For the past two North American DrupalCons, my presentations have focused on introducing people to the Webform module for Drupal 8. First and foremost, it’s important that people understand the primary use case behind the Webform module, within Drupal’s ecosystem of contributed modules, which is to…

The other important message I include in all my presentations is…

Over the past two years, between presentations, screencasts, blog posts, and providing support, the Webform module has become very robust and feature complete. Only experienced and advanced Drupal developers have been able to fully tap into the flexibility and openness of the Webform module.

The flexibility and openness of Drupal

Drupal’s ‘openness’ stems from the fact that the software is Open Source; every line of code is freely shared. The Drupal’s community’s collaborative nature does more than just ‘share code’. We share our ideas, failures, successes, and more. This collaboration leads to an incredible amount of flexibility. In the massive world of Content Management Systems, ‘flexibility’ is what makes Drupal stand apart from its competitors.

Most blog posts and promotional material about Drupal’s flexibility reasonably omits the fact that Drupal has a steep learning curve. Developers new to Drupal struggle to understand entities, plugins, hooks, event subscribers, derivatives, and more until they have an ‘Aha’ moment where they realize how ridiculously flexible Drupal is.

The Webform module also has a steep learning curve

The Webform module’s user experience focuses on making it easy for people to start building fairly robust forms quickly, including the ability to edit the YAML source behind a form. This gives users a starting point to understanding Drupal’s render and form APIs. As soon as someone decides to peek at…Read More