drupal advocacy

About San Diego Drupal Users Group

Drupal user groups are starting to crop up around the world, but there is currently no central location for these groups to organize. That is being changed. groups.drupal.org is currently being developed. When it is finished, our San Diego group will live there. Meanwhile, please leave a comment here to express your interest. If there are any existing DUGs in San Diego that I'm not aware of, please drop a link here so that we can join/coordinate.

Drupal Showcase

Here are some sites (in no particular order) that use drupal in an interesting way.

Drupal -vs- DIY

You say you want to build a website? It must be feature rich, flexible, extensible, powerful, and very web2.0. This is an important site, and you don't want to be locked in to someone else's framework, so you have decided the smartest approach is DIY. You have a small team of very experienced LAMP developers who have track record building successful sites. They've promised to meet your every requirement. You're new site will look and feel unique. It will not have that distasteful look of so many of these other sites built on one of the open source content management systems (CMS) like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal. Down the road, as you extend your website, you will save lots of money as you won't have to hire developers with specialized skills in a certain CMS. Anyone with sufficient knowledge of Apache, PHP and MySQL can work on the site. A CMS might work wonderfully in many situations, but in your case, you need the power and flexibility only offered by a DIY solution.

Sounding pretty reasonable to you? If not, you may be failing to buy in to some common fallacies.

Doing Drupal development effectively

Clients seem to come in sets. A couple months back, I had several clients who had hired cheap off-shore companies 12 timezones away whose developers were curiously unavailable by phone, email or carrier pigeon. You probably already know the rest of the story: client needed to spend more money to have someone else go in and try to make it all work. (BTW, always use the term "refactored" rather than "threw out" when referring to the busted up stuff the client paid for).  

Lately the theme has been clients who hired a 'Drupal developer' to do custom development and ended up with hacked up Drupal core, semi-working custom functionality and lots of odd behavior in different parts of the system. As an intelligent, hip, effective web entrepreneur, you should not strive for this.

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