Drupal Community

"Come for the software - Stay for the community"

So I totally missed this discussion in the Drupal community. Until I googled it. This slogan simply resonated with me when I heard it for the first time today.  And when I repeated it at the Drupal user group tonight some people looked at me funny (like "are you from another planet" funny) and others echoed my sentiments - that it captures what Drupal really is all about.

A few years ago I realized I needed to seriously look at providng my clients with a CMS solution. I had cobbled together some text based php stuff but it was all bad. So I started looking... postNUKE, Wordpress, and a few others were played with. And this stragely named newcomer Drupal. So I tried building a Drupal site for one of my clients. And they loved it. It became my hammer in search of a nail.

I started to seriously promote it to all my clients. The reasons they were  three:

1. Drupal didn't look like a CMS - everything else had this weird blocky boxy three column look to it. The Zen Garden was just hitting design. And this worked with it. And to think that people complain about the recognizability of Drupal sites.
    
2. Drupal was secure. PostNuke had just gone through major hackings. I had a contractor client who had vevery one of his 30 sites hacked by some "Free Turkey" hacker. And I was scared to death of having to deal with it myself.
    
3. Drupal had community. Bryght was its face in Vancouver but it was clear that there was an ecosystem here and it was strong and had staying power. It was open source which appealed to me. But there was something deeper.

It is that something deeper that is about the community. If I was to trace a thread through all my careers that thread would be community. So I get involved. Some presentations about components of Drupal. Linuxfest. Spreading the gospel of Drupal. Finding it in large corporations but finding it in churchs, not for profits, and all sorts of other places.

Reading through some of the threads on the slogan on GDO (groups.drupal.org) here and here and I realize that there is passion and all kinds of interesting thought and energy. And that too is part of why I'm here. Drupal has become much more than a piece of software for me.