Oomph leads the Contact Form Track as part of the influential Drupal CMS initiative
The Drupal Association brought a new challenge to the Drupal community this past summer. At the beginning of May 2024, Dries Buytaert, the founder and leading visionary for the Drupal platform, announced an ambitious plan codenamed Starshot. The community rapidly came together around the concept and started planning how to make this vision of the future a reality, including Oomph.
What is Starshot/Drupal CMS?
Codename Starshot is now known as Drupal CMS. Drupal is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) where authors and developers build and maintain websites. Drupal has been around since 2001, and in the past, it was focused on being a developer-friendly platform that supports complex integrations and custom features.
Drupal CMS is a reimagining of Drupal for a wider market. Currently, Drupal successfully supports the complexities that governments, high-volume editorial sites, and membership organizations require. But, the barrier to entry for those that wanted to start with a small, simple site was too high.
Drupal CMS is the community’s solution to drastically lower the barrier to entry by providing a new onboarding and page-building experience, recipes for common features, advanced SEO features, and “AI Agents” that assist authors with content migration and site-building acceleration. Dries challenged the community to start building towards a working prototype in less than 4 months, in time to demonstrate significant progress for the audience at DrupalCon Barcelona in mid-September.
The Contact Form Track
The Contact Form is an official recommended recipe. As the name suggests, its purpose is to provide a Recipe that installs the necessary modules and default content to support a useful, but simple, Contact Form.
The primary user persona for Drupal CMS is a non-technical Marketer or Digital Strategist. Someone who wants to set up a simple website to promote themselves, a product, and/or a service. A Contact Form should start simple, but be ready for customization such as integrations with popular email newsletter services for exporting contacts and opting into receiving email.
Research and Competitive Analysis
Drupal CMS aims to compete with juggernauts like WordPress and relative newcomers like SquareSpace, Wix, and Webflow. To create a Contact Form that could compete with these well-known CMSs, our first step was to do some competitive research.
We went in two directions for the competitive analysis (Figma whiteboard). First, we researched what kinds of experiences and default contact forms competitor CMSs provided. Second, we took stock of common Contact Form patterns, including those from well-known SAAS products. We wanted to see the kinds of fields that sales lead generation forms typically leveraged. With both of these initiatives, we learned a few things quickly:
- The common fields for a simple Contact Form are generally consistent from platform to platform
- More complex sales lead forms also had much in common, though every form had something custom that directly related to the product offered
- WordPress does not have a Contact Form solution out of the box! Site owners need to research commonly used plugins to achieve this
Our approach was starting to take shape. We internally documented our decisions and high-value MVP requirements and presented them to the advisory board for feedback. With that, we were off to create the start of our Contact Form recipe.
Recipe and Future Phases
Phil Frilling started the Contact Form recipe, which is currently under peer review. The recipe is barebones for Phase 1 and will install the required modules to support a default Contact Form and email the site owner when messages are received. Once the initial recipe is accepted, a round of testing, documentation, and additional UI in a custom module may be required.
Our plans include additional fields set as optional for the site owner to turn on or off as they need. Some customization will be supported in a non-technical user-friendly way, but all the power of Drupal WebForms will be available to those that want to dig deeper into customizing their lead forms.
In the short term, we are proposing:
- Database storage of contacts that safeguards valuable leads that come in through forms
- Quick integrations with common CRMs and Newsletter providers
- Enhanced point-and-click admin UI through the in-progress Experience Builder
- Advanced fields to handle specialty data, like price ranges, date ranges, and similar
- Conditional defaults: Through the initial set up, when a site owner specifies an Editorial site they get one default Contact Form, while someone who specifies E-commerce gets another default Contact Form
- Feedback mechanism to request new fields
Next stop, the Moon
DrupalCon Barcelona took place last week, September 24 through 27, 2024, and the Drupal CMS prototype was displayed for all to see. Early 2025 is the next target date for a market-ready version of Drupal CMS. The community is continuing to push hard to create a fantastic future for the platform and for authors who are dissatisfied with the current CMS marketplace.
Oomph’s team will continue to work on the Contact Form Track while contributing in other ways with the full range of skills we have. The great part about such a large and momentous initiative as Drupal CMS is that the whole company can be involved, and each can contribute from their experience and expertise.
We’ll continue to share our progress in the weeks to come!
Thanks!
Track Lead J. Hogue with Philip Frilling contributing engineer, Akili Greer and Rachel Hart researchers, and thanks to Rachel Hart again for bringing the Contact Form Track Lead to Oomph for consideration.
