Meet Alexander Varwijk — Candidate for the 2025 Drupal Association Board Election

TDT[1]: Your journey with Drupal began through solving a problem for a local sports club, and now you're building platforms for the UN and European Commission. How would you translate that grassroots-to-global evolution into a strategy to make Drupal more accessible and aspirational for the next generation of developers?

Alexander Varwijk: When I built that first sports club website, Drupal's simpler structure allowed me to quickly build things that fit within the CMS mould. Today's Drupal powers the UN and European Commission because its professionalisation makes it easier than ever to break out of the CMS mold and build complex and secure data management systems of any shape, while remaining maintainable.

The move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is a key moment in Drupal’s history. The most visible change is that we switched from a mostly procedural to a mostly object-oriented code style. We’re finalising that trajectory now in Drupal 11 by transitioning the final hooks out of the famous `.module` file. That change in style is a sign of the larger professionalisation and improvements in code quality that have happened over the past 10 years.

It’s important to acknowledge that these steps have brought the project as a whole enormous benefits. There are numerous features that we likely would not have been able to introduce previously, such as the Access Policy API, Variationcache, or the cache pre-warm API. These are low-level APIs that improve the performance of all Drupal sites and provide a huge amount of power to build feature-rich web applications; Drupal CMS and its powerful no-code features, for example.

Additionally, I would argue that Drupal’s adoption for experienced developers who are familiar with PHP or other web programming languages has become easier than it was 10 years ago. This is a result of the reduction of Drupalisms and the adoption of modern development paradigms and development tooling.

However, it’s true that this professionalisation has also made it much more difficult for someone with no-to-little programming experience who is using Drupal to dive under the hood and tinker with things themselves. It also means that for a new developer the bar for contribution is higher. Not only do they need to solve the issue. They must do it at the current quality standards and in a way that matches Drupal’s architecture, to ensure that the solution can be maintained and expanded upon in the future.

I think it’s unlikely that the gap will narrow. Many initiatives are turning Drupal into a no-code and AI powerhouse. Those are domains that pose complex engineering challenges to ensure a maintainable, scalable, and user-friendly experience.

With that in mind, it's important that we work on growing the bridge to cover the gap and that we keep evaluating and adjusting. It’s also likely that we need more than a single bridge. The journey will differ for people with different starting points. Those who want to go from user to programmer without programming experience will need to be provided guidance to learn the basics of programming, development tooling, PHP as a language, and Drupal. Meanwhile, an experienced JavaScript or Ruby on Rails developer may suffice with a basic introduction to PHP syntax and an architectural overview of Drupal to help them find their way.

The IXP (Inexperienced Drupal Professional) initiative is already doing great work for people who are at a “critical transition point between learning and professional practice”, such as someone just starting in their development career. As a community, we should embrace this and build upon it to ensure there are clear entry points for people coming to Drupal with different levels of experience and different needs.

From my own journey, starting with that sports club site to now working on enterprise solutions, I've seen how each person's path is unique. That's why I believe we need multiple bridges.

TDT[2]: You’ve been part of the transformation of GoalGorilla into Open Social. What lessons from that organisational pivot—especially moving from an agency to a product-driven model—can inform how the Drupal Association evolves its approach to sustainability, innovation, and community engagement?

Alexander Varwijk: The Drupal Association is responsible for a large amount of work in supporting the Drupal community and the health of the Drupal project. However, it does so mostly in the background.  When you know of its existence and you know where to look, there is plenty of communication. However, discovering its purpose can come late in a community member’s journey.

An example of this is that on the Drupal homepage, there’s no mention of the Drupal Association, and the only way to learn more is to go to “Support Drupal”. A call to action that is unlikely to resonate with someone who has only just started using Drupal. I would love to move the Drupal Association (and hopefully soon, the International Drupal Federation) more to the forefront.

As I mentioned in my candidate blog post, the Drupal Association’s pitch for funding is currently mostly focused on trading funding for visibility. This turns away a group of Drupal-using organisations that do not benefit from visibility: organisations that use Drupal as a tool to build end-user products; those who do not resell Drupal itself or customised solutions.

Those companies do have another major challenge in common with any builder or maintainer of software: the risk that key dependencies on which they rely on will disappear. The Drupal Association can play a key role for those companies in mitigating the risk of dependencies becoming unmaintained.

Funding individual dependencies can be a big effort for organisations, but the Drupal Association (or its regional counterparts as part of the International Drupal Federation) is in a unique position that it can be a distributor of funds and a single point of contact for companies to help mitigate that risk. We can even see this from the Drupal Association's own mission statement, which exists for the longevity of Drupal.

