Doubling Drupal

“They’re going to double in a year. That’s insane, in my opinion” Steve Ballmer (Microsoft, CEO), speaking of Google’s rate of growth as an organization

It’s one thing to see the Drupal community’s exponential growth curve plainly plainly graphed. It’s was quite another to walk into a massive conference hall packed with over 800 Drupal developers last week in Boston. It was honestly all a bit overwhelming.

Since I have been a member of the Drupal project, the incredible rate of growth for the community has been a given. When a relatively small piece of the ‘market’ knew what Drupal was, it’s rate of growth seemed more an interesting aspect of the project than a defining characteristic. But as more and more individuals, organizations, and Drupal specialized companies start betting big on the community, the pressure on the project created by this growth will only continue to increase proportionally.

What does this actually mean? Well, in the past few years it has meant:

• The difference between 20,000 users and 250,000+ on Drupal.org: Setting up the site on Kjarten’s spare server vs. deploying on an expensive cluster tuned and tended to by a dedicated team of highly skilled systems engineers.
• The difference between a volunteer organized DrupalCon for thirty people and producing a four day conference for near a thousand costing over $200,000 and hundreds of hours of heroic organizing effort.
• The difference between Drupal powering The Onion being huge deal and the news of another high profile launch becoming almost old hat.

Despite these changes though, in many ways the Drupal project appears very much the same as it did a few years ago. Yes, every release the software really does get that much better. More patches, better patches, rinse, repeat. But this kind of relatively painless growth is only possible because the open-source method has created an incredible medium of software production that can relatively easily scale to meet the demands of virtually any size project.

But past a certain point the open-source method runs it’s course. The demands of supporting communities, even if they are largely web based, catches up with the code. We clearly reached this point with the Drupal project a little more than a year ago. These new type of challenges the Drupal community has been confronted with in the past year will become the major challenges that the community will face. And as Drupal continues to double, they will double.

But of course, so will Drupal.