Drupal

Now that I have been here for more than a month, I have had a solid opportunity to really dive into the inner workings of Drupal. Coming from a background where I worked with object-oriented programming and the MVC design pattern (model, view, controller), it has been a little overwhelming to get a grasp on exactly how Drupal is organized.

I am used to a very clear separation of concerns that the MVC design pattern affords when using popular frameworks such as CodeIgniter and CakePHP. While there is a tool named Movico, which is essentially an MVC approach for structuring a Drupal module, I have yet to fully wrap my brain around how it interacts with Drupal.

Six months ago I wrote a blog post called Cooking up a Homemade Drupal Theme. A visitor recently submitted a comment to my article that's left me contemplating the target audience for that particular post. "Wait," you think—"shouldn't every writer know for whom they are writing before they publish content to a website?" Technically, I agree with this sentiment, but considering the varied interpretations of the skill sets required of a Drupal themer, defining an appropriate Drupal audience can be a real challenge.

Choosing the right tool for a project can sometimes be easy. For example, when driving a nail, the obvious choice would be a hammer, or when splitting some wood, a saw would be the best tool in the box. Sometimes we know the tools we need but don't have them at our disposal, like the time my father-in-law asked me to help him paint a room. What he failed to mention was he only had two small four-inch brushes—not a great choice for such a big project.

Drupal themers are like cooks. We use common components (contributed modules) as a starting point for successful websites. Cooks also use common components—tried and true ingredients (salt, pepper, garlic, onions, etc.)—as the base for delicious recipes. The fruits of our labors are robust and flavorful. But somewhere in this busy world, saving time has taken priority.

"Methought I heard him think, 'Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!'" — John Adams, describing what he believed George Washington was thinking upon retirement

The Drupal world has been abuzz, of late, mostly owing to the news that Whitehouse.gov, one of the many online mouthpieces of President Obama's administration, has been moved to Drupal. Indeed, this has been hailed as a victory for all open-source technologies, and one outlet after another has offered mostly pleasing remarks about the switch.

Economic conditions have provided additional incentive for IT decision makers to explore open source technologies.  Shrinking revenue streams have forced business to conserve cash.  Using open source represents one way to do so, since not only are licensing fees eliminated, open source technologies can often be leveraged and supported at lower cost and with more widely available resources than

Jazz great Charles Mingus once noted that "Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." The same thing could be said in business; as products and services get more complicated, moreover, making the complicated simple leapfrogs creativity in favor of genius.

I recently was asked by a client to provide some ammunition for selling Drupal to his management team. I found plenty info using my friend Google, but ultimately had to spend an hour or so organizing it into a concise list of bullet points that I thought addressed the broad spectrum of benefits that Drupal can provide.  I thought I'd share with others who may need something similar at some point.

So, you've got 10-20 Drupal sites under your belt and are feeling pretty good about how far you've come in your ability to leverage the Drupal content management system. You're even helping newbies out on the support forums on drupal.org, whistling to the tune of "It's a wonderful day in the neighborhood" and "Won't you be my neighbor" all the while. You're a viable, competent part of the community, and life is good.

There's a shirt for sale on Veer that simply reads, "I draw pictures all day." I want that shirt.

Drawing pictures all day is part of my job description as a website designer for Digett. I have to show the client a picture of what their site will look like upon completion. Once approved, I pass it off to our developers to bring the picture to life. Sounds easy, right? Not so fast, my friend.