Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg at SchipulCon 2011 Photo by Ed Schipul

WordPress and Drupal are now the top of mind for web developers as well as publishers alike.

Each of these projects have a prominent face in the form of Matt Mullenweg and Dries Buytaert, the de-facto decision makers in the projects.

These Open Source projects come from humble beginnings, but are now fuelled by a large community that depends on these products for their livelyhood. In addition both Mullenweg and Buytaert have set up commercial entities that work around their products, Automattic and Acquia respectively.

The market share obsession of WordPress and Drupal

For both projects the focus now seems to be world domination. Both WordPress and Drupal finally announced REST APIs that allow them to expand beyond traditional web publishing applications.

A table from a blog post displaying numbers that WordPress is used by 25% of web sites

In the early days the objective could have been being purely of good will as free platforms were less common and both the cost of hardware as well as software licenses were prohibitive obstacles for publishing online.

With the combination of free software, dirt cheap web hosting and free publishing platforms like Medium — this is no longer the case. Free software won the web publishing race. Period.

Charts displaying how much “moar importanter” Drupal is compared to WordPress

So now it seems like the major influencer behind these is expansionism and old fashioned greed — obviously to provide return on capital venture investors on Acquia and Automattic.

Matt continues to move forward with improving their WordPress.com content platform, while Dries is pushing Drupal to new large markets like India and China that are potentially lucrative in the future. These targets are much more akin to 1990’s Bill Gates than the bad tempered, but a more non-profit approach Linus Torvarlds has.

Drupal and WordPress are already platforms for millions of developers, but they’ve got so much clout in the projects that they could make an impact beyond their own walled gardens.

Create components, don’t just adopt them

Traditionally both WordPress and Drupal have extensively used Open Source components like jQuery, CKEditor, TinyMCE and more to power their experiences.

More recently Drupal has adopted Symfony components with Drupal 8 and WordPress moved to the JavaScript realm with Express and React.js for their open sourced editor shell for WordPress.com. In both of these cases they build on top of existing lower level components, but fail to produce anything similar that would be usable beyond their own products.

Both Drupal and WordPress more or less require you to go all in, not creating specific components that do certain things well. In the meanwhile Liferay, for example, has open sourced AlloyEditor — an interface to CKEditor that could be used in WordPress or Drupal. Liferay is a business that sees value in sharing beyond their own product.

WordPress and Drupal are now significant enough to detach from their monolith past and start sharing bits and pieces that could be used by other projects.

Good places to start would be the planned PHP Workflow engine in Drupal and investing in JavaScript components that would be usable outside of WordPress Calypso.