Tom Geller's nuggets o' joy

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be teaching my first live telecourse on Monday, 29 March, "Setting Up, Customizing Drupal", for Environments for Humans. My three-hour course is in the morning, with Sheena Donnelly teaching "Drupal Theme Building" in the afternoon.

Most Drupal people know me for my Lynda.com video courses. I'm no stranger to live teaching: One of my first jobs was teaching secretaries how to use Radio Shack TRS-80 (!) computers when I was 16. (Yes, I'm that old. ;) ) I presented at a lot of tech conferences during the boom, and later taught real estate courses for City College of San Francisco and a private company.

But I'd put off teaching Drupal courses live. I fell into a trap a lot of folks in the Drupal community are in: Because so many of us are highly technical developers and sysadmins, I figured the market for beginner's courses wasn't that big. The success of Drupal Essential Training gave me an inkling that it's bigger than I thought; the entry of such companies as Lullabot into the field, and live training by such excellent video providers as Sean Effel (DrupalTherapy) convinced me. So when Environments for Humans' Christopher Schmitt approached me with a specific proposal, it was easy to say "yes".

Watch for another blog post before the date -- including a way to win two free tickets. And I'll try to report on how it went afterwards. Spread the word!

A recent CNet article notes that such shops as AF83 have been turning away business because they can't keep up with demand. That's a familiar story to many of us, including me: Drupal is just growing and growing, and we're reaping the benefits and challenges.

But consider the other side of that coin, expressed by the article's title: "Need a job? Learn Drupal." If the message gets through, the Drupal community will experience a wave of people driven by practical matters of employment. A few minutes in Drupaldom's current hangouts -- IRC, drupal.org, mailing lists -- predicts how such an influx will clash with the existing culture.

Not that the the Drupal world isn't already commercial and entrepreneurial -- it is, in large part thanks to pioneering companies like Chapter Three* and Dries' own openness to commerce. But the three badges of Drupal honor today are that you (1) you code, (2) you work on GPL projects, and (3) you're active in "the community". Few people responding to the call of this article -- or of the business community at large -- will meet these criteria. Let's look at each separately.

• New immigrants will not be coders. Coders were necessary to Drupal as hunter/trappers were to U.S. expansion. And, like trappers, they're not as important as they used to be. After food sources are secure, people need banking, commerce, clothing, entertainment. These are institutions that pioneers are not equipped to provide.
  
  Obviously, trapping isn't as important a skill now as it was in 1800. We still need food and warm clothing, so the functions formerly served by trappers are now served by others. Trappers can be angry at how they -- the people who built this country! -- have been pushed aside. (Old westerns are full of such grizzled characters.) The smart ones will get off their laurels and adapt to inevitable change.
  
  New Drupal workers will be in public relations, finance, advertising, distribution, sales, business relations, and content. They'll think inheritancy and encapsulation are about wills and pills. They'll fail to recognize coding intelligence, because they're not optimized for such wisdom. In my experience, coders repay that ignorance with a vengeance, failing to recognize the intelligence of those "soft" skills even more. But they'll make Drupal's banks, markets, stores, and bars run -- regardless of how you feel about them.
  
  
• New immigrants will not work on -- or care about -- GPL projects. They're here for a job, not a philosophy. The first ones will become educated about open source because they'll have to be in order to get along with the community. But peer pressure will shrink as the pool of Drupal users grows. We've already seen this in (for example) the Linux world: How many users understand their operating system's origin or license? 1%? How many contribute back to the project? 0.001%, maybe.
  
  Which leads to a hard question: Does Open Source Matter? On some level, yes, and I spent a good part of the late '90s expounding the position that it does. But for the people building a career based on using Drupal? No, it doesn't. They hope that Drupal remains strong, and perhaps have a vague idea that volunteers are behind it. Because they're not coders, they won't have any connection to those volunteers -- unless the Drupal project changes in ways that make it easier for them to get involved.
  
