Summary: John Kennedy and I spoke about two exciting Drupal 8 projects he's running at Acquia in 2016. He's the Program Manager of the $500,000 US dollars Acquia is investing to upgrade important modules from Drupal 7 to 8 as part of the Drupal 8 Module Acceleration Program. He's also the Product Manager of Acquia's Enterprise Authoring Drupal 8 distribution, Lightning. "I think Drupal is great at a lot of things ... and if we want to create a world where regular people can create great experiences, not just developers, Drupal is a fantastic application for that." - John Kennedy Interview video - 25 min. - Transcript Below Guest dossier Name: John Kennedy Work affiliation: Acquia Program Manager Drupal 8 Module Acceleration Program - Product Manager, Drupal Lightning Drupal.org: johnkennedy Twitter: @commercejohn LinkedIn: John Kennedy Blog/Website: http://site.com 1st version of Drupal: A Drupal 4.7 site he immediately migrated to Plone :-( How did you discover Drupal? John Kennedy: Well, I was doing a little bit of work for a nonprofit organization called Vibewire maybe back in 2006 and they said to me, “We’ve got this website, it keeps going down and we really need to have you look at it for us.” I looked at it, it was on Drupal 4.7, loaded up to the brim with modules and I said “This is awful” and promptly migrated them to Plone. jam: Thank you, have a nice day. John Kennedy: Since then, I’ve had some better experiences with Drupal. I ended up running my own Drupal shop for a while and I then came out to the UK to actually start the UK operation of the Commerce Guys and I did that for a little while, and then Acquia brought me on to be head of solutions architecture for Europe and now they’ve brought me over here. jam: Fill in the blank here between 2006 and 2016, from being a big Plone fan to actually sticking with Drupal all these years. What changed for you? John Kennedy: I don’t know that I was a big Plone fan. I was a big open source fan. I’d been a systems administrator and I’d been using the range of tools on top of Linux for a long time. Plone at the time seemed more mature. I had some developers who I could use for Plone, but what happened was that I found a couple of projects that were really suitable for Drupal and I worked out how to use it, nontrivial at the time, at least ... still ... and then once I was dug in, I found it more and more useful and I really got in touch with the community. I started coming to DrupalCons. The first DrupalCon I came to was Chicago and I hadn’t missed any since until I had my son 17 months ago and then I’ve missed a couple. The power of the Drupal Site-Builder John Kennedy: Absolutely. Drupal creates this role that exists in other ecosystems, but it’s really clear in Drupal of site-builder, and it’s someone who can be, but is not necessarily a developer, and can be, but is not necessarily an author, and they actually create experiences by assembling modules, assembling functionality, and that could be layouts with Panels or it could be business logic with Rules or it could be a range of other functionality bringing it in through the module ecosystem. I think that role is incredibly powerful because it allows little organizations and large organizations to much better leverage their expertise to build great experiences, to build complicated functionality. It also facilitates this amazing ecosystem of people who scratch their own itch, but also contribute to a wider modular functionality and it’s a lot more, I would say, sophisticated than the module ecosystems you see in things like with Ruby Gems or necessarily just the wider Composer or PHP ecosystem because it actually takes into account that there’s an end user that needs an administration interface and needs guidance on how to implement this. It’s not just a piece of code that you plug...
