After listening to the Brussels Drupalcon podcast I thought it would be good to post a general write up on the state of support on Drupal.org and what new people or people not really involved can do to help out. A lot of this is unscientific and opinion based.
Drupal has experienced phenomenal growth over the years. This is not new. I am user id 5195 and started 3 years ago. As I post this we have more then 80,000 registered accounts and a growing list of involved companies selling Drupal services. Maybe someone (mythical someone) could do a date, user registration graph to see the current curve. Past graphs showed this.
Over the years many people have joined in (or were already helping) and provided support and answers to a large number of people. Some posts have gone unanswered. My feeling on this is the numbers have gone up but the overall percentage of unanswered posts have gone down. Numbers because we've got over 80,0000 registered users and not all that many folks answering questions in the forums. A lot of unanswered posts are multiple from the same person. A person asking a question, not liking the answer and posting it again. Or someone posting an unclear question and it not getting answered. Or the few who would know that are on holiday and missed it. It happens.
We need to try and emphasize the Drupal mission and principles more in response when some new person comes in all fired up to start a fight rather then get involved and help out.
So, the summary first..... All in all, not bad. Could be better. Could be worse. We still need more people returning the help they have received from others to the next generation of Drupal users. As Drupal core and contrib have continued to evolve into the next generation and our exposure to the rest of the world continues to grow, we gain whole new classes of users, developers and implementers. Read on for some ideas on how to help out and contribute back to the project that gave this great tool-set/CMS.
Now onto some realities and how you can help out.
- This is Open Source software. No one is responsible for providing free support to you and there are no guarantees to support unless you contract with an individual or company.
- People provide support here for a variety of reasons, often they are complex. They are not obligated. There is no mythical 'they’ and no mythical 'someone should'. There is only all of us, you and me.
- If you are not providing some form of support on Drupal.org in return for this free software and free assistance, then how can you expect others to provide free support to you?
- If you have successfully installed Drupal, then you know more than someone and can help.
- It can take three weeks to three months to really begin to get a handle on using and developing Drupal. This tends to hold true across a variety of skill levels depending on skill set and goal. Plan your time to deployment accordingly. What Drupal allows you to do and accomplish is not simple, expect to invest some time to learn it as it does prove worth it.
Leveraging resources
Three years ago I decided my contribution would be answering basic questions (fortunately others have decided this too). This evolved into teaching and encouraging others how to support and working with people to improve the documentation and directing people to pages and resources they may not be aware of. Many other technical forums contain and maintain their documentation and FAQ's in their forums. Drupal.org does not do this, instead choosing to maintain long term information in the handbook, and a lot of folks either don't know to, or never, look in the handbook for answers.
The handbook is large. Over 1400 pages. The handbook re-org in January this year was effective in that it organized a lot of the information in an easier to find format. The php snippets and the phptemplate theme snippets have been added and have grown through contributions by our members and inspired other specialized sections with bits and pieces of complex tools. This resulted in a change in the type of questions being asked in the forums as the question became more sophisticated and complex. The Troubleshooting FAQ has been added to which also helps significantly with repetitive issues. Over this last year we have added videocasts from a lot of nice folks as these things take time to do right. More hosted centrally off Drupal.org would be nice.
One thing we lack is 'So Drupal is installed now what?' tutorials. People keep demanding them form the mythical 'someone should' and others keep promising them and telling the community 'they'll show us' and disappear to never return. So if anyone really wants to make a name for themselves they can put together some 'now what' tutorials. There is even a starting point thread that outlines a lot of stuff, just need to pretty it up and walk through all the steps from, Drupal is successfully installed here's step 1. I certainly haven't had the time to do them so anyone else picking them up would be great.
How to help and why
People contribute for a variety of reasons. Today we have more people then ever providing support in the forums and helping out with the occasional handbook page. We still don't have enough but it's not all doom and gloom.
Altruism, enlightened self-interest, community involvement. All of these come into play. Altruism because it's a 'right thing to do'. Enlightened self-interest' because as mentioned on the web-cast helping people in the forums, providing support and code to contrib module maintainers for modules you use and interacting with the community gets you noticed by people who are over worked. High profile people who are looking for someone to direct work they can't take often do so to people who are involved and active in the community.
Other ideas that came out of the webcast...
Pay it forward
- Companies can budget some support time as a way to contribute back to the community that gave you this great free software. benefits you because you are tapped into whats going on and folks are more likely to help those they recognize…. Hour a day/ Friday morning a week, etc. Be creative. Get your folks in the habit of helping build the next generation of support folks who will turn into the module developers you can hire later. It's a good way to help build your reputation and find those whom you may hire.
- If you are not doing support, then how can you expect others to? People are more likely to spend additional time assisting those they know are helping others so it benefits you to help others with no expectation of help in return.
- Anyone can answer a question that they know the answer to. Someone is newer then you or less experienced then you
- Learn to use and reference resources on Drupal.org. The support tab, the contribute tab and the handbooks all have a wealth of resources and sometimes it can help others to show them how to use them as well as answer their questions. A little more time up front is less time later. If you answered a question more then twice and there isn't a handbook page, then the third time add such a page and link to it instead.
IRC
IRC support is an interesting point. #drupal-support and #drupal-themes have been listed in the support tab for a year yet so many never click the link. There are a lot of opinions about IRC support. Drupal is a community platform. People in a community strive to communicate. #drupal is the original channel and is for code development on Drupal not support questions, it is active and the root channel. #drupal-support has a limited number of volunteers supporting people in it. That's all right as it's conversations are transitory and not the best venue for long term storage of help and assistance but it can still be used effectively. Here's how;
- Like with forums, answer questions with links to handbook resources.
