The Community is what makes the project tick: Dries Buytaert interview in PC World
Dries Buytaert, founder and lead of the Drupal project (EOS Directory entry), is featured in an interview on the Australian edition of PC World: “Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS world”
The title plays off the fact that the name Drupal is derived from the Dutch word “druppel” which mean water droplet (this also explains the druplicon).
The interview talks about the evolutions of Drupal and it’s somewhat meteoric rise from a simple student project to a foremost option for community-based lightweight CMS sites. Along the way, Dries touches on the importance of the community, both as a philosophical orientation of the Drupal project and in terms of the impact community contributions have had.
Highlights:
Thousands of people have contributed in numerous ways. More than 500 developers contributed patches to the Drupal 5 core, the main Drupal distribution. Over 1800 developers contributed Drupal modules (third-party extensions that can be added to the core) for Drupal 5.
Hundreds of people have contributed to the documentation and thousands of people contribute in the support forums. Volunteers from all over the world have answered over 100,000 Drupal support questions.
. . .
. . . Deanspace helped us bootstrap a successful ecosystem around Drupal. It helped us move from a “toy project” to a project that you could actually build commercial Web sites with.
. . .
The community is really what makes the Drupal project tick.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the Drupal community that continue to improve the software on a daily basis. We’re innovating non-stop: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in all parts of the world. As a result, Drupal continues to get better, and often at a much faster pace than many of Drupal’s proprietary counterparts.
. . . It goes without saying that without the Drupal community, Drupal would not be where it is today. It would simply cease to exist.
The most potentially controversial point is his take on Java versus PHP:
The Web is built by millions of individuals, many of whom are amateurs. They continuously update, tweak and rebuild their Web sites. Scripting languages like PHP lend themselves to that, and are widely available at affordable prices. It would have been very difficult to get critical mass if Drupal was written in a programming language like Java. Not because Java isn’t as good a language, but simply because Java isn’t as accessible as PHP.
Taken out of context, that might be seen as a critique of Java, but in context I think it is a clear argument for how PHP served the need that Drupal addresses better than a Java based solution would have.
He also talks a bit about some of what’s coming in Drupal 6.0: OpenID support, more AJAX improvements in the interface, performance enhancements, module update notification system, and significant localisation (l10n) and internationalisation (i18n) improvements.
Optaros has seen a significant uptick in interest from enterprise customers for Drupal - both in the Media and Publishing space and in the context of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration communities. In addition to building our own intranet on Drupal 5.x we’ve delivered Drupal based solutions for Chicago Public Radio (http://vocalo.org), Nemertes, and Swisscom as well as internal (behind-the-firewall) solutions for other enterprise clients (a content-sharing application for best practices and a mini-social-network application). We’re also in the midst of Drupal based projects for our own Optaros.com site and a health oriented community site for a major U.S. publisher.
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