Acquia Inc. podcasts

On October 4/5, 2013 (depending on your time zone), I hosted a live Hangout on Air with three major Drupal core contributors: Lee Rowlands (larowlan), Tim Plunket (tim.plunkett / @timplunkett), and Daniel Wehner (dawehner / @da_wehner). We talked about what's going on in Drupal 8 and how you will benefit from all the new stuff. This post is the first of four that cover the details of that conversation. Lee Rowlands felt that some of the noise going on around the Drupal 8 developer experience didn't touch on all the wins that we're getting from the changes in Drupal 8. He wrote a blog post and gave a presentation at the Melbourne users group outlining some of the many ways Drupal 8 will be a great experience for developers. "I work all day on Drupal 7 sites. Drupal 8 is where I get to do the fun stuff. There are a lot of things in Drupal 8 that I couldn't wait for, dealing with shortcomings in Drupal 7 on a daily basis. 'I want it now' kind of stuff (I picture Lee having a tantrum at this point), in particular the plugin stuff, and the entity filed API changes. That was my motivation for that talk. "We do a lot of introspection and critical analysis in open source and Drupal, that's what makes it great. But sometimes I think we don't stop and celebrate the wins." Meet Lee Rowlands Drupal start date: 2007 First Drupal memory: The first time he looked at Drupal, "I saw '/node/1' and I went to the file system to look for a file called 'node' and I couldn't see it and I didn't get it. I was a static HTML, PHP script person back then. That was Drupal 4.7. I put it to one side." When Lee later needed an open source eCommerce system, Ubercart brought him right back to Drupal 5 and here he's been ever since! How did you get into contributing and how do you contribute now?: "I used to be a contrib. developer. I think I had 30+ modules in Drupal 6 and 7," I have no idea how he had anything resembling a life at the same time ... "I did a lot with Ubercart, commerce, and media things." "I sat there in Drupal 6 land and didn't pay attention to what was happening in core and then Drupal 7 came out." The first time he needed to build a Drupal 7 site for a client, "I had to go on a long car ride and I saved the massive change notice page, the handbook page on Drupal.org on upgrading Drupal 6.x to Drupal 7.x modules. It was a three hour car trip and I think it took 3 hours to read. That was the day I subscribed to the RSS feed for core." "I said, 'never again am I getting that far behind,' so that was my motivation to get involved." His first Drual 7 patch got rejected because it needed tests, so he learned about testing. He was a bit of a lurker in and around core for a while until one fateful day when he volunteered to help out in core and was promptly handed the maintainership of Forum Module. "I took it on and keeping Forum up to date with all the changes gave me a great grounding in what was happening in Drupal 8." Along the way to Drupal 8, Lee migrated Forum and Comment to CMI (which took 1000 posts of discussion and a year of work). That all gave me the confidence to look at other stuff." Meet Daniel Wehner Drupal start date: 2006 Drupal origin story: "My first moment was Dimitri [Gaskin: dimitrig01], he was 12 at the time and he helped me when I was maybe 16 and I was a student. There was a program where people mentored other students to get them involved in Drupal. I did one or two projects and since then ... I'm kind of addicted." How did you get into contributing and how do you contribute now?: As Daniel told me, he got into contributing because, "One day I realized that Earl Miles suffers in productivity as he had to answer so many support questions, so I jumped in and got involved in Views." "These days, I am excited about the WSCCI initiative and the menu system. I do Drupal because it is interesting for me; that's basically my...

