The changing Drupal community

Posted Apr 24, 2010 // 1 comments

With my voice still recovering from Drupalcon SF, I've been thinking a lot about what I learned.  The most surprising and significant thing I learned is that the landscape of Drupal has changed in drastic ways since I first started using it 4 years ago.  Even since Drupalcon DC last year, the community is different.  Standing at our booth last year, a few people stopped by with curious interest.  After a few minutes of small talk, most folks would mosey on to the next booth with the same ambivalent inquisitiveness in which they had found us.  Not this year.

The Drupal community, like the project itself, has matured to new levels.  No longer were booth butterflies simply inquisitive.  They were hungry, determined and desperate for information.  It was clear many had already experienced their rookie season, bruised and battered from a couple of first Drupal projects.  But now they were smarter, aware of the pitfalls and nuisances of trying to be successful with such a powerful tool.

In particular, I was pleasantly surprised at the community's interest in the non-technical aspects of Drupal.  Previous conferences were filled with bespectacled programmers in ironic t-shirts looking for the latest Drupal hotness... Drush, SOLR, Semantic, etc.  Don't get me wrong - there were plenty of awesome t-shirts and Drupal hotness this time too - but there was also a new genre of Drupaler.  Folks trying to figure out how to leverage Drupal for success beyond just standing up a website with the latest cool modules are now the norm.

Feeling this movement take place for a while now, Dave and I prepared a session that we thought would address this new wave of folks lost in a sea of Drupal modules: Planning and Executing a Successful Implementation.  Admittedly, I thought it would be a bust.  5:30pm on the first night of the conference, I figured everyone would be at happy hour by then.  Wow, was I wrong.  Folks listened to us with intensity and interest, and even stayed late for questions.  Sure, some of what we were saying was probably obvious for many, but I think everyone - at least - took some solace in knowing they were not alone in experiencing the many joys/failures/uknowns of making a living with Drupal.  And at best, folks really understood the complexities in the entire ecosystem surrounding a complex Drupal implementation.  Finding the coolest thing-a-ma-module suddenly isn't that important anymore.  Knowing what to do with them once you've found them is the part you have to understand if you want to build a powerful, long lasting and successful site that your stakeholders will love and not loath.

Our session is now available to view online.