[consulting] Drupal Marketing and Consulting - Was: Fedora Core and the CMS Discussion

[Gunnar Langemark]

What are the pros and cons of being a very widely used CMF (Content 
Management Framework)?

For a consultant it is always a barrier if the system you're pitching is 
totally unknown and has no track record, so being used by lots of sites 
must be good, and being the CMS of choice by lots of high profile 
companies is even better.

But popularity for the sake of popularity may not be all good.

To me it is clear that the Drupal community right now is experiencing 
some problems with becoming more widely known. Tons of people coming to 
Drupal expecting yet another Mambo/PostNuke - or at least something so 
simple they can start hacking away at their installation right away. No 
one wants to read documentation, no one wants to meet words and concepts 
they don't know - and yet everybody expects Drupal to be much more 
powerful than whatever they had before was.

Drupal is a very ambitious project. We have different "distributions", 
packages of modules - like E-commerce, tons of smaller functionality add 
ons like the new cool service_links module. It all adds to the confusion 
amongst newbies and everybody else (who can seriously say they have a 
perfect grasp of all the modules in contrib?).

Drupal is clearly getting very big,  very powerful - even for a 
nonprogramming consultant like me, very much more mature (the interface 
usability has improved immensely since 4.0 - my first installation). 
This makes it more feasible to go for market share and popularity.

Drupal process and projects - like security, documentation etc. shows 
that this is a maturing project. As I see it, Drupal is not giving in to 
chaos. The guys at the helm, are taking care of the growth challenges, 
which is good.

So where am I getting at?

For a consultant, I think that the ideal way for Drupal to develop would be:

    * Make process and project teams even more visible. A professional
      organisation, with teams working on all relevant issues is a plus.
      Make it evident on the website and in the documentation what is
      going on.
    * Let certain "packages" - like E-commerce have their own
      "sub-communities" - and let them stand out. These are specialized
      implementations of Drupal, and should be treated as such. A
      potential client would like to see that the ecommerce people are
      actively pursuing some clear goals.
    * Have clear roadmaps for the development of Drupal and some of the
      modules - next version plans - and a three year visionary thing too.
    * Make the Drupal themes more "sexy" (there's a good discussion
      about this on the themes list right now.), as the visuals always
      attract way too much attention. Actually I'm convinced that some
      project choose Mambo/Joomly over Drupal exactly for that reason
      and nothing else. Same with Wordpress. And that is a shame. (And I
      don't believe that Drupal is not a blogging system - it is too -
      and it is a better blogging system by far, than Wordpress, if you
      want cool web20 functionality - y'all know... and there's business
      to be made in that area too!)

If a client is in the process of making a choice of system he will look 
at such things, because he can make sense of it. He does not understand 
the technical matters, he hires you to figure that out. But he probably 
knows a little about what a healthy business looks like.

I believe Drupal is going in the right direction. It can go there even 
faster.

I don't believe though, that going after popularity in itself - and 
using marketing ressources to do so - is a very good thing. Drupal will 
just attract a lot of low end users, who expect a simple system - easy 
to install, easy to understand, and no challenge to their brain cells. 
If Drupal degenerates into a system where terms like "taxonomy" are 
considered a "no no", it will have lost its soul and its unique appeal.

Sorry about the rant.

Best
Gunnar


Khalid B wrote:
> If we want to think in marketing terms, then this is an extra channel
> to get Drupal
> in the hands of many people, already packaged and configured. This no doubt
> increases "market share". Linux distros are used on hosting servers, corporate
>