WebEnabled - A solid service for Drupal developers (if you don't get how it works, keep reading)

WebEnabled is really neat, so neat you have to give it a few minutes to sink in.

If you're a Drupal freelancer or web shop, you spin up new Drupal sites all the time. If you've been doing it long enough, you've probably figured out ways to make the process quicker and cleaner. If you've got a team, you've most likely established a system that allows multiple people to work on the same project. You've got a system for demo-ing Drupal to potential clients and for capturing your work so that you don't do the same stuff over and over. However, if you're considering adjusting your current workflow, have some gaps that need to be filled, or are starting from square one, then it's worth your while to meditate on what WebEnabled can do for a moment.

After signing up for WebEnabled, the first thing you'll want to do fire up an 'application'. WebEnabled has a one-click installer, which installs the latest versions of Drupal 6, Drupal 5, Drupal 7 dev or Acquia Drupal. While cool, a one-click installer is not novel in itself. What is novel is the feature set that accompanies the application. You can set up an app on a fresh .webenabled.com sub-domain, or link it up with your own domain. You can share applications with other users, which makes team-driven development a snap. SVN is also supported out of the box, if you roll with version control. Once you have your app set up, you can clone it. Imagine this workflow: You have a few different flavors of sites you work with, say blogs, e-commerce sites and social networking sites. If you start from scratch, you end up running the same configuration every time, installing the same modules, making some basic theme adjustments. If you've been doing this long enough, you've probably got a folder and database set up locally which you copy every time you start a new project. WebEnabled take this one more step: Fully automated cloning, complete with database config changes, a new database and new SSH account. Again, all this with just one click. It's hard to get simpler than that. After its cloned, you can continue to make improvements to the base site.

Okay, so we've got the ability to create a new site and clone it in just a couple of clicks. Perfect for solo folks, but what about managing default installations with a team? Here's one place where the number of options in WE is a little overwhelming, and detracts from the central awesomeness which is that if you want team-driven development, you can have it. For one, you can use integrated Subversion to manage team development with version control. Version control is a common solution to the problem of team development, but you can also connect different WE accounts to the same project to give several team members access to work with files directly.

The above feature set was enough to get me excited, but WE does one more really unique thing that I personally think is brilliant.

In the Drupal community, there's a lot of work sharing that goes on. Users contribute modules, themes, documentation, and support so that other users don't have to go through the same rigamarole that they did. Fixing people's problems is a two-way exchange. You help people, and earn a name for yourself, and perhaps meet some of your other goals (financial or otherwise). One thing I haven't seen is a good method of sharing base installations. Install profiles and the Patterns module can do something similar, but they take time that most folks don't have. People can package up distributions and share those, but maintaining a distribution is a daunting task that's difficult to do well.

WebEnabled allows you to publicly share your default installation, again with one click. What this does, in essence, is elegantly fill this missing gap for a community-based mechanism of sharing base installations. One doesn't need to go so far as to create and maintain a distribution, and updates made to the default install are automatically available, so there's no overhead in making the default install public. A WE account is required to initially import the default install, but because the free WE account allows up to 3 application installs, there's no cost to download. A public URL is given to a shared install, so you can promote the install however you'd like.

A plan is in the works to provide a marketplace so that developers have the option of selling their default installs. This would work in the same fashion as the free / premium theme model. Supporting this model means that people can actually derive some financial motivation to construct good default installs, and that could benefit the Drupal community and help users at all levels.

One more use case - Drupal training

One thing I think is worth mentioning is that WE is being used by at least one Drupal training firm to get their students set up and learning Drupal. It's easy, ubiquitous, and the only thing that you have to help people set up is an SSH browser of some sort. I can see WE being used for all kinds of Drupal training, both by instructors demonstrating, and students following along.

Criticisms and Concerns

From a User Experience standpoint, the interface assumes that you're a seasoned developer, and I think that might be a mistake, especially considering that students and new developers provide some really solid use cases. So, there are some gaps in documentation and some of the messaging was a little cryptic. There were several points during the initial setup where I asked myself 'okay, what's next?' Once I sorted those out, moving forward was reasonably clear.

I get the feeling that WE is still wrapping their head around their target markets. If I hadn't talked to one of the WE developers, the site wouldn't have called out to me to re-think the way I was doing things. It took a longer conversation to get enthusiastic about it, and to think about ways to incorporate WE into my workflow.

At it's core, WE is a hosted solution. While they've got a bit of a head start, with the open availability of Aegir, and with the Garden / Fields Acquia hosting projects, they're going to have some formidable competition in the marketplace really soon. WE is already stepping up their marketing, and that's good to see. WE has the opportunity to fill a real niche amidst some different rising options, but they will need to carve it out and perhaps even define it as they go.

My experience experimenting with WebEnabled left me pretty excited about its future. I can see that it's headed in a good direction, and it already has what appears to be a solid platform for creating default installs, supporting team-based development, and distributing the install packages. WE can be an awesome addition to a Drupal developer or firm's toolbox, and solves some rather difficult problems quite elegantly.