Inside Acquia, the Client Advisory Team is something special. These are the people who are on the front lines, helping others succeed with Drupal 24 hours a day. They go above and beyond the call of duty for anyone who needs help and for other members of their team. In July, I spoke with five Acquia Client Advisors about their work and their team. THIS IS SUPPORTA! What a team! This is a group of technology experts who will fight (maybe literally?) for you and your Drupal site. They will celebrate your launch, your solved problems, and your successes possibly just as hard as you. While editing the recordings I made for this podcast, I could feel a contagious excitement steeping into me. I think this is because what you hear is the sound of Drupalists talking about something they (and so many of us in the Drupal community) love to do and truly believe in: helping other people with Drupal. The fact that they get to do this for a living must be an incredible feeling. Life in the Trenches I spoke with these Client Advisors about what support means at Acquia, about the team, and what makes them tick. Aurelien Navarre - EMEA Support Team Lead On support delivery - Aurelien describes Acquia support thus: "... Making sure that support delivery will be top-notch. Your job is to make sure that you will convey the correct technical expertise that [customers expect] and that you will give them the path to move forward ... making sure they can follow Drupal best-practices or making sure they can understand the Acquia tools and get the most out of them." If you speak French, check out Aurelien's screencasts on mastering Drupal at www.drupalfacile.org. Chris O'Neil - Client Advisor On helping customers to success - I find how Chris describes this quite moving, "I think my greatest moment so far has probably been receiving feedback from people in whose voice I can hear desperation relieved ... where it's obvious that something that has been plaguing them for days, or weeks, or even months has suddenly lifted from their shoulders and that I have been a part of discovering that ... part of helping them work through that and overcome that ... and for Acquia to be a part of that." Alex Jarvis - TAM Support Manager On what support at Acquia is - From his perspective, Alex calls the Client Advisory Team: "The first-line channel between different companies – from companies that have used Drupal for a long time, to companies that are brand-new to Drupal, and maybe even brand-new to content management systems. We are that voice for them that knows what the challenges are, how to advise them, how to support them, best practices ... We're helping mould the direction they go in and the approaches they adopt to make Drupal as awesome as it can be for their sites and their properties." Tine Sørensen - Technical Account Manager On what's great and different about working in support - Tine moved from being a backend developer to the Acquia Client Advisory Team. I love her perspective on what makes supporting other people's Drupal sites so great: "Here, you get to use all this awesome stuff you've learned over the years and apply it to solving other people's problems, as opposed to sitting there with your own code. That can be kind of awesome because you actually solve stuff for people on a daily basis. It's awesome to go home with a success; it always is." Sam Lerner - Technical Account Manager Sam sums it all up - Well known among his Supporta colleagues as being deeply passionate about support Sam puts it simply: "Support is helping people work with Drupal to succeed at what they're doing. Support gives people a way to get answers faster, so they can get back to doing their development and spend less time struggling. Acquia's goal is to make people in all realms successful with Drupal." Highlight When asked to...

I spoke with Kevin Miller, lead web developer at Cal State Monterey Bay. He's been working with Drupal for more than six years and is making great contributions, especially in the area of accessibility. On Drupal and Open Source My favorite thing about Drupal, "is that I can take a rough concept and get working prototype together within a few hours. That really helps our clients visualize what they're trying to do rather than doing a lot of handwaving." My favorite Drupal module: Arr! My job, "is to translate what people want into what they actually need." The value that open source brings, "to a university, an institution with a blended environment of both open and closed source ... If you're trying to use a closed-source product in the way that it's intended, then you can probably succeed just fine. But when you're trying to stretch it out or make one project work with another project, unless you're a large client and somebody's going to listen to you, you're probably not going to get heard. Open source gives us the flexibility to take technology and make it work for our unique use-case and not have to go begging to a vendor." Accessibility and Drupal With "several people in my life who use assistive technology," Kevin became interested and active in web accessibility issues, "not from the web developer's perspective, but from the perspective of the legally blind having difficulty turning homework into a learning management system [LMS]. When I think of accessibility, I always think of that quality of life issue for users who are prevented from doing things that we take for granted because someone was not thinking about accessibility." Kevin says that many of the proprietary accessibility solutions on the market are more about "CYA for legal requirements and showing sure diligence, but they don't translate will into making a website actually more accessible." QUAIL Accessibility Information Library "QUAIL was started because I was angry using one of those traditional tools. I was rage coding, I said, "How hard can it be to select an image that's missing an alt attribute on the page?' QUAIL 1.0 was written in PHP. It was the first attempt to translate accessibility testing into an open source project." PHP at the time was not completely up to all the tasks necessary, "On the train back from DrupalCon in Colorado, I threw everything away and said, 'Let's rewrite this in jQuery!'" This offloaded things like the parsing of the DOM and CSS to the browser, which is better suited to these tasks. QUAIL 2 has a suite of over 200 tests for things like meaningful image alt attributes, too much flashing in animated Gifs, poor color contrast in CSS, and much more. On top of QUAIL, "Drupal needs a layer that lets site builders select tests and to test content for content authors. That's where the Accessibility module comes in to play. It has a base API module for developers to use as they see fit [and integrate accessibility testing into their own code and modules] and it has sub-modules for checking content" both on pages a user has edit rights to and during authoring in WYSIWYG editors. "Just like the red, squiggly live for spelling errors, we can do that for accessibility problems." The Accessibility Themeing module helps themers determine the source of any page element. "Accessibility is also integrated with test swarm, so you can do automated browser testing for accessibility in your site." There is a "nascent reporting module" that surveys your site and can produce a report about accessibility issues. Here's where this gets even more interesting: "If you used it with something like the Statistics module, you could focus your efforts of making the biggest impact" by building a report of the biggest, most common errors on the pages with the most visitor traffic. The Video Interview The Drupal Accessibility Module in Action Screenshots of the Accessibility module's workflow. Click the thumbnails to see larger images: Resources & W

