Hi All,
I have now been a member of this great community for a few months. During this time I have come to love everything about it, the Drupal Core, contributed modules, the active and supportive community etc...
Before I decided that Drupal was the system that suited me best I did extensive research as well as talked to a selected number of friends who's opinion I trust. None of my friends mentioned Drupal, most of them recommended Wordpress, some Joomla. Thus I started researching the Internet about them. Soon though I stumbled upon comparisons between those two and Drupal.
I was lucky to find a few feature comparisons that made my focus change more and more to Drupal as Drupal got more ticks in my requirement list. The more information I then managed to find about Drupal it became obvious it was the system that suited my needs the best.
Now a few months later I look back to review if I made the right choice. I am happy to say that I am with a big YES. Everything I needed is either already in place or I can easily fix it myself. Right now I am in the process of building my first real site using Drupal and at the same time learning everything there is to know.
I have been in IT since the 80's so I have a long and wide experience of almost all aspects of computers and internet. Therefore it is not very often, these days, that I stand up and take my hat of for something that really impresses me.
I take my hat off
For Drupal though I am doing that. I stand up and take my hat of and say thank you so much Dries and everyone involved in this community. You have all contributed to creating something truly remarkable. The quality of both the Drupal Core and all the contributed modules, both the ones I already use and those I haven't found yet is simply astonishing.
The only part that has been a bit hard to overcome is the drupal.org website. It took me quite a bit of time to get a grip of the organisation and how to find what I am looking for. It is, as you know, not very user friendly. Therefore I really look forward to the upcoming changes that I hope will be introduced very soon.
I am very happy to be part of this great community and I hope that soon I will be able to give a lot back to it.
This now brings me to the other topic of my post:
Promoting Drupal
There are several Drupal sites I check on a daily basis, http://drupal.org, http://groups.drupal.org, http://drupalmodules.com and Dries personal site http://buytaert.net.
On Dries site I see posts almost every day about new sites launched using Drupal. Often it is by very well known companies and/or organisations. Just yesterday it was the US government site http://recovery.com that was listed.
This is of course fantastic for our community as it is evidence on that you (we) are doing something right.
What surprises me though is that this information is not used to help promoting Drupal.
I just did a few quick searches on Google for Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress.
On http://news.google.com I simply searched how many news hits it returned for each of the three:
"drupal" returned 578
"joomla" returned 729
"wordpress" returned 3,320
Of course neither of the above results are very impressive. Especially comparing when you search on the same names on http://www.google.com:
"drupal" returned about 29,400,000
"joomla" returned about 117,000,000
"wordpress" returned about 278,000,000
However, Drupal lags even more here.
Then I made a search on Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=drupal%2C+joomla%2C+wordpress
Drupal = 1.0
Joomla = 3.45
Wordpress = 2.85
Click on the link above and you will be able to see the trend since 2004. Drupal and Wordpress is counted from since the beginning, but Joomla came on second half of 2005. Even so it took them about a month to overtake Drupal and about two months to overtake Wordpress.
Both of them has since then had a better growth than Drupal, who's line is more or less linear since the start.
Then I went to http://association.drupal.org to see what I could find out what it is doing. In the about it says:
By 2006, it became clear that Drupal needed some sort of body to help manage the infrastructure, funding, and promotion of the community-driven project in order for it to continue to flourish. And so, the Drupal Association was born.
Then I click on the Press link and I find one (1) real press release date 2007-02-26, that is two years ago.
OK, the blog is quite active, but its only useful for those who will actually find the site.
As I mentioned above, none of my friends even mentioned Drupal. and then several of them are in IT media or within the CMS industry. When I got back to them asking if they had tried Drupal they all said they heard of it, but not tested it. When I asked why they said they had "heard" it is much more difficult to install and work with and thus they hadn't even bothered trying it.
I believe Drupal's growth potential is hurting from these "rumours" and we need to do something about it. At least for me Drupal is incredible easy to get going with, I can have a basic site up and running within hours from scratch.
In my view Drupal suffers from what we in Sweden call "the club of internal admiration". This means we who already are within the Drupal community pat each others backs every time we see a new Drupal site launched by a big name, smiling about it, etc. Then we don't use it to get even more people, companies and organisations to come on board.
Where to start then?
That is quite easy. Use the big names that are launching Drupal based sites. Contact the site owners and get a few quotes and send out press releases to news organisations, both online and printed.
There are tons of great IT related sites that will publish industry information like this. The more press releases they get about big names getting on the Drupal bandwagon, the more they will wonder why and write about it. But don't just send it to the IT press...
I believe that is the best way to start spreading the word outside the Drupal community.
What do you think?
