Making Drupal better - a daily task
Of course I love Drupal. I wouldn't have worked with Dries to start the company if I didn't.
But there are clearly areas where there is still a ton of work to be done to give more leverage to both developers and end users. It's nice to know, though, that there's a world of people out there using their own labor to do the work.
Cruising through the Drupalsphere, I found two articles that just sound right. Both are the work of the geniuses at Palantir:
- Larry Garfield's request for comments on Pluggable System Handlers. This is a meaty writeup. I'm glad to see traditional design patterns being leveraged in Drupal.
- Collen Carroll's blog about Sustainable Markup. It's a great start, as well as only a salvo in the larger "How do we simply the task of making it easy to make Drupal pages look a particular way?" This is a big topic, and one we (the community) need to consider, a lot IMHO.
These are great work. Thanks, guys.
They also reflect a slightly endemic problem with Drupal, though: We have lots of technical people thinking about how to make Drupal work better for programmers. We don't have nearly enough users participating in the dialog. I think the Drupal environment is mostly set up to cater to the former; the latter don't have an easy place to land in the Drupalsphere.
In my brain, I still keep comparing the Drupal world to the WordPress world. wp.com's Forums are much more filled with user entries, vs. developer entries. Yes, WordPress.com is more about the free WordPress blog site, and it's natural that such questions would appear here. But bottom line is that there's an outlet for them, and a set of developers (at Automattic) that listen to them. I'm not convinced that Drupal.org Forums are as user friendly.
Jay, all good points, Drupal
Jay, all good points, Drupal (and all tools, whether open source or not) needs user-centric marketing,support,and community. Not at the cost of other kinds of features, but just *in addition to* all the other cool stuff Drupal does.
A friend and I made a video comparing WordPress and Drupal, particularly on the community/support style.
(http://www.thesethingsmattertome.com/2008/04/video-drupal-vs-wordpress-p...)
Kieran has seen it, and we had a good talk with him about these differences.
A thought: Though it'd be great if drupal.org's forums were more user-friendly, it doesn't have to be the place to fill this niche. Another difference we pointed about w/WordPress is that it's less centralized. Some other place/forum could fill this need for Drupal.
Wow, great post! I have to
Wow, great post! I have to agree 100%. It's very easy to get one's head bitten off in the Drupal forums, and there seem to be a few very active members who take great glee in doing so (though I won't name them here.)
Addressing the newbie in the forum issue (and improving the forum to be on par with at least phpBB if not vBulletin) would go a long way to encouraging more people to use Drupal.
Case in point to support
Case in point to support your comments about the "friendliness" of the forums:
http://drupal.org/node/280315
the above isn't indicative
the above isn't indicative of the forum atmosphere. What you've linked isn't part of the forums. It's an issue in the issue queue.
I do agree that both the forums and the issue queue should have a friendly atmosphere to them.
I'm a user, not a developer,
I'm a user, not a developer, and with regard to the inclusiveness of the forums for 'regular' users, there's one thing that's been baffling me since back when I first installed D4.2:
There's a really big Drupal community, but at least for a 'user' there appears to be just too little relevant discussion on the forums. "Relevant" here of course depends on your point of view, but I've been mostly ignoring the forums lately. I'm comparing here with a few projects I follow or followed: Movable Type (up to 3.0 release), WP, MythTV (mailinglist), Joomla! and some others. For a normal, fairly informed, user these forums seem to be a lot more inclusive.
On Drupal's forums, it appears hard to get a question noticed, let alone answered: response times are often high for such a big community. Personally I feel like often there's low signal, high noise: from the ever present 'Drupal vs Product X' type of posts to the 'help me tweak hook_whatever to magically insert unicorns whenever date_field says the stars align' minutiae.
Furthermore, informed 'high level' discussion by the leading developers of where to take certain features or functionality often happens outside of the forums: irc, their own blogs (see above), issue queue, dev list. This in itself is not so bad, but to me too little of those discussions reappear on the forums for another part of the audience to participate.
In short, I think I mostly miss a 'bourgeois', middle cadre of peers on the forums. And all of the above of course rests on the possibly false assumption that I am representative of a 'normal' Drupal user ;-)
I think the best practice of
I think the best practice of open source world is from Mozilla. Anyone remember the early 2000s day with the Red Communist Mozilla site? Now they try to think in ter marketeer mind.
For example:
- SpreadFirefox for grassroot marketing: download number, widget, t-shirt, activities
- Support.mozilla.com for newbies support
- Addson.mozilla.com for one stop Addson site (Now Drupal has two: Drupal.org/project and DrupalModules.com, which is the result from the lackluster of the former one)
- and so on...
I think it's time to hire the real marketing professional guys.
Isn't Drupal a framework to
Isn't Drupal a framework to build websystems while Wordpress is a blogging system? We (proxiss) build great app's with the terrificly good Drupal engine inside but does my enduser need to know that? I don't think so.
And I think that's why you don't get that much enduser feedback. Drupal is still much to generic to be a CMS system. It's not a (simple) CMS because it can do so many things!
But if I got acquia right, you entered the market to provide a set of CMS's built on Drupal!? Imho what you need is a Drupal-Setup with (a) a cutting edge designed GUI - can pick one from the theme-repo (b) predefined content types suitable for a CMS - there's a content type with an image missing actually (c) a less generic administration interface - drop some features in this "CMS Drupal".
I am in Drupal for only about 15 months now (while 5 years in the web-market), but I would really like to see that wonderful generic system stay as it is (conceptual) - D6 is fantastic. Why not fork a subproject called DrupalCMS?
Cheers,
Rainer
I would also note that there
I would also note that there seems to be a dearth of business people involved in the Drupal communities. Drupal technology is cool, but at some point it needs to translate to how people can make a living using Drupal. I am active in the Northern Virginia Drupal group, and we're putting on a event with a panel talking about investment in the Drupal space (http://groups.drupal.org/node/13118), and from the response from some folks you'd think we were heretics :-) . I respect the (technology) people that want to make the world a better place using Drupal, but my focus is in figuring out how to use Drupal to meet the needs of the enterprise. It would be great to have a home in the Drupal communities for the kind of issues I deal with on a daily basis.
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