I recently spoke with the Managing Director of Deeson Online, Tim Deeson about how choosing and using Drupal has given his agency the tools it needs to provide great, large scale digital experiences for large, multinational organizations. The sound quality is not the best at some points during this recording. I am still figuring out how best to produce these "video podcasts"; apologies in advance. The things that Tim has to say are very much worth your while, nonetheless! I've included extensive excerpts in the notes below, too. Early days and discovering Drupal Tim started Deeson Online in 2001, adding it to the Deeson Group, a communications agency his grandfather started in 1956 and the content publishing company his father had started in the 1980s. Some clients began asking for websites and Tim's business was born. After five years of bespoke PHP builds, Tim "felt deep down that something wasn't right. We were reinventing all of these wheels." He and his colleagues started looking for a platform to do all the drudgery, so they could concentrate "on the fun, interesting stuff that adds value for customers." After several months of auditing, Drupal was their choice. Why Drupal? "We were looking for flexibility and control. We wanted to be able to learn and do things ourselves. We didn't want to be stuck in someone else's licensing model where we were just reselling packaged features that we didn't have any control over. We wanted something that would give us the power and flexibility to grow as a company and not be restricted by another company's roadmap. It gave us freedom and independence." "Most of the CMS's out there were over-engineered blogging platforms, whereas we recognized that with Drupal, you can do anything. We felt we weren't going to bottom it out if we grew a bit and started working with larger clients. We weren't going to bump our head on its functional ceiling." Drupal and business growing hand in hand "We've grown as a company from working with a few small clients to working with multi-national companies. They're deploying these platforms that we build to millions of people in some cases. This means the quality and the processes need to carry on ramping up. I think we've been really lucky that Drupal – being pushed by demand and by opportunity – has been growing into that enterprise space in a strong way. We've been able to grow with it." "We've been able to recruit people at the top of their technical and engineering game and make sure we're providing them with a platform that has this sophistication. We're aiming to be best-of-breed at how these problems are solved. They're problems that all CMS's and all software generally has. It's been interesting to see how the Drupal community has stepped up and been so keen to address them." On selling Drupal "Drupal is a tool for a job. A few years ago, we still had to address a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about open source." Now that happens much less. "But Drupal still has that sales and marketing job of getting out there to educate people what it's good at, what it's capable of. The challenge for us is getting away from saying 'Drupal can do anything!' Saying that to the end user isn't really that helpful. They want to know what it can do for them. As a community, we've still got that challenge ahead of us. We've got to demonstrate how great it is. Telling them 'it can do anything' is actually just scary and not very specific." Competing with other agencies "With the large, commercial, enterprise CMS's, I think people are used to being led by one provider. The Drupal community is much more complex. There's no sales rep who is going to tell you how to do everything. Open source itself is a complex concept. [Other digital agencies] will slowly get it, often they're led by a project a client specified Drupal for and they say 'We've got PHP developers, we'll just call it a Drupal development team'. And then comes the learning curve ... Drupal is a fr

