These Things Matter To Me

This weekend Selena and I spoke at the charming and hospitable LUG Radio Live USA, in San Francisco, CA. The topic was Choosing between Drupal and WordPress. It was very civil. A few people have asked for the video of our presentation, so I’ve uploaded it above with a Flash embed. More ambitious full-on video file to come later.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Selz and I are giving a presentation on choosing between WordPress and Drupal at LUG Radio Live in San Francisco this weekend. She and I agree to disagree.

The myth of centralization, the reality of distributed information.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that that:

• authoritativeness is subjective
• information is distributed
• if anything ever seems centralized, it’s only because giant pockets of activity are hidden, and once surfaced, we can see, “oh yeah, information is distributed!, better to have it available, than invisible!”

This applies to all sorts of activities and information, but today I’m talking about software reference material, in specific, Drupal reference material.

Drupal is an incredibly popular content management system framework. You can call it other things. Drupal helps you make websites.

Drupal’s fight to centralize

I’m relatively new to Drupal, quite like it, and recommend it frequently. That said, I have some issues with it, and among them what seems like peer pressure in the Drupal community to not create, or feel self-conscious about creating, Drupal resources outside of Drupal.org. There is a surprising lack of websites about Drupal given how popular it is. This is thoroughly confusing as everybody knows that with both proprietary and open source software, bands, artists, etc… having a breadth of resources/fan sites/ forums is a sign of a healthy, thriving community/market/mindshare. There’s a time and a place for “many eyes” and joining large group efforts (like Drupal.org) and there’s a time and a place for shirking mass-meetings, votes, digging in by yourself or a few collaborators, and making something totally fresh, especially for “proof of concept.” Neither approach is better or worse, but they each have their time and place, and nobody should feel guilty or self-conscious for working hard on their own and making something.

Recently a non-Drupal.org resource was created, drupalmodules.com. This has been mildly controversial within the Drupal community. Drupalmodules.com is too new for me to honestly judge on utility alone, but without a doubt, it’s purpose is undeniable: navigating the world of Drupal modules is very challenging, for many different reasons. While many within the Drupal community agree there needs to be a way to sift through modules by “quality” (there are wildly varying degrees of quality), the problem is bigger than just that. Quality aside, it’s challenging just to know if you’re picking the module that mostly closely scratches your itch… Anyway, Drupal modules: tough to navigate, agreed! Not agreed? That making drupalmodules.com was the right thing to do. Crazy, right?

Apparently there have been discussions for ages on a rating system for modules on Drupal.org, let alone a general redesign of the site, and its sub-sites. Maybe people think drupalmodules.com undermines those efforts?

Really people, there’s no downside to having another Drupal resource. In bizarro-land, the downside is that people who believe in centralizing everything, think the cost of keeping track of things and managing quality is not worth the benefit of having constantly-created resources, failing-fast, iterating often, and innovating often. In that reality, people should stop creating things, unless it’s a thing inside the heavily formalized, but tracked, “system.”

But on my planet, planet Internet, we’re enjoying the abundance! (and we have RSS readers) John, thanks so much for working on drupalmodules.com! I hope it doesn’t cause you too much grief. I hope you get lots of donations, and don’t feel self-conscious about putting ads up on your site (unless you don’t like them ). Do not feel self-conscious about the success or failure of your site! I hope more Drupal websites get born. I highly dig Drupal, and think it will get better faster not just with an ever-growing gigantic body of Drupal.org community members, but with highly-motivated independent visionaries who use Drupal as a canvas to express their vision.

Don’t control artists.

We all know the expression “design by committee,” and how it’s a derisive term used to describe the dynamic of when the lack of a cohesive vision dilutes quality. And it’s no secret that user experience and design is one of the most common criticisms of Drupal. So it’s extra discouraging when the very thing that will lead to improved experience and design in Drupal, escape from design by committee, is frowned upon. Big groups are great for fixing bugs, raising money, and lot of other stuff. I don’t want the awesome Drupal.org community to go anywhere. I just want it to recognize and appreciate that lots of cool Drupal stuff might not come from Drupal.org, but can still help Drupal.org.

One of the challenges of Drupal is there is always more than module to scratch any itch, including some included modules (especially easy to reach for). And more than once I’ve chosen a module or approach to solve a problem, only to find out later about a superior solution I wish I would have known about earlier.

So it’s a great relief to hear that Acquia will help guide us down the road of module selection by including a bunch on their to-be-released Drupal distro, code-named Carbon.

