Front page promotion request

Sure. Actualy, if we did it later than we did, we would have chosen Drupal 6. We started building this 16 months ago, and a number of modules were not available for Drupal 6. The story is very different now, and the problem is actually the reverse, offering a strong incentive to build on Drupal 6. I will add this comment to the story.

Thanks.

I believe that the choice of Drupal 5 over Drupal 6 was made at a moment in time aeons ago when it made sense. It is incidental to the scale and import of the project, and we have a roadmap to upgrade all the way thru 6 to 7 when we can.

I will edit the case study to include which modules were modified and to what extent, though I believe over the development cycle, we have discarded such customisations and have moved more and more towards out of the box implementations of the modules.

Please do review the post now and provide your opinion.

Thanks
Srini

I am happy to submit to any positive suggestions from yourself and the rest of the team. Many thanks for your support.

Best
Srini

All,

Thanks for the constructive feedback. Will work on these points and update the group.

Thanks
Srini

Apologies, We had a rather brutal hacker attack, and we also had hardware failure. Fortunately, the site was up through all of it, and this is largely due to the cluster approach. We have been distracted over the last month due to these issues. We will now be upgrading to the latest version of 5.x and I'll return to this request and update the group that the issues have been fixed.

Thanks
Srini

also, I am tempted to abandon the original write up and just do a fresh one with the inputs you have all provided. Is it OK if I just did that?

Thanks
Srini

@Heine, this had nothing to do with the one vulnerability that you refer to as 'quality issues' , which,as you kindly pointed out, is rather easy to fix, by upgrading to the latest 5.x version. This hacker attack was not application related, but targeted at our servers for a denial of service and brute force attack. A lot of this was handled by our firewall. We spent time investigating the source, and had it stemmed at source. In order to do that, we did let it run for a few days, while the sys admins waded through the IP masking and other defences the hacker was hiding behind.

The hack attack followed shortly after our press release, and indeed, we think it was triggered by the press release. While we narrowed this down to the offending server and had their ISP turn it off, we were unable to pin down the actual individuals behind it. We did experience some amount of pride that someone thought us a sufficient enough threat in the cashback and price comparison marketplace to launch a DOS attack.

Meanwhile, I am having some difficulty understanding the motivations for the Drupal Showcase. I am not a coder/programmer. I am an entrepreneur who has invested his own money into building a business proposition. I did not build the website to make it the best Drupal website ever. I did not build it as the best designed website ever. I did, however build it as the first price comparison and cashback website independent of an ad network (Bing is part of Microsoft's ad network). It will soon offer coupons as well (so do i invest in upgrading to Drupal 6 or in strengthening my customer offering? I choose the latter when resources are tight because I am interested in the business result and Drupal is a way to get there). I did build it as the largest Drupal site to launch. Did I intend to? No. It was not my objective. My objective was to find a business opportunity and use Drupal as a tool to address it.

In that sense, I am not sure if the Drupal Showcase is the right place for PepperVillage to be talked about. Looking at the other write-ups in the space, I see that the focus is around visual or technical design, and seldom has a good business proposition been showcased there. The prettier websites do get a lot more discussion. Do they get more business? Impossible to tell by the buzz created in the showcase. The indicators for making it to the front page as well as the reactions of the audience do not seem to be connected to a cold hard evaluation of the business proposition and the way it is supported in the execution by Drupal. Are the Drupalers missing a trick here by being fascinated with the business tool rather than the business result?

Or have I misunderstood the motivations to showcase. There must be a story in how someone with a solid business idea put their money where their mouth is by choosing Drupal. Or maybe the audience is techy, and we shouldn't really use this as a forum for showcasing business ideas and entrepreneurship executed through Drupal. I don't know.

For us to really know how the Drupal community can benefit from the showcase, there needs to be an understanding of who that showcase talks to. I thought the audience was twofold - one, consisting of people like yourselves, who keep this fabulous community and product ticking; two, consisting of people who are interesting in finding out how they can use Drupal. The latter - is it the technologist who builds sites, or the entrepreneur or business person who pays for them? And to understand that, there needs to be an understanding of the decision - who decides on Drupal as a platform? The technologist or the bill payer? In our case, it was me, the bill payer. Others will differ, and you need to decide if the showcase needs to talk to all, or the dominant decision maker. Who is Drupal's customer?

Whoever you choose to speak to through the showcase, please remember that at the end of the day, there's someone non techy who pays for it all, and there has to be a section on Drupal.org that appeals to them and gets their juices flowing about the hugely active community and the many ways businesses have benefited from using it. Maybe it isn't the Showcase. Maybe it is something else. Any alternative to Drupal that is not free will launch an appeal to the business decision maker equally while talking to the technologist. Just because Drupal is free shouldn't mean it talks only to the technologist and miss the trick on why it is a great business proposition as well. These are my 2 cents that I learnt from my MBA and business experience. I can also see this is the missing link that makes Acquia different from Drupal.org. They talk business and D.o talks techese. The front page of Drupal.org would look very different if the site was trying to sell Drupal to a non-believer.

Given these thoughts I'm having, and my inability to understand the audience on the Showcase, I am beginning to think we shouldn't look at promoting PepperVillage.com to the front page. This confusion about the target audience in my head accounts for my inability to write a relevant article that resonates with you, the team here. Also, the site most likely doesn't meet the high standards for visual design that is often the case with the frontpagers. I am open to advice from the moderators on whether there is any angle that can make it interesting to the audience of this forum, as no doubt, you understand the audience here better than I do, but until then, I don't see myself renewing my request to get this on the front page. In the meantime, I am greatly indebted to all of you for your suggestions on making the site better and more secure.

I hope you're looking at this note as an attempt to help. I am happy to work with anyone on D.o to start looking at a section that addresses the business sense behind choosing drupal. Something like IBM's line that they once used "no one gets fired for choosing IBM". I do have, as I said, an MBA, and a background in building successful online businesses (see timesofmoney.com/remit2india.com from an earlier life - I was the business manager), and if that is a skill I can donate to Drupal (since I can't write code), I am happy to do so.

Changing the status to needs review, as there are points in my note I'd like the team to look at. Forget about the original request to promote this to the front page.

Thanks
Srini

Sorry, I wanted to check the communication objectives around the showcase. I believe Drupal.org is missing out on a large audience by speaking only to the geeks. That's all I wanted to say. If there is any motivation to build a section that speaks to business decision makers, I am happy to work on it for the community. Should I open another ticket somewhere to get discussion going on that? How can we start looking at that?

In that context, I believe peppervillage.com has a better story for the business decision maker than the pure drupal enthusiast, and doesn't fit into the showcase.

Cheers
Srini