I had the tables turned on me at DrupalCon Portland and got interviewed by Ray Saltini from Blink Reaction. He asked me some great questions about Drupal, and especially why you should come to Drupal community events like DrupalCon. Take six minutes out of your day and learn: How spending time in person helps long-distance collaboration, and cooperation later. Who comes to DrupalCon and why. Why you should come to DrupalCon. Why you should join the Drupal Association. The benefits of sponsoring DrupalCon. What's new for DrupalCon Prague (Community Summit! - Labs Track!). If you need any more convincing, just have a look at this Flickr set of us in Portland. Glorious! Oh, and moustache suits ... jam_plugs_drupalcon_fixed.mp3

I had the tables turned on me at DrupalCon Portland and got interviewed by Ray Saltini from Blink Reaction. He asked me some great questions about Drupal, and especially why you should come to Drupal community events like DrupalCon. Take six minutes out of your day and learn: How spending time in person helps long-distance collaboration, and cooperation later. Who comes to DrupalCon and why. Why you should come to DrupalCon. Why you should join the Drupal Association. The benefits of sponsoring DrupalCon. What's new for DrupalCon Prague (Community Summit! - Labs Track!). If you need any more convincing, just have a look at this Flickr set of us in Portland. Glorious! Oh, and moustache suits ... jam_plugs_drupalcon_fixed.mp3

Acquia Cloud Engineer, Tim Hilliard, and I sat down at Acquia headquarters this spring to talk about ... what else? Drupal and helping people succeed with it. I find Tim's job interesting. He is part of the client advisory team at Acquia, but isn't specialized in front-line client support. He describes his role as part of the onboarding team for the Acquia Cloud platform, as "support enablement," ... "Enabling Support to do a really stellar job is one of the things that I really love and I focus on." He created a set of tools and automations that help other parts of the Acquia Client Advisory organization do critical migration and quality control tasks for clients faster and with less risk of error. As the Client Advisory team discovers new tasks to automate and better ways of doing things, every member can add to and improve the toolset codebase. Tim says the team is releasing "one or two things a day to the toolset to keep evolving it." Check out the Drush script Cache Audit, to see the amazing tool Mark Sonnabaum built that inspired Tim to build the tool suite he discusses here. tim_hilliard_final.mp3

Acquia Cloud Engineer, Tim Hilliard, and I sat down at Acquia headquarters this spring to talk about ... what else? Drupal and helping people succeed with it. I find Tim's job interesting. He is part of the client advisory team at Acquia, but isn't specialized in front-line client support. He describes his role as part of the onboarding team for the Acquia Cloud platform, as "support enablement," ... "Enabling Support to do a really stellar job is one of the things that I really love and I focus on." He created a set of tools and automations that help other parts of the Acquia Client Advisory organization do critical migration and quality control tasks for clients faster and with less risk of error. As the Client Advisory team discovers new tasks to automate and better ways of doing things, every member can add to and improve the toolset codebase. Tim says the team is releasing "one or two things a day to the toolset to keep evolving it." Check out the Drush script Cache Audit, to see the amazing tool Mark Sonnabaum built that inspired Tim to build the tool suite he discusses here. tim_hilliard_final.mp3