  That, of course, has been a topic of much discussion. The Drupal.org redesign will help, but it's only a drop in the bucket. Ultimately no amount effort will entice the majority of new Drupal users to get involved.
  
  
• New immigrants will not be in "the community". This will be the hardest blow to Drupalistas who have been with the project since Dries was a jongetje. It strikes at the real reason that people contribute their efforts to Drupal, or any cooperative project: Because they like the people as much as the subject.
  
  When a group is small, members feel they can know everybody, and problems can be solved via IM. Even if they don't know everybody, they feel they can at least trust others, and that they'll share common beliefs.
  
  But growth engenders diversity. I remember being part of a pretty insular bisexual activist community in the early '90s, all working together for the recognition and dignity of Our Sort. We started interacting with some counterparts from another city and found them... tacky. Suspicious. Poor representatives of what we thought We were. We had gone beyond our tribe, and not liked what we saw.
  
  So it will be with Drupal. One thing that's surprised me is how little we hear of Drupal being used for right-wing political sites. Will our community, with such left-wing support businesses as Development Seed and Chapter Three prominent among us, trumpet their success as well?
  
  

So -- the contrast between "old guard" and "new school" may sound harsh, but it's actually cause for celebration. If Drupal does in fact attract such people -- who don't code, who aren't GPL-savvy, and who aren't community members -- it'll be a sure sign that it's escaped its corral into a larger world. And as we can take advantage of their skills, the circle will continue to be ever-widening.

* Say, who were the first Drupal service companies? I'm assuming Chapter Three was one of them because of its leadership's involvement in Deanspace.

Here's a statistic I haven't seen bandied about much. Drupal runs three times as many of the Alexa 10,000 top sites as the next CMS, according to backendbattles.com.

This figure was extracted using Wappalyzer. It's not perfect: The Onion doesn't show up as a Drupal site, for example, probably because it runs an old or heavily hacked version.

It's nice to have this statistic at hand when Drupal supporters feel disheartened by popularity comparisons to Joomla. There are many ways to be successful; capturing the attention of the world's biggest sites is a pretty good one.

Having said that: WordPress is found on nearly three times as many big sites as Drupal. (Backendbattles.com categorizes it as "blog software" rather than a CMS, so it doesn't show up in the comparison.)

Peachpit just published my article, "Top Ten Changes That Make Drupal 7 the Best Version". Peachpit is a publisher of a wide range of technology books, so this article will reach many readers who are savvy enough to use Drupal well, but might not know much about it yet. Comments welcome!

Just want to point people at a terrific new resource maintained by a "Seattle Drupal Beginner" group: a list of Drupal-related books, with bonus links to the authors' Drupal.org profiles! Nicely done, folks.

Regular readers know that I've been working on a Drupal 7 book for beginners. We -- meaning Peachpit Press and myself -- are now faced with a decision. We could release it before, after, or at the same time as Drupal 7's release. Each option has its pitfalls. Release it too early, and it might not match the final Drupal 7 software. Too late, and we could lose the "first mover advantage" to another book.

Whatever our decision, we have to provide some date for potential distributors, booksellers, and customers. So we boldly decided we'd try to release it at the same time as Drupal 7 itself -- and announced the 24 January 2010 date you currently see on Amazon.

Webchick, when asked when Drupal 7 will be released, always says "When it's ready". Neither she nor co-maintainer Dries will set a date at this point, and for good reason: Neither of them are in control of when "ready" will be. Of course they could release it any time they like -- in an unready state. That would be bad for everyone who relies on Drupal, wants to switch to Drupal, has built a business around Drupal, who teaches or writes about Drupal... in short, bad for everybody. So their silence is as it should be.

But we, like IT professionals around the globe, still have to make decisions. In our case, we have to guess at Drupal 7's release date a few months in advance if we're going to hit that goal of simultaneous release. (Book publishing takes time!) And the sooner we make the decision, the better.

I'd personally love to announce the availability of Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide on the same day as Drupal 7's own release. But I'm nagged by unknowns. What would it mean if it came out early? What if it came out after a similar book? Which situation is worse?

