Nick Lewis: The Blog

Jeff Whatcott ponders why Drupal isn't dominating the job postings for social app PHP developers.  He guesses the main problem is lack of awareness and understanding of drupal among the greater developer community. With this line of thinking, the obvious fix would be outreach and education. Personally, I'm skeptical that the developers who choose systems other than drupal do so because of lack knowledge, or awareness. I think its something far less rational

I. Our API is Only as Powerful as the Developer's Knowledge of It -- When I developer first starts poking around the hood of drupal, they'll probably be totally unaware of how hook_menu works, what the formapi is, how our template engine overrides, etc... If they took the time to read up on all the documentation, they'd probably become a drupal convert. Unfortunately, developers are lazy, and prone to thinking anything they don't totally understand is "crap".

II. Developers Hold a Deeply Held Believe that *their* tool is the best -- Converting a Rails developer into a drupal developer is about as easy as converting a Muslim to Judaism. Ever tried to convince a Rails developer that drupal's modularity gave it a huge advantage for building complex applications that would have to grow over time? Yeah, I stopped 3 years ago too...

Oh, btw, RoR sux. lrn2theme. Drupal FTW!

III. Developers Often Don't Form Opinions From Experience -- Most developers like to sound smart. So when in doubt, they naturally look to the opinion of someone else who they think is smart. Making matters worse, developers have a tendency to think people they agree with are the smartest.

IV. Anti-PHP snobbery. The snob factor is huge. PHP's reputation among the elite opinion leaders in the development community is about as good as most people's opinion of communism. Making matters more difficult, PHP5 took care of most of their gripes, but nevertheless, they continue to quack the same anti-php song, and that hurts drupal.

V. Drupal Doesn't Speed Up Development for Developers Who Aren't Drupal Ninjas -- Learning drupal takes a lot of time. If time is short, and developers aren't familiar with the APIs, even I'd recommend against Drupal.

Someday, I'll have a chance to design some halfway decent drupal ads. In the meantime, however, I can only offer some general thoughts on how Drupal could become the poster child for good grassroots open source marketing.

The Focus of Our Marketing SHOULD NOT BE Drupal

Drupal's biggest problems, in terms of marketing is two fold:

• Our marketing is not getting people's attention. I think the majority of new users had to seriously educate themselves before they understood that drupal was the right choice.
• Even when we do get their attention, our current marketing fails to seduce them.

To put it differently, Drupal keeps messing up first Dates.

Dating Advice for Drupal

Have you ever watched a really BAD first date? Well, I certainly have. I work 10-12 hours a day at a busy coffee shop near University of Texas. I witness at least one bad date every day. Oddly, the most common mistake I've observed in dating apply directly to drupal marketing efforts.

Don't Talk too Much

And for god's sake, don't talk too much about yourself. This is the number one screw up guys make on dates. They talk. I can't tell you how many times I hear from friends, "Well, I thought he was cute, but then he just started talking, and talking, and talking... I was so bored. "

Similarly, drupal's date is unlikely to care that it's a framework, and a CMS. Drupal needs to understand that their date is still "getting a feel" for Drupal.

Skilled daters know that on the first date, you ask your date questions. When they give an answer, you make an effort to empathize, to understand, to agree (but this is best done in a way that makes them laugh, or intrigues them).

The goal of your questions is to find some weird passion, ideal, or activity which both of you share. More often