Kevin Hankens, Acquia Engineer, discovered Drupal 5 when he was looking to build a highly personalized eCommerce visitor experience for his then-employer's website. I was fascinated to hear an origin story of the very beginnings of the sorts of digital experiences everyone is talking about today* (see below), 6 years later. In this interview from March, 2013, Kevin and I also talk about the evolution of Drupal from developer-oriented platform to a more user-friendly experience over the last couple of releases; how Kevin joined then left then "came home" to Acquia, Drupal contributions while developing Acquia products, and the BEST MODULE EVER. Drupal Gardens, Enterprise Gardens, Acquia Cloud Site Factory Since we were talking in March, Enterprise Gardens has been substantially reworked and rereleased as the Acquia Cloud Site Factory, and even more powerful and flexible platform for rapid site deployment. Every time Kevin says "Enterprise Gardens," pretend he said "Acquia Cloud Site Factory" :-) Here's some more information about that: Acquia Launches Acquia Cloud Site Factory And don't forget Drupal Gardens: http://drupalgardens.com Namechecks and Resources Here is the Queue Runner Module, that Kevin mentions in the context of Acquia product development that flows directly back into community code. More on Acquia Search The BEST MODULE Kevin has ever used: TABLE FIELD! Services Module REST(fulness) Module OAuth Module *Digital Experiences today Here are some resources to learn more about Drupal and the "Digital Experiences" that everyone is chasing now: "Digital Marketing: Embrace change or Play Russian Roulette" - Podcast with Acquia CMO, Tom Wentworth "The next generation digital experience is built on open source" - Generation DX article on opensource.com by Acquia CEO, Tom Erickson "Let's Get Personal: The Basics" - Blog post by DC Denison Acquia Named a Leader in Social Depth Platforms Industry Research Report - More information on Acquia and Drupal's increasing leadership according to Forrester analysts. "Acquia Says Open Source Helps Enterprises Thrive in Today’s Digital Disruption" - Interview with Tom Wentworth, Acquia CMO kevin_hankens_final.mp3

Kevin Hankens, Acquia Engineer, discovered Drupal 5 when he was looking to build a highly personalized eCommerce visitor experience for his then-employer's website. I was fascinated to hear an origin story of the very beginnings of the sorts of digital experiences everyone is talking about today* (see below), 6 years later. In this interview from March, 2013, Kevin and I also talk about the evolution of Drupal from developer-oriented platform to a more user-friendly experience over the last couple of releases; how Kevin joined then left then "came home" to Acquia, Drupal contributions while developing Acquia products, and the BEST MODULE EVER. Drupal Gardens, Enterprise Gardens, Acquia Cloud Site Factory Since we were talking in March, Enterprise Gardens has been substantially reworked and rereleased as the Acquia Cloud Site Factory, and even more powerful and flexible platform for rapid site deployment. Every time Kevin says "Enterprise Gardens," pretend he said "Acquia Cloud Site Factory" :-) Here's some more information about that: Acquia Launches Acquia Cloud Site Factory And don't forget Drupal Gardens: http://drupalgardens.com Namechecks and Resources Here is the Queue Runner Module, that Kevin mentions in the context of Acquia product development that flows directly back into community code. More on Acquia Search The BEST MODULE Kevin has ever used: TABLE FIELD! Services Module REST(fulness) Module OAuth Module *Digital Experiences today Here are some resources to learn more about Drupal and the "Digital Experiences" that everyone is chasing now: "Digital Marketing: Embrace change or Play Russian Roulette" - Podcast with Acquia CMO, Tom Wentworth "The next generation digital experience is built on open source" - Generation DX article on opensource.com by Acquia CEO, Tom Erickson "Let's Get Personal: The Basics" - Blog post by DC Denison Acquia Named a Leader in Social Depth Platforms Industry Research Report - More information on Acquia and Drupal's increasing leadership according to Forrester analysts. "Acquia Says Open Source Helps Enterprises Thrive in Today’s Digital Disruption" - Interview with Tom Wentworth, Acquia CMO kevin_hankens_final.mp3

In our first "video podcast", I recently spoke with prominent PHP developer Michelangelo van Dam (aka @DragonBe) about PHP, its history, current trends toward convergence and compatibility, use in the enterprise, and where Drupal fits in the picture. This conversation is a follow-up to Michelangelo's guest blogpost on Acquia.com: "The power of PHP: The Swiss Army Knife of Digital". michelangelo_van_dam_final.mp3