Comments
Hi edde42 first of all
Hi edde42
first of all thanks for this interesting topic and analysis it think this is something we don't talk about too much here in the drupal community (maybe we're too busy exploring the beautiful drupal universe xD ).
I discovered drupal in 2003 when i was searching for an open source CMS to launch an esports community download it and tried to install it and you may have wondered i failed miserably (there was no interface installer back then) then found myself using mambo (which became joomla) which was more easy (and still) to install and configure then i released the Esmaghreb community in 2004 which became the biggest one in Africa (about 2000 members and 10 000 visitors per month) everything) then i realized that such a huge website and community needed more control over the content the users the code the template etc... More control over the website and that nor joomla nor mambo couldn't give i closed the website.
Searched again and tried tons of CMS the only one that catched my eyes was drupal that cms that i couldn't install years before thought i would be as simple as mambo and joomla but it wasn't and realized that the learning curve was too high but saw the results and big and beautiful websites made by the Drupal and began studying it and little by little felt in love with it and now can't imagine myslef doing a website or an intranet without it.
Now i'm sure i'm not the only that chose the simplicity over complexity cause it's human nature and people these days tends to be more lazy so when you say to them Drupal is the best cms you should try it the answer is generaly "i prefer wordpress it's better and there's a lot of beautiful themes for it" or "i prefer joomla it's easier to change design" Drupal is a great tool but it has learning curve and that what people don't want, for sure if i wanted to make a personal blog wordpress too would be and interesting option.
What google says :
"drupal" returned about 29,400,000
"joomla" returned about 117,000,000
"wordpress" returned about 278,000,000
but what google can't say and compare is the quality of the websites made by these 3 cms and in my humble opinion drupal would be on top (now there's some people that would say wordpress would surpass drupal i'll YES too > but 90% are blogs so...)
So i'm with you on the point that we need to promote Drupal in a better way and you suggestion is a good thing to start with
At last thanks to Dries and the drupal community for making my work (harder xD) fun.
Sorry if it's a bad english xD
/Kind Regards
Youness
Hi Youness, Thanks for your
Hi Youness,
Thanks for your reply.
In a way I think I was lucky to start using Drupal from v6.8. As you mention it was much more difficult to get starting with before and the learning curve was much steeper.
Unfortunately this is something that lives on for a long time in peoples minds, who once tried it and then decided on something else instead, and it takes quite a bit of work changing it.
As we know usability is much more prioritised now and from what I have read about Drupal 7 it will be one of the big things, such as a WYSIWYG editor in core and hopefully automated update/upgrade features.
In my "research" I believe the two most interesting parts was the number of hits using news.google.com, i.e. hits on media/press articles writing about Drupal and the Google Trends.
I do believe that if the Drupal Association could be more active in sending out press releases, such as the ones I suggest about big name people, companies and organisations using Drupal, with or without quotes from them, it will quickly have an impact on the number of journalistic articles writing about Drupal.
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/thomas
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@tsvenson
Better marketing for Drupal
First, Drupal is going to be less popular than consumer level CMSs. Wordpress is a personal publishing system and their target audience is 6 Billion people, and they've got about 5.5 Million hosted blogs at wordpress.com. They've also got a lot of downloads.
Joomla targets designers, that's everyone who knows HTML and CSS, and is primarily used by small businesses. Mambo started with a strong marketing team and those marketing efforts carried over to Joomla.
Drupal lends to more advanced websites, and web applications at much smaller but very active audience.
There has been a lot of press about Drupal, some of it through Acquia in 2008. The Drupal association released two press releases in 2008, one for Drupal 6, and one for winning best overall CMS in the Packt CMS awards.
We do have a marketing team but our strengths lie in grassroots marketing activities. See http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-marketing
Dries does quick blog posts about name brands using Drupal. I work on case studies for the front page of Drupal and we've done about 20 of them in the last year.
In the last 14 months there have been at least a dozen Drupal books. That was not accidental. That was because Dries was working with publishers to review proposals and encourage them to publish Drupal books.
As I noted before, we've spent more time in 2008 working on quality press and conversations with content management industry analysts. You'll see that there where Drupal was not in any analyst reports in 2006 or early 2007, Drupal is now mentioned in many if not most relevant analyst coverage.
The Drupal communities natural marketing strengths lie in our grassroots efforts. A good example is our blogging and twittering. See http://planet.drupal.org it's diverse relevant and on topic.
We also have almost 200 local groups doing meetings around the world at http://groups.drupal.org. We are on track to have over 20 Drupalcamps world wide and at least 2 major Drupalcons, not least of which is the sold out 1300 attendees at Drupalcon DC in a few weeks.
