Frans van der Meer

Robert Douglass ‘s talk in Brussels about a Drupal App Store bravely hits the Achilles heel of open source in general.
The ongoing rage discussion about a Drupal App Store on Twitter got me thinking… what problem are we trying to solve here?

The problem is not money, but apps. There is a lack of  (so called) apps for Drupal.
Why is WP so popular? Because it works, out of the box. Besides that, it is easy to understand for a non-nerd. The huge number of complete plugins and themes is fantastic. Just search in the plugin section of your admin area, click install and it works… wow!

Now compare that with Drupal… Do you really think that I can teach my mother how to use drush?  Of course that says something about my teaching skills and not about drush or my mother.

I know… “Drupal is build by and for devs” (and not for my mother). But there is a whole market out there!
The Lullabots compared Drupal with Lego in their podcast. If Drupal is Lego, WP is Playmobil. With Playmobil the fun is to play with a complete ship, out of the box. With Lego the fun is to build the ship and then play with your custom 22-canon pirate ship.

Now… what if we could attract the Playmobil community to come over and play with us? What would that mean for Drupal? It would build momentum for the whole Drupal project! All we need to do is provide ready-to-play toys!
So, we skip the money discussion and we concentrate on complete, generic solutions, products or apps.

I would love to have a central Features server with complete and supported products, promoted on drupal.org. And yes… those Features will be free and open source, no micro payments, no macro payments.
Let’s see if we can invite ma.tt to come out and play!

Be Sociable, Share!

•