What do you think?

I've been busy writing Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit Press over the last couple of months. I'm pleased to say that all the main chapters are done, and most of them are already available for preview on Safari Books Online. (I've given the table of contents below.)

Now it's time to write the appendices, and I'm not sure what would be most useful. We're thinking:

• Extending Drupal, including a list of the most popular modules, and whether they're expected to be available for D7 (thanks to the #D7CX project)
• Differences between D6 and D7
• Interacting with the Drupal community

Here's what the book contains so far:

Chapter 1. Getting Drupal Up and Running

• Fulfilling Drupal's Requirements
• Downloading and Unpacking Drupal
• Creating the MySQL Database Using phpMyAdmin
• Installing Drupal

Chapter 2. Establishing Your Drupal Site

• Performing Common Post-Installation Tasks
• Giving Your Site Its Identity
• Selecting a Visual Theme
• Monitoring Your Drupal Site
• Packaging Your Drupal Site

Chapter 3. Creating and Managing Content

• Gaining More Control of Individual Nodes
• Creating Other Types of Content
• Finding, Editing, and Deleting Content

Chapter 4. Customizing Content

• Defining Custom Types of Content
• Putting Images and Styled Text in Content

Chapter 5. Making Content Interactive

• Enabling Interactive Content Types
• Categorizing Content with Taxonomies
• Mastering Text Formats

Chapter 6. Improving Access to Content

• Making Content Searchable
• Directing Traffic with Menus
• Laying Out Your Site with Blocks

Chapter 7. Wrangling Users

• Managing User Accounts
• Controlling How Users Interact with Their Accounts
• Defining User Roles and Permissions
• Building and Protecting User Community

Chapter 8. Customizing Drupal's Look and Feel

• Creating a New Theme
• Changing Theme Graphics and Typography with CSS

I'm sure I'm not the first to discover this, but...

An online dictionary search for "Drupal" says it's a synonym for "drupaceous": that is, "resembling, related to... [or] producing drupes". A drupe is a fruit whose seed is covered by a tough endocarp, like the red peaches you see here.

Juicy!

Look at the top keyword searches that bring people to my site, according to Google Analytics:

1. tom geller (O.K., that's a gimme.)
2. wamp drupal
3. drupal wamp
4. (content targeting)
5. drupal on windows
6. drupal windows

Further, about one in five requests for support sent through my site's contact form is WAMP-related.

So -- what's the story? Is it that WAMP is hopelessly messed up? Is there a vacuum of relevant information out there? (My Running Drupal on Windows using WAMP article is Hit #4 on Google.) Have you had problems running Drupal on WAMP? Does the Acquia Drupal stack installer for Windows help?

At last I can announce the release of my new six-hour video series from Lynda.com, "Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data", which you can check out with a free one-day pass. (Of course it's also available to anyone with a Lynda.com subscription, starting at $25/month for all-you-can-stand training in over 600 topics.)

I first talked about this course in January and was able to implement at least one suggestion from your comments (about creating calendars). There are also videos about mapping, charting, and preparing data for tabular export, all built on a foundation of CCK and Views.

Since Lynda.com's audience is mostly graphic designers, the course starts out with an in-depth description of data structure: As you know, data planning is at least as important as implementation! And it's an essential subject whose subtleties elude most beginners.

One wag in IRC questioned the need for such a course. "Presentation of Data?," he said. "Isn't that what Drupal does anyway?" He's right -- in the same way that a car is a tool for going shopping. But I believe that many people who would benefit from Drupal's data-presentation features simply don't know about them, because their knowledge of it stops at Stories, Pages, users, and blocks. They need a bit more information to make the leap, and could become fierce advocates for Drupal when they see all it can do in this area.

Extra bonus: For giggles, check out the Introduction video, which includes some live-action video of me looking goofy. :)

Thanks, as always, to the Drupal community for both helping me to understand these topics myself, and for making Drupal the Web development powerhouse it is.