Modules currently under consideration:

(via a friend, this could be changed later, go here for freshest info (login required))

What’s Included

Carbon will include the latest release of Drupal 6 core along with a carefully selected set of modules. We are selecting modules based on their relevance to common social publishing use cases for both public-facing web sites and intranet team collaboration sites. The module set is still under review. Currently, it includes:

Page layout: Panels 2
Custom content: CCK, Date, Imagefield, File
Views: Views 2
Lightweight markup: Marksmarty
WYSIWYG: Kupu
Scheduled publishing: Workflow, Actions
Image management: As fields – Imagefield, Imagecache; As nodes – Image, Image assist
Events: Calendar
Forums: Forum
Comment spam filter: Mollom
Social bookmarks: TBD
Content rating: Voting API, Fivestar
Search: in core, Solr
Categorization: in core
RSS: in core
Content aggregation: tbd
Workflow: Workflow
Content versioning: Core, Diff
Tag clouds: Tagadelic
SEO URLs: Path Auto
Utilities: Primary Tag, Custom pager, JS Tools, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Wiki freelinks
Import / migration: tbd
Authentication: Persistent login, Securesite, LDAP, OpenID
User Groups: Organic groups
Email gateway: tbd
Email notification: Subscriptions

New Drupal show alert! Drupal enthusiasts probably already know about Lullabot’s excellent podcast/videocast. And now they have some company. Drupalmao has just launched, which is a casual, DIY show, not unlike Diggnation, where two friends in NYC/NJ just talk about stuff they’d probably talk about even without the camera there, and it’s fun and super informative.

One of the critical skills for any Drupal developer/ administrator is constantly adjusting and tweaking your approach to your site(s) with an awareness of fading/emerging modules and how they’re best used. In my first night with Drupalmao, I already learned about one module I hadn’t heard of at all, and another one whose name I recognized, but whose purpose I was unclear on.

Keep up the good work guys!

(So, BTW, Amnesty.org just relaunched, using Drupal. via Dries.)

Last year I started using Drupal. I made it into a blog server. It is a fine blog server. For hosting multiple blogs by multiple authors, it might even be my favorite. But because I had previous exposure to Wordpress and its elegant admin panel, I couldn’t help but be majorly disappointed by the administrative interface of Drupal. What made it worse was how little anybody talked about its horrible interface. The only people who seemed willing to talk about it were the people who tried Drupal and left.

I stuck with Drupal. I love Drupal. I think it’s the best tool for building many types of web applications, but many parts of the administrative experience are ridiculous. I think many people in the Drupal community know this, and are working to change this, but we are likely a few versions away from any of the major turn-offs being healed.

In the meantime, I’m going to give back to Drupal. Not by beating it up about its shortcomings, but by acknowledging them, and working around them. By guiding people through them. People who have poked around Drupal and wrinkled your nose: You are not crazy. You are not stupid. Drupal doesn’t make sense at first. But if you walk away, you are turning away from an amazing, amazing tool that likely does anything you were thinking of doing, but more!

Drupal is like a beautiful mansion. No. It’s like a the holodeck. No. Drupal is like a holodeck mansion. If you want a loft, it can be an urban loft for you. If you want a beachfront property, bam! It’s beachfront property. Drupal can adapt to your desires. But there’s one problem. Drupal is a holodeck mansion without a door. There’s a little doggy door. You have to get on your hands and knees and crawl. You’re going to get very dirty. You might even scrape yourself. But once you’ve made it inside, there’s nothing like it.

Stay tuned for Lesson One in Drupal Therapy: The beginning’s not a good place to start.
It will help if you have the ability to use a virtual machine.

• UC Berkeley posts entire course lectures on YouTube. Your move, MIT OpenCourseWare
• If your Drupal site is on the Internet, you can publish from Google Docs
• Notes from a DrupalCon Barcelona attendee
• Ubuntero.org is a social network for Ubunteros and their admirers

• 43 Folders switched over to Drupal
• New DrupalCamp alert: BADCamp ‘07, taking place in the Bay Area (northern California) early November 2007
• new episodes of LUG radio are noteworthy enough on their own, but this one has an interview with Miguel de Icaza
• most of this summer 2007’s WordCamp (WordPress un-conference) talks have videos up
• (video) If Morgan Stanley can get social networking inside their business and present on Enterprise 2.0, there’s hope for you. “Who knows who, and who knows what.”

(art from Andrei Robu via FFFFound!)