In our first "video podcast", I recently spoke with prominent PHP developer Michelangelo van Dam (aka @DragonBe) about PHP, its history, current trends toward convergence and compatibility, use in the enterprise, and where Drupal fits in the picture. This conversation is a follow-up to Michelangelo's guest blogpost on Acquia.com: "The power of PHP: The Swiss Army Knife of Digital". michelangelo_van_dam_final.mp3

Jeff Beeman, Acquia Professional Services consultant, talks about how far Drupal has come in the last 8 years, what it's like to be on a team of people specialised in joining other teams, and the satisfaction of making Drupal really sing when it counts. This interview was recorded in March, 2013 in Burlington, Massachusetts. Life changing moment - Hello Drupal! While Jeff was working at Arizona State University as a front end developer, a Wordpress blog needed expansion beyond what it could handle at the time, "We went looking around, and I happened to try out Drupal." He describes discovering Drupal 4.7 as a "life-changing and eye-opening moment" when he "realised what a content management system was. I don't think I ever understood [before] that that kind of thing could exist." :-) Drupal then and now "In Drupal 4.7 building forms, creating custom content types, and things like that required writing a lot of code. And now Drupal 7 is so incredibly powerful. With the suite of tools that you have out of the box and from contrib. [the contributed module repository], you can do a lot more with it without ever writing code." What Jeff and Acquia PS Do (really well!) "The enterprise space typically deals with lots of tricky and complex use cases that can be hard to turn into technical requirements. In our role as Professional Services, a lot of what we're helping people do is succeed at implementing hard-to-solve problems with Drupal, and ideally in the simplest way. Helping to distill complex business process into tools that are useful inside of Drupal." "We help clients take their general idea of what their site should be, and we help them translate that into Drupal architecture with a roadmap on how they might build out the solution." Since Acquia does not build websites, the PS team also adds value by "communicating this months-long process of turning vague requirements into an actual Drupal architecture, taking that to a partner and helping them be successful implementing that solution." Embedded Drupalists "Because of what we do in Professional Services, sometimes we're disconnected from the company a little bit. The approach we take on projects is that we are getting embedded in someone's team. I think that's one of the biggest values we bring: All of the people on the team are the type of person who walks into a situation and immediately tries to be a part of the team." Job Satisfaction "All of us are so passionate about solving a problem well." Jeff gets a lot of satisfaction from "I guess you would consider them more minor, but frequent successes. Helping a client with their site that's performing terribly, for example, or keeps getting hacked. Being able to drop into a situation, quickly assess it, and help them turn around a bad situation into a great one is always really rewarding. Being able to take a site that's performing very slowly and turn it into something where the web servers are barely noticing any load – that kind of thing is always really rewarding." jeff_beeman_final.mp3

Jeff Beeman, Acquia Professional Services consultant, talks about how far Drupal has come in the last 8 years, what it's like to be on a team of people specialised in joining other teams, and the satisfaction of making Drupal really sing when it counts. This interview was recorded in March, 2013 in Burlington, Massachusetts. Life changing moment - Hello Drupal! While Jeff was working at Arizona State University as a front end developer, a Wordpress blog needed expansion beyond what it could handle at the time, "We went looking around, and I happened to try out Drupal." He describes discovering Drupal 4.7 as a "life-changing and eye-opening moment" when he "realised what a content management system was. I don't think I ever understood [before] that that kind of thing could exist." :-) Drupal then and now "In Drupal 4.7 building forms, creating custom content types, and things like that required writing a lot of code. And now Drupal 7 is so incredibly powerful. With the suite of tools that you have out of the box and from contrib. [the contributed module repository], you can do a lot more with it without ever writing code." What Jeff and Acquia PS Do (really well!) "The enterprise space typically deals with lots of tricky and complex use cases that can be hard to turn into technical requirements. In our role as Professional Services, a lot of what we're helping people do is succeed at implementing hard-to-solve problems with Drupal, and ideally in the simplest way. Helping to distill complex business process into tools that are useful inside of Drupal." "We help clients take their general idea of what their site should be, and we help them translate that into Drupal architecture with a roadmap on how they might build out the solution." Since Acquia does not build websites, the PS team also adds value by "communicating this months-long process of turning vague requirements into an actual Drupal architecture, taking that to a partner and helping them be successful implementing that solution." Embedded Drupalists "Because of what we do in Professional Services, sometimes we're disconnected from the company a little bit. The approach we take on projects is that we are getting embedded in someone's team. I think that's one of the biggest values we bring: All of the people on the team are the type of person who walks into a situation and immediately tries to be a part of the team." Job Satisfaction "All of us are so passionate about solving a problem well." Jeff gets a lot of satisfaction from "I guess you would consider them more minor, but frequent successes. Helping a client with their site that's performing terribly, for example, or keeps getting hacked. Being able to drop into a situation, quickly assess it, and help them turn around a bad situation into a great one is always really rewarding. Being able to take a site that's performing very slowly and turn it into something where the web servers are barely noticing any load – that kind of thing is always really rewarding." jeff_beeman_final.mp3

