Drupal 9 for Marketing and Technical Decision Makers

Josef DabernigJuly 2020

Drupal 9 is here, but why should my marketing and technical decision makers be excited about it? In this blog post, I'll summarise a few arguments for these key personas in evaluating Drupal as a web framework.

Drupal 9 for Marketing Decision Makers

Flexibility, speed and cost are key driving factors for marketeers when buying a new web system. This is what Drupal 9 offers.

Flexibility: Drupal features a modular and API-first architecture. Content editing, the administrative backend and the frontend can be easily customised using many modules that are already available for Drupal 9. Using REST-, JSON:API or GraphQL interfaces, you can easily integrate Drupal into a decoupled architecture.
Speed: While many systems require heavy lifting upfront, with Drupal you can get started quickly and evolve and grow your site over time. The low time to market and ease of adaption play very well when agility is needed to deliver value fast to the end user.
Cost: Since Drupal has shifted to a bi-yearly feature release model, we are able to ship new features regularly every year. Drupal 9 is an incremental update from Drupal 8.8 without deprecated code, so the cost to upgrade will be minimal. We are able to keep maintenance costs low by minimising technical dept.

Marketeers will appreciate that Drupal 9 offers visual page design with its Layout Builder Module. Media management has been greatly improved with different views to display and organise your media contents. New frontend and backend themes provide a better out-of-the-box experience, optimized accessibility and better overall usability of Drupal.

Content moderation workflows enable teams to define arbitrary states and transitions that help content teams organise their publishing process effectively. Workspaces allow editorial teams to develop, stage and publish entire sets of content changes as part of their editorial workflow or to publish an online campaign.

Drupal 9 keeps the bar high for analytics, SEO and other digital marketing needs. Search engine friendly markup, granular controls over meta tags and plentiful options for API-integrations make Drupal a powerful part of your digital experience platform.

The graphic shows the roadmap for the individual Drupal versions 7, 8 and 9, until when bug fixes are guaranteed and when support ends - dated until 2022.

Drupal 9 for Technical Decision Makers

Maturity, talent and innovation are key driving factors for a technologist. This is what Drupal 9 offers:

Maturity: Drupal is created by one of the largest open source communities world-wide, it powers one out of 30 websites on the internet. By leveraging interoperable standards, implementing modern software patterns and building on the shoulders of giants like Symfony, Drupal offers a great platform that is proven to work. Drupal 9 is an incremental upgrade that removes all legacy code from Drupal 8 but keeps the good parts in place. So you can benefit from a stable platform that's been tested over years already and keeps evolving.
Innovation: Drupal core ships new features every six months. New APIs get added while old APIs will be marked as deprecated and removed later on. Many community modules as well as the API-integrations allow to create delightful digital experiences and integrate new services seamlessly. Want to leverage Drupal's powerful data modelling and API-capabilities but use a faster, more interactive frontend? Many organisations choose to decouple the frontend based on React or Vue and integrate Drupal for web framework capabilities such as data modelling, editing workflows.
Talent: With specialised systems it can be a challenge to find experts capable to deliver and maintain new features. Experts can be found close to you by browsing the Drupal marketplace. Agencies from all over the world are ranked by their contributions to code and the community. By adopting standard software patterns and APIs, as well as an intuitive user interface, Drupal will be appealing to both new developers and content editors working with the system.

Techies will enjoy Drupal's modular architecture, test-driven development workflows and plethora of contributed modules expanding the ecosystem. Drupal's modules aren't off-the-shelf-solutions but interoperable building blocks that work really well together. The total cost of ownership can be drastically reduced by leveraging those community-maintained building blocks which results in less custom code to maintain.Drupal's powerful cache tags technology automatically determines which pages are affected by content changes. The enhanced upgrade and composer workflows allow for much easier maintenance of Drupal sites reducing your daily stress to keep sites up and alive. Plenty of local development stacks, solution and hosting providers exist to help build and maintain effective Drupal sites.

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Drupal – Your Flexible Enterprise CMS

Drupal 9 for You

Both Drupal 7 and 8 will receive security and bug fix support until November 2021 which gives a bit more than a year to update to Drupal 9.

At Unic, we are excited to already work on our first new Drupal 9 projects and have started updating Drupal 8 contributed modules and customer sites over the last months. With our Drupal services offering, we gladly help you on your journey to a fresh and even more powerful web solution. Build on our knowledge in conception, implementation and maintenance of dozens of Drupal sites. As contributors to the new Admin UI and maintainers of various Drupal modules we are looking forward working with you.