> The Drupal Association is a non-profit organisation focused on accelerating Drupal, fostering the growth of the Drupal community, and supporting the project’s vision to create a safe, secure, and open web for everyone. The Drupal Association also administers Drupal.org on behalf of the Drupal community.
> From https://www.drupal.org/association

Modules used in products such as the Drupal CMS, as well as modules that provide key selling points for Drupal as a framework, can be deemed as "critical" and supported with funding that flows through the Drupal Association, to ensure those modules do not become unmaintained. This relieves organisations of having to fund each individual module.

A great example is the recent funding of the Drupal AI initiative. It will take many different disciplines to help determine which modules are crucial for Drupal's success and to craft a compelling story around this for companies donating and for new prospective Drupal users, why it's a safe bet to bet on Drupal.

TDT[3]: In your LinkedIn post, you highlighted the need to break Drupal out of its "well-kept secret" status. If given just one experimental campaign or initiative to put Drupal in front of new audiences, what would it look like, and how would you measure if it actually worked?

Alexander Varwijk: The short answer would be: “I want to start a Drupal developer advocacy program”.

There are many open-source and web-related conferences outside of the Drupal community where developers come to learn more about how they can solve their problems. Drupal can be a learning opportunity and can be shown to replace SaaS services that these developers might now be using. A great example is the talk ‘“React now looks like PHP”, they said’ by Lukas Fischer at ReactSummit in 2024.

Let's make it easy for more developers to go outside of the Drupal community and talk about Drupal. The Drupal Association can play a great connecting role here:

• Asking speakers from our Drupal events whether they’d be interested in talking at non-Drupal events. We can ask them when they submit a session.
• Provide a clear overview of relevant events and a newsletter to notify interested speakers about important dates like session submission deadlines and what topics might be of interest.
• Help speakers with sessions and session proposals through the Drupal Slack, and encourage sharing best practices and success stories among speakers.
• Work with the existing marketing team at the association to create a clear brand identity and slide templates that can help speakers tell the Drupal story.

To help speakers be compensated for their time and travel I see a few avenues of funding:

• Some conferences cover travel expenses and accommodation
• The speaker’s organization can be encouraged to cover costs. Going to a non-Drupal conference can lead to great insights that can be applied within Drupal and be a great promotion for recruitment or brand awareness in other developer markets.
• We can connect the speaker with another Drupal organization that can benefit from promotion at the targeted conference
• The Drupal Association can choose to fund talks for conferences that are of particular interest for promotion.

For measurement, we need to identify the touchpoints of activation for a viewer of one of these talks. For example, in a survey during a Drupal.org account creation or on the download page. Or by providing attendees of external conferences with a conference-specific discount code to the nearest Drupal event, and tracking sign-ups using that code.

TDT[4]: You've contributed technically, like adding async capabilities to Drupal, and you volunteer locally for a music festival. How do you see the role of non-code community engagement in shaping the future of Drupal, and how would you promote that balance if elected?

Alexander Varwijk: I know for sure that if I had been able to build that original sports club website together with the designers, product owners, marketers, and others that are a part of our community, the site would’ve been a lot better for it.

I think non-code contributions are hugely important. Drupal can solve all the technical challenges in the world, but it’s of little use if we don’t do so in a user-friendly manner, ensuring accessibility, proper documentation and a compelling story.

Drupal CMS has been a great initial product from the Drupal community that focuses on what Drupal has always been good at: content management. There are other groups of modules that we can bring together and show that Drupal can build more of these solutions. A clear example of where product ownership, marketing, and design can help is in the space of Drupal's authentication modules.

I truly believe Drupal can compete with services like Auth0 to serve as an open-source alternative for an authentication provider SaaS. The individual authentication modules work well and are secure thanks to the scrutiny of the community. However, combining multiple modules in a single installation can cause challenges and setup for less technical users can be challenging.

I've watched organisations spend thousands on SaaS services when Drupal could provide the same functionality. We have all the pieces — we just need to package them with the same polish users expect from SaaS products.

A key part of the challenges that I've outlined in my candidacy for the Drupal Association board revolves around storytelling and providing the right people with the right information at the right moment. Just as we've been working on a great new homepage at Drupal.org, so too must we extend our message to other channels, like external conferences, in a clear and cohesive manner.

I've spoken with marketers at DrupalCon who were eager to help but couldn't find the right people to connect with. This highlights a broader issue: we need UX and marketing expertise to create clear contribution pathways. The contributor guide on Drupal.org, while comprehensive, might overwhelm newcomers. Analytics can show us where we're losing potential contributors in their journey and help us eliminate those friction points.

In helping to organise the music festival, I've seen that small groups of people are able to do great things together. To be successful, however, they need ownership over what they're doing, clear support from the people they report to, and a clear escalation path in case they need help. To make sure the groups can grow, excited newcomers need a low barrier path to finding the right group, lest they get frustrated and leave.

My journey from that sports club website to enterprise platforms mirrors Drupal's own evolution. We've gained incredible power, but we must ensure the ladder remains in place for the next generation to climb.