Automattic Donates €20,000 to Fund Next Phase of Drupal Gutenberg Development

Drupal Gutenberg, the Gutenberg module for Drupal that was created by a Norway-based agency called Frontkom, has received a €20,000 donation from Automattic to fund the next phase of development.

The module was one of five projects, selected from 35 proposals, that was granted funding during the DrupalCon Pitchburgh innovation contest. The winners were announced as part of Dries Buytaert’s State of Drupal presentation at DrupalCon North America 2023 in Pittsburgh.

“Since Automattic is the main developer behind Gutenberg, I shared the Gutenberg proposal with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic,” Buytaert said. “Matt was really excited about the idea of more Drupal sites using Gutenberg, and he kindly offered to provide the full €20,000 in funding through Automattic. Furthermore, he will be sending some Gutenberg experts to join the sprint without any cost to the Drupal community.”

The Drupal Gutenberg module is used on more than 3,000 Drupal websites. Frontkom, a 120-person agency, uses it exclusively when building Drupal sites for clients.

“Our clients love it,” Frontkom sales director Thor Andre Gretland said. “In fact, we haven’t built a Drupal site without Gutenberg since we started the project back in 2018.”

In his pitch video (embedded below), Gretland said the requested funding will be used to take the project to the next level by arranging an in-person workshop for a few days. They intend to gather people from the WordPress core team who have built the editor, the Drupal core team that knows the needs and possibilities for the admin initiatives, and the Drupal Gutenberg team that built and maintains the module.

Gretland listed several things he hopes the teams can create together, including a Gutenberg starter theme and a starter pack, where Gutenberg is setup with a complete frontend as a base theme or theming reference, as well as the ability to make it work work within the layout builder.

“Our goal is to make sure that the Drupal Gutenberg of the future is always using the latest and greatest version from the WordPress team, and better enable Drupal developers to contribute back upstream,” Gretland said. “We want Gutenberg more tightly integrated with Drupal and to do this properly we need to gather the people that should be involved. This is a great opportunity to extend our cooperation across open source projects and to move forward making Drupal the most easy to use enterprise CMS.”