Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, comments in his blog, which is always a source of great articles, on what he calls orchestration and how this is gaining importance in the marketing and technology sector. The key transformation is that the tech stack as such is losing centrality, since orchestration lets it behave like a network in which previously disconnected pieces of software can operate as connected nodes.
Dries explains in the blog how he started using n8n for these automations and connections, but soon discovered Activepieces, which has a much more open licence and is pure open source. In fact, he has invested in the latter and expects orchestration to become something vital and critical within a few years.
The market has already recognised the value of automation or orchestration and in fact n8n is already valued at 2,5 billion dollars. These figures seem to validate Dries’s thesis.
What role does Drupal play in this context? According to Buytaert, this affects all CMS in general and Drupal in particular, since it would move from integrator hub to key node within orchestrated networks. Events in Drupal could trigger flows in other systems and receive actions back without adding complexity to Drupal core.
This orchestration is also closely related to generative artificial intelligence. Dries talks about “digital workers” capable of understanding goals, making decisions and executing tasks across platforms, which could be a major revolution.
To conclude, the founder of Drupal notes that the question is not whether orchestration will be critical, but whether that automation will be open and built collaboratively or not. If it were free code, we would certainly all gain on different fronts, with transparency perhaps the most important, although not the only one.
Before AI and orchestration, composable CMS already existed, drawing on proprietary code and extensions, those from third parties or from the community. Orchestration goes further, because it would connect services as different as Mailchimp, Slack, etc and will sprinkle them with AI. Perhaps now what is needed is to make this orchestration happen more easily rather than developing Drupal itself.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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