I worked hard to support a dozen different marketing positions in the Drupal association elections, the General Assembly elected 3 & 1/3 marketing reps including 2 to the board. We need more leadership in marketing in the Drupal community.
Cheers,
Kieran Lal
Drupal association director of business development
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Kieran Lal
Hi Kieran, Thanks you very
Hi Kieran,
Thanks you very much for your reply, it was very enlightening.
I know you guys work really hard on promoting Drupal. As I read your reply I felt it had a little angry tone, I hope I am wrong about that as it was never my intention to diss what you, and everyone else is doing. Rather I wanted to give a little input on my own experience and journey after becoming a member of this community a few months ago, as well as suggest a few ideas I think could be useful.
As I mentioned I have worked in the IT sector since the 80's, including the Internet. I have also owned and published my own magazines as well as worked as editor for a few others. Thus I also have experience from the journalistic side of the table. Added to that I also have several friends that are journalist, some within the IT media.
I would like to add a few lines about my own experience finding information about Drupal. In most cases it has been something I have stumbled upon from drupal.org, or when googling for some information. It is not very easy to find or navigate any of the official drupal.org sites (official, groups, planet and association). I have looked at the http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration11/homepage_notloggedin.html work for the redesign and I can't wait until it is live as it will improve things a lot and speed up finding the information needed.
If I may come with a few small suggestions:
Oki, now over to some comments to your reply.
In your reply you mention that the Drupal Association "released two press releases in 2008", How come they are not listed in the press section?
One of them was about Drupal 6, I guess it must be Drupal 6.0 as I couldn't find it. I believe it is important to send out a press release for every new minor release as well, but also about important contributed modules that are being made production ready, etc, for, in this case Drupal 6.
I did find http://groups.drupal.org/node/7550 about the monthly newsletter which I think is a really good idea. The posts though are more than a year old and it doesn't seem to have happened very much. Maybe this is something I can help with later on when I get more experience about Drupal, and also a little bit more free time I can spend on it.
You mention 20 case studies on the front page. It took me a bit to find. First I clicked About Drupal, then Caste Studies at the bottom. At that page I got a list of direct links to sites using Drupal, which is good but not what I was looking for. At the bottom there where more links to more pages, but in total I found very few case studies...
Then I scrolled down the frontpage and found the one about Trinidad Guardian A very well done case study I must say, nice work. I then click on the Drupal showcase tag and came to a forum with loads of posts and it was quite difficult to find other case studies.
Unfortunately my conclusion is that the organisation of these case studies is not very good. Some are in a book and some are in a forum where they are getting lost among all other posts in there.
This is very unfortunate as this is gold material that deserves to be easily found by anyone, especially as it is third party endorsements. For each one Drupal Association should also send out a short press release with a link to the page containing the full case study. Preferable it could also be downloaded as a well designed PDF.
Getting so many books published about Drupal is a fantastic achievement and I applaud Dries for the hard work he has put in making that happen. I think this is only the beginning and we will see a lot more book coming out soon.
As you mention "The Drupal communities natural marketing strengths lie in our grass roots efforts.", which is fantastic. I am a strong believer in organic growth and Drupal is a very good example on exactly that.
This, however, doesn't mean there is no room for traditional PR and improvements. Your post made me aware of all the hard work you have put in to create these case studies and other things. What makes me a little disappointed though is that it is so hard to find it. I believe it would not be a very big task to organise all your material into something that is much more easy to find and dig into. I have given a few suggestions above. That and the fantastic grass root work being done would only lead to something even better for the Drupal community.
Even though I am quite new to Drupal, I would like to offer my assistance in this as I feel this is an area where I can help most until I gain much more experience with Drupal. It would of course also be a great way for me to get to know you all and give something back.
Please point me in the right direction, groups, etc. where I best can help with this. For the next month or so I wont be able to commit to anything as I am involved in a few big projects, but after that I will be able to put aside some time.
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@tsvenson
You got it when it comes to
You got it when it comes to the cases they're hard to find when i was a beginner i had so much difficulties to find them i used to search on google "drupal websites" or "drupal showcase" etc... and that's not the best way to attract more people especially beginners anyway that was the past now looking forward you can see in in http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration11/homepage_notloggedin.html the new website will be user friendly (it will attract a lot of poeple) the new visitor's eye will for sure be catched by "Things we made with Drupal" with the screenshot of the MTV website and that's a good and important addition then when you click http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration11/about.html you can see "Who's using Drupal" naming big companies and famous brands using drupal i just hope they will add a little button next to it linking to the case study listing but in general that's really a beautiful useful(easy to navigate and fun find the information) i'm really impatient to see it live and i'm sure sure 200% that the drupal community will grow faster with it.