Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, writes on his blog, which is always a source of strong articles, about what he calls orchestration and how it is gaining importance in the marketing and technology space. The big shift is that the tech stack itself now matters less because it is beginning to act as a network thanks precisely to orchestration, so that previously disconnected software pieces can operate as connected nodes.
Dries explains on the blog how he started to use n8n for these automations and connections, but soon discovered Activepieces, which has a much more open license and pure free code. In fact, he has invested in the latter and expects that in a few years orchestration will be vital and critical.
The market has already understood the value of automation or orchestration and, in fact, n8n is already valued at 2.5 billion dollars. These figures seem to validate Dries’ thesis.
What role does Drupal play in this context? This, according to Buytaert, affects all CMSs 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” able to understand goals, decide and execute tasks across platforms, which could be a major revolution.
To conclude, the founder of Drupal comments 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, though not the only one.
Before AI and orchestration there were already composable CMSs, which fed on code and extensions of their own, of third parties or of the community. Orchestration goes further because it would connect services as disparate as Mailchimp, Slack, and so on, and it will sprinkle them with AI. Perhaps now we should make it easier for this orchestration to happen rather than develop Drupal itself.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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