We have been cracking Drupal since early 2006. We went in deep, heads first right from the start. As we're all a bunch of geeks in nature, passionate about cool new technologies, we also looked at other content management systems such as Wordpress, Mambo, Joomla, Typo-3 and MMBase. Preaching to fellow Drupal developers, there is nothing quite like Drupal. But we all know it all depends on what you are looking for and what the needs of your clients are. This is a feel-good post about ourselves and a statement towards the future that perhaps may inspire you, for whatever purpose you are reading this.
The road taken
There is a great deal of helpful information on selecting a suitable CMS, like cmsmatrix, and cmscritic. As much as I appreciate sharing and reading opinions for others to make a careful choice, I say to our beginning Drupal readers: don't be afraid to make your own judgment. I think Drupal 6 is suitable for the majority of beginners nowadays, in spite of cmscritic's top 5 content management systems for the complete beginner.
We design
We love good design. We like cool stuff. Not just stuff that does cool things, but also stuff that is designed well. I love this axiom by Steve Jobs, who nailed it down I think....
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
And as we know, the how-it-works part has not yet fully matured within Drupal. Many features in Drupal that do the same thing work in different ways, thus resulting in confused clients and end-users. As much as we love the solid features that add value to our Drupal propositions, we have focussed on these inconsistencies to straighten out for all of our clients.
We feel we can make a difference by uplifting usability for existing modules and behaviours for our clients. One challenge is to see how we can project these changes onto Drupal, modules, the community and other projects without spending all of our time giving away and supporting stuff we did. Certainly something we will focus on.
Furthermore, when talking design, Drupal allows us to design almost anything and have it put into themes and templates. Drupal's astounding theming capabilities are a big plus to that. We will be looking into interesting developments around JQuery and AJAX as well.
We commune
How refreshing to have other Drupal suppliers over for pizza and beer and share experience. Even share leads. I mean, does this happen with larger, commercially oriented applications? I mean, does IBM recommend Dell when they are understaffed to handle requests? It's hard to imagine. In the end it's all about what's on the bank, for the sake of survival. We all find this a fascinating community.
We went to DrupalCon Szeged 2008, DrupalJam Breda and Enschede where we showed OpenDover and OpinionMiner, with quite some uplifting feedback. We support the Revamping Drupal.be.nl project and arranged the New Year 2009 Meetup at our offices, where Dries attended. We are the kind of downright techie enthousiasts that feel at home in the Drupal community.
We contribute
Finding a way of properly contributing is something else we need to lay focus on. Lack of time and a proper release strategy is mainly the root problem there. Others have seemingly similar issues. We have put in Shadowbox, FCKEditor and E-mail Defuscator. We are working on a release plan for these and more, including Open Dover and Opinion Miner.
The looking glass
We will be focussing on Drupal. We stand for the things we make and we make them solid. I am actually proud of the things we do! As we all should.
We are also becoming an expert in service providing and relieving update management using Drupal Commander. We have the facilities, procedures and tools to create a good support structure for Drupal based organisations and Drupal developers.
With a team of skilled Java people in Minsk, who have been part of the team for over 10 years and with our skilled Drupalteers in Holland, we have started the first projects as Drupal integrator. Designing a Drupal website around an existing Oracle or PostgreSQL environment is something we get asked quite a few times lately. We have the means and knowhow to do this. It would be great to show this to the community and share our experiences in the near future.
We look for solutions that are niche oriented and pose us challenges while at the same time add value to our clients. Hopefully we will be part of this for a long time. We are looking forward to have fun and do cool things with Drupal and at the same time make a decent living out of it. It's Drushido: the way of the Drupalteer.
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