Breaking Into Drupal – Using What You Already Know for the Drupal World

By Renee Mitson

Although we may pride ourselves as marketers, we are constantly adapting to new information and without that adaptation, our expertise finds itself obsolete. I recently attended DrupalCon Chicago 2011 with my compadres Rae and Kaywan. This was a great chance for me (a non programmer/developer) to learn more about the Drupal community and how I can market the capabilities of Drupal more efficiently.

Along the way there were a couple of surprises. For those of you who do not know, Drupal is an open-source content management system, the most important part being open-source. This means it is run, maintained, and improved by a community of people who use it every day. Basically, the people that use it are the ones that improve it. Now, I knew this at the time, but attending DrupalCon helped to solidify just how deep-rooted that community is.

You might be thinking, “why would people spend so much time trying to improve something for free, don’t they have jobs?” The answer is yes, they do have jobs, but improvement of Drupal is based on both an interest in the community and self-interest in improving a CMS they work with. For instance, imagine if you could change an aspect of Microsoft Word, or QuickBooks, just some little glitch or problem that decreases your work flow and probably annoys thousands of people. Wouldn’t you want to?

This community involvement lends itself considerably to the marketing of Drupal. Originally, Drupal users received some skepticism as it was considered a less legitimate CMS and means of developing a website. This was due to the community aspect which made it appear to some that Drupal was not as sound as a corporate CMS. This just is not the case. In fact, the Drupal community is perhaps the strongest attribute of going to a Drupal shop or choosing to integrate Drupal into your brand. I like to think of the Drupal community as the biggest customer support service around, thousands of people working to improve something for free. Therefore the financial investment you are making with Drupal and the developers/designers you are working is being improved constantly by the improvement of the CMS.

One way to look at it, is Drupal makes the company you go to for your Drupal site better, simply by improving how things are done/made/designed and impelemented. And the Drupal community is incredibly present. The lead developers are extremely personable and were available for one-on-one questions throughout DrupalCon. These conventions are held around the world as well from Los Angeles to Chicago to Copenhagen.

By looking on Drupal.org you can see that Drupal knows its strength in numbers as well with the quote,
“Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.”