This is the second part of a two-part conversation with Acquia's Chief Marketing Officer Tom Wentworth. In it we discuss Tom's understanding of data-driven marketing, the rise of the "Chief Digital Officer", You can listen to part one, in which Tom discusses his background in computer science, his perspectives on the early web, the rise of the content management system, and how open source solutions like Drupal remove risk and add innovation for businesses. Both parts of this interview were recorded at Acquia headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts in March 2013. Fact-based decision making On the importance of data, Tom says whether 'big' or 'small', it makes a huge difference: "The more we understand about our customers, the better we can market. The core of Tom's understanding is to move Marketing "from a culture of speculation to a culture of fact-based decision making. I've gotten good at building a team that knows how to look at data, understand data, and use data. Marketing is a lot now about the technologies that can make us more effective, make us more data-driven, and help us deliver a better customer experience." Digital disruption? Hello, Chief Digital Officers! Digital technologies, and the shift to moving the core of business to digital is disrupting every industry. The move to having a "Chief Digital Officer" began, according to Tom, in the media industries, where they had to confront digital distribution and consumption of their products early on. The idea of a Chief Digital Officer is now making its way from media companies to health care companies, financial services companies, and higher education companies because digital is so transformative for their businesses. Some CDOs fall more on the CMO side, some on the CIO side. Ultimately, says Tom, CMOs will have to embrace digital to guarantee success. "Whether you're a super-technical CMO or a CDO, the real important point is embracing technology and digital transformation. Don't shy away from it, because it is inevitable that digital is going to disrupt your business." The first part of the Chief Digital Officer's role, "is to build up a team that equips the organization with all these transformative digital capabilities: from web platforms like Drupal to social media monitoring, to big data and analytics, to CRM. The CDO needs to harness all these digital customer touch points and arm each of the departments in an organization to better achieve their goals through digital technologies." The second part of the CDO's job is to play a central role in knowing what's working, what are the right tools to use, "It's a hybrid of what the CIO used to do, from a tools and technology standpoint, with what the CMO should be doing around data and customer experience." Beyond websites, Drupal as a platform "The Drupal community has built an incredible platform. As a CMS guy, when I look under the hood, the technology is fantastic. When I look at something like Spark [a huge leap forward in the Drupal content-authoring experience], it's clear to me these things couldn't happen without a passionate, super smart, active community." "Drupal has an opportunity to become the 'connective tissue' of digital marketing. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of technologies that marketers harness to solve their problems; the problems around customer experiences, analytics, multi-channel delivery ... there's all sorts of categories. Drupal is a platform that helps you connect all the things that you need to deliver a fantastic experience through your website, mobile devices, social networks, and social communities. Drupal has modules that connect to all these other things: web analytics, CRMs, marketing automation," and so on. "If I can connect my website directly to my CRM, I can show them something that is directly and personally meaningful to them. That's an integration point that's available in Drupal today. The biggest strength of the Drupal platform is that it's so flexible,