Archiatlas.org

Actually I thought I would write a bit about my experience using Drupal, I think it makes for an interesting story.

First my background: I am not a developer and my only coding experience was a course in University a decade ago. When I started with Drupal I had basically no idea of PHP and no idea of CSS/stylesheets. So you can imagine that the beginning was rough. Very rough actually.

My first issues started when trying to set up a development environment in my PC. I had a bunch of issues installing Apache, then finding the drivers for PHP 5, then addressing some bugs with the drivers etc. etc (yes, I am a newbie!).... fortunately, I discovered XAMPP, a great package that installs the whole LAMP suite of products together with minimum configuration and ready to use, including some advanced PHP modules. I recommend it for anybody looking for a quick start: it made my life so much easier!

After that, installing and configuring Drupal 5 was relatively easy. Drupal.org is very well organized, and I had no problems finding what I wanted, playing with different configurations and reading dozens of howto's to get to do what I wanted the system to do.

However, that only took me maybe 50% of where I wanted to be. At the end, no matter how good the modules are, you always need to tweak your design, slightly modify some of the functionality, etc. Covering that step took a lot of energy, and I gave up many times.

Drupal is a complex app for a newbie, and what makes it so complex is its high level of nesting. I was in front of a page and I had no idea of what file I had to modify to do the changes that I wanted to do. Of course I could try to open some .module files... but without having much of a clue, I found myself trying to understand the most complex ones, such as node.module, or cck.module... even today, I do not think I can really understand how they work in a reasonable time.

The other tool that changed everything for me was firebug. The first time I plugged it in and I was able to know what css file was being applied for each part of the screen, the sky opened and the angels played music for me. Finding out the styles (and changing them) became suddenly a trivial task.

Of course, once I managed to understand the themeing, I started to look into some smaller modules, and I started to understand them as well. And from there, with a bit of patience, I managed to pull together this site.

I heard something similar to Firebug is shipping with Drupal 6. That's amazing news and an outstanding product decision (I am a product manager in real life). My take away from all this is that drupal.org should have some section related with tool, tips and any type of help related with the task of developing and setting up a site. In terms of the product itself, is harder to say. There is always a balance between out-of-the-box/good for non-developers vs. easy to customize/loved by engineers. I think that most of usage may come from the first part, but probably the most interesting product adoption is the latter.

Only my two cents thought...