[documentation] Hitchhikers guide to Drupal

[Robert Castelo]

On 6 Jan 2006, at 16:09, Angie Byron wrote:

> Btw, I have kind of a "sister" document to this one here:
> "HOWTO: Enact change within the Drupal community" 
> http://drupal.org/node/36602 that I put up a couple months ago... its 
> audience is slightly different, in that it's geared toward people 
> making demands about Drupal.org itself, but there is a list of ways to 
> contribute in it and a bit about how the community works, etc. It's 
> possible this document could either be merged with the Hitchiker's 
> guide or else linked to it if there's any useful tidbits you like.

I think this page is about giving new users an understanding of the 
community they are joining and making their expectations realistic, 
"HOWTO: Enact change within the Drupal community" is the next step 
after joining, how to participate.

> There is a perception problem here with the word "users" in that 
> (based on past discussions like this) core contributors tend to 
> consider users as anyone who uses the software and doesn't contribute 
> directly back to it. This includes a "Joe User" from 
> somedrupalsite.com who uses the software to post their daily blog 
> entry, but it also includes "Joe Web Administrator" who creates sites 
> using Drupal as a tool. The latter group does not consider themselves 
> users, but website administrators. So I think this needs to be more 
> explicit.


Yep, this is something we need to sort out and standardise across the 
whole handbook.


> I think here we should implement Steven's suggestion of a "philosophy" 
> document (either within this text or in a separate page) explaining 
> the community-driven development process so that people don't come in 
> here with the wrong expectations initially; it will probably help to 
> ease the frustration level somewhat, or at least have a page to point 
> out to some of our more "difficult" users. ;)

Would it be appropriate to link to some commercial alternatives to 
Drupal, you know, the ones that cost $20,000+. That should give users a 
better perspective on the value of Drupal and the generosity of it's 
community.

 From a marketing point of view it might also be effective to link to 
other open source Drupal alternatives - that shows incredible self 
confidence in the product. As we're not actually selling Drupal we 
don't need to worry about missed sales.


Best regards,

Robert