less obvious is the extent to which Drupal is empowering what are traditionally called content managers or website administrators. With Drupal every website page can be content managed to a very fine degree. Besides text and images, content managers can also deploy features like polls, put entire applications or blocks on specific pages, or give select users the permissions to start a book and blog and run with it.

Whereas earlier content management systems circumscribed the role of the manager - just change these fields and nothing else please! - Drupal gives its managers enormous potential roles in the construction and deployment of websites. Some of these roles cross over into what were once programming tasks - deciding on a URL, managing site responsiveness under high loads, adding a menu item or fiddling with navigation (sounds dangerous - it is!). With modules like CCK and Views, a Drupal manager can expose database fields to users in any way they want; they even set up the very fields that will go into the database (or empower users do this). These were tasks once assigned to a database engineer.

New Processes

The disruptive nature of Drupal can bring everyone to the table in the construction of a website because there are now languages and tools to cross between separate knowledge fiefdoms.

This impacts the development process as well. Drupal allows project managers to set up many components of a website without programmers. Instead of writing a spec, a project manager can put together a prototype with substantial functionality even before adding design or customized elements. This prototype - or key bits of it - can be available before the design process even starts. Some might call it putting the cart before the horse, but why not build the cart before finding the horse to pull it?

Drupal Managers

Drupal is giving rise to a new category of Website Managers, some of whose tasks cross into what are today engineering and design tasks. These managers will be deeply involved in marketing and user-centric activities, in the nuts and bolts of how a site interacts with its visitors. They will monitor statistics (hopefully to be improved in future Drupal releases) and e-commerce or advertising and user activity goals. They will also administer content from many sources, just like the traditional content manager. But they will do so with a much greater understanding of user behavior, with their fingers on many more levers of a website.

Maybe we should call these people Drupal Managers. Just like websites themselves are a new reality, combining technology, art and business, so new roles and types of employees are evolving to manage websites. A good Drupal Manager is a truly cross-cultural figure, one who can speak many tribal languages.

Unfortunately, today Drupal is still very much in the hands of programmers - very smart ones, with a clear vision of empowering non-engineers and users to run the websites of the future. However the development of Drupal Managers, especially those who can flourish in an enterprise setting, lags far behind the development of the platform itself.

The Challenge

For me the true challenge of Drupal in the coming years lies in educating and establishing the proper roles for non-technical people to use all that Drupal offers. So much effort is going into programming Drupal, but its future success is probably not so much in the hands of engineers as it is in the development of new website managers. The fact that there is still so little good documentation for Drupal is a warning that the tool is running ahead of its users.

My hope is that before this happens, the role of a Drupal Manager emerges. Bit by bit, these managers behind the admin login need to create a clear space for themselves within organizations and in running websites. Over time these Drupal Managers should acquire a voice that helps shape Drupal's development - just as users today are shaping the development of the best Drupal websites. It's all about the user, right?