Posts from March 2011
Why I Like Drupal
A former employer emailed me recently and asked if I could provide a couple bullet points about why I preferred Drupal over Joomla. Since I was writing it up anyway, it seemed like a good thing to share:
- Lots of developers. Chances are good that someone else has solved your problem before, and if they haven't released a module to address it, then they probably wrote a blog post about it.
- It's all free. Joomla and Drupal are both licensed under the GPL, so I'm not sure how this works, but Joomla plugins may be released as commercial software. I guess the plugins aren't required to use GPL, while Drupal modules are. I've heard horror stories of people buying 10 different plugins before finding one that did what they wanted, or had decent support, and while those may have only been $3 a piece, that adds up and incentivizes developers to spin off and do their own thing instead of contributing to the larger community and project.
- Contrib repository. Drupal modules and themes are all in one place. There are some exceptions that live outside of that - unusual distributions that have more specific requirements, and those written by developers who haven't yet been granted full repository access - but those cases are rare.
- Training. I'm not sure what the state of things is in Joomla, but there is a lot of training available for Drupal. My favorite comes from Lullabot: they make fantastic training videos, in addition to their workshops and events. All of their videos are available on their subscription-based website, http://drupalize.me/.
- Community. This last one is kind of touchy-feely, but it's worth mentioning. I don't know who in the Drupal world coined the phrase, "Come for the code, stay for the community," but it's true. The Drupal community is a lot friendlier and more diverse than that of any other open-source project I've worked with, and that makes a bigger impact that one might think.
DrupalCon Chicago
I know it's been over a week, but I'm finally getting caught up on sleep and email after Drupalcon.
This was my first DrupalCon - well, my first anything-con, really - and it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I don't mean that in a bad way: I just didn't really know what to expect, I guess, so reality wasn't quite what I was imagining. I had a lot of fun and learned all sorts of things, but I definitely learned some important lessons for next year.
Sleep more the week before the con. This one is obvious, and I even had fair warning that it would be a sleep-deprived week, but because of other projects I didn't get to stock up as much as I should have. Frankly, I got a solid 6 or 7 hours every night I was there, but there was so much going on all week that it was far more exhausting than a regular week at home.
Meet more people. My one disappointment is that I didn't get to meet more people. I did meet some new folks and spend more time with people I had met briefly at the DC Drupal meetup, but I was expecting to get to know a lot more people. When I arrived at the Sheraton on Monday, I wandered around the hotel a bit to see what was where, and found tons of people working on their latops. I thought that on that first day, everyone would be catching up with old friends and hanging out, not elbow-deep in code. I'm not sure how that observation really applies to my "meet more people" plan, but I'll have to keep it in mind next year.
Find more time for community. This one is less about DrupalCon specifically, and something that I need to focus on year-round. For DrupalCon specifically, I'd like to take part in more BoF's and get involved in more projects next time around. On the morning of the second day, Ben and I were talking about deciding between sessions that were in the same time slot, and he pointed out that we could attend one and watch the video from the other one after the con. That's when I realized, we could watch all of the videos later on, and spend the rest of the day in BoF's, since those wouldn't be taped and it was the only chance to experience them. I only wound up attending a few BoF's, but it was enough to show me that the sessions are for people that want to learn someting, while the BoF's are for people that want to contribute and get some work done. I definitely want to attend plenty of these next year.
Similarly, I want to make more time for the community in the time between cons, too. There is so much happening on groups.drupal.org and in the project issue queues, and I've barely scratched the surface in terms of involvement. I honestly don't know how anyone can keep up on groups, maintain a couple projects, and still follow conversations on IRC, but I would like to start including them at least a little bit.
Find more time to contribute code. I now have two contrib modules available on drupal.org, and would like to add more. There are a few other modules that I need to clean up and document before releasing them, and a couple more ideas that I haven't started yet. Furthermore, I know that I should be submitting and reviewing patches a lot more than I have been again.
For both code and community, I need to make more time: not find time, but make time. Something else is going to have to be displaced in order for me to do those things, and that's always the tough part for me. I had dinner a couple evenings with my coworkers at the con, and had an encouraging conversation with them the one evening. I'm hoping that we as a company can allow a little bit of time to contribute code and maintain some modules, but I know it's difficult to work that in around client work.
So: it was a good week. I learned a lot, both about Drupal, and about what I can be doing for Drupal. I hope that by the time the Denver con rolls around, I'll be a lot more involved and have a couple more modules under my belt - and certainly, I'll get more sleep beforehand.
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DrupalCon Chicago Prep
I never did get around to writing anything about the Webchick Drupal 7 Tour after the Lullabots came through DC a few weeks ago, but at this point, DrupalCon looms much larger on everyone's mind.
I couldn't be more excited. Even though I worked for four years at an event management company, and handled on-site IT for several technology conferences during that time, I've never actually attended a conference. I started working with Drupal just a few months before San Francisco, so it was too late to make arrangements to go by the time I really got into the project, and I couldn't afford a trip to Europe for Copenhagen. But, I have spent the past year attending the Drupal meetups here in town and occasional training events (like the Webchick tour), and from everything I've seen, next week is going to be a big hotel full of 3000 people that I'd really like to hang out with. They say, "Come for the code, stay for the community," and it's true: the Drupal community is so much friendlier and more welcoming than that of any other open source project I've dealt with.
I think I'm just about ready to head to Chicago for the week. I definitely wanted to make time to get a module in contrib before DrupalCon, and I managed to post two. I know what sessions I want to attend. I figured out how to get to my airport here, and to the hotel in Chicago. This weekend, I'm going to knock out a good chunk of a freelancing project I've been working on so that I don't have to worry too much about that. The only thing I'm concerned about right now is striking a balance between the scheduled sessions, and the BOFs, code sprints, and other ad hoc goings-on that I don't want to miss out on. It's shaping up to be a pretty incredible week.
And now that it's nearly 1 AM, I should really get to bed and stock up on sleep, because I sure won't be getting any in Chicago.
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Webform A/B Testing Module Released
The Webform A/B Testing module that I built recently is now available in the contrib repository. This one is better documented than my first contrib module, Multi SMTP, and is likely to have wider appeal. It adds a new content type for A/B tests of webforms, so that a site administrator can test a couple webforms against each other to determine which version results in the best conversion rate.
Development of both of these modules was supported by my employer, Jackson River. We have several more modules that we have been using internally for months and will be adding to the contrib repository soon; for the time being, they are available from our website.