- If you have no links and have answered the question more then twice, write a handbook page so others can answer for you. Fifteen pages I wrote originated this way as well as updating others.
- No one is there to help! Really? Well are you there helping people for free? No? Hmmm....... Free, live support is a gift, please treat those who offer it and the time they grant you as such.
- If you are hanging out there and bored tag team on forum questions or docs. You can also learn a lot just auditing the channel.
What can you do?
Aspiring Drupal Ninja.
- If you've installed Drupal, you know know more then someone else.
- Support gets you noticed over time.
- documentation saves you and someone else from repeatedly answering the same questions.
- other support folks tend to respond more to those that they see helping others and are more likely to take the time to invest more in the support
- those to busy to take work or recognized get asked for who they should hire or give work to.
- Easy contributions: Write documentation for contributed modules you use that don't have a page. It's easy but we have hundreds of modules and so few handbook contributors.
We are resource constrained here on Drupal.org. There are more good ideas then real people or resources to implement them. So we try to make the most effective use of our resources as possible.
It is each of our responsibilities to train those that come after us as those who came before have helped us. The responsibility is a distributed one. It's the only way this community will scale. So when someone says "why don't you do x", it's not because it's not a good idea, it's often there is no one to do x and maintain it or it's been tried and not worked well. So if you want to do x, then step up and get a team to work on it.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the code, UI, forums support, documentation, evangelism and so forth. Without the code we'd have nothing to build on, without the community we'd not have such great code.
I leave you all with this last note. I am expecting the birth of my daughter in January. This means I will have less time to allocate so let's hope someone will step up and help cover my work in the forum. I will be trying to focus more and more on documentation in preparation for 5.0 as ultimatly that helps more people.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Community plumbing - Drupal is a plumbing tool as in plumbing the depths to learn and there are a lot of depths to be mined. (I just like that quote from the podcast)
Comments
Contributing to Drupal
Steven,
I have been skirting at the edges of Drupal for some time now (user 21548 - 18 months) and have often thought, what do I have to offer, I can read PHP but can't code PHP.
I believe in open source, in fact my own company is almost ALL open source (except for Windows laptops).
I have a great deal of experience in sales, marketing, etc... I can help!!!
I will help by documenting modules!!!!
Perhaps you might consider placing a new link on module project pages to "Document this module", where there is no documentation present...
Thanks... You have motivated me to do more...
I will also ask my software guys to spend 1-2 hours per week contributing to open source...
Russ
---
Russ @ Maintenance Essentials
---
Russ @ Firewize
Servus, Steven. Firstly, all
Servus, Steven.
Firstly, all the fun with the baby. I know what it is like but nothing beats that crying, shitting, vommiting, sleep depriving, and time consuming extension to life, not even a community of 80k people.
To make supporting somewhat easier, it'd be great to have an item like "unanswered posts" like there are recent posts. The amount of posts to skim for unanswered questions is simply overwhelming, hence some aid from the system would be welcome.
Thanks for your ongoing support,
Norbert
-- form follows function
Norbert
-- form follows function
Unanswered posts block
An 'unanswered posts' link in the contributors block here on drupal.org would be a great help in supporting others.
At present I tend to skim the recent forum posts block for things to answer.
--
Ixis (UK) providing Drupal consultancy and Drupal theme design.
--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.
use views
for folks who want an 'unanswered posts' page on their own site, i recommend using views.module. just do a filter for type=forum and comment_count=0. i have done this on one of my client sites ... drupal.org does not run views right now, so is a bit harder to deploy here.
Yeah views would make it
Yeah views would make it real easy. Maybe one day Drupal.org will accept it........ :)
--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.
Rather then a block
I've been thinking of a support resources page with a link to such information on a page. Rather then a global 'all' unanswered, make it a per forum check, last 30 days or such. We'll see what we can get implemented.
Just a matter of time to dicsuss such with all the con's and such going on and Drupal 5.0 freeze taking up everyone's time :D
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
"answered / unanswered" option with posts
Better yet, it would be nice to have an "answered/unanswered", "solved/unsolved", etc, option with posts, so it's easy to filter out posts needing attention. Answered posts aren't always solved.
Good idea
It would be a great idea to allow the original poster of the thread the posibility to close the thread and mark it as solved. It might be a good idea to give these 'solved' threads a higher rating in the search engine too. This will make it easier for users to search for answers in the right spot.
Also, as sepeck mentioned, there are quite a few cases of questions being asked multiple times, not always by the same user though. People should be encouraged to use the search function and check the handbooks before starting a post, and/or perhaps check IRC first.
Drupal Page Rank
Lots of questions are asked multiple times and often people get directed to a thread with answers. Ultimately, the Drupal.org search engine should promote the "linked to" posts in the results. Kind-of Google style.. Makes me think of a drupal-page-rank module..
Enhance search results
Wait! Can't the Drupal foundation make a plea for Google to donate a Google Mini (or rather Maxi ;) ?
already done
drupal search already uses links for scoring as you suggest.
I've asked a lot of
I've asked a lot of questions on the forums. I feel I've given back by:
answering questions posed by other folks
filing bug reports
suggesting new features on modules
subscribing to feeds on certain Drupal topics
What I've noticed is that I don't provide support through the forums unless:
the subject of a forum post jumps at me off the "new forum posts" on the Drupal homepage, or
I happen to find a question through random searches.
I just get lost in the forums sometimes. I’ve seen module specific questions posed in the forums that have no replies to it. I think, “Hmm…I wonder if anyone saw this question.” And then I think, “Hmm…I wonder if anyone capable of answering this question will find this question.” And then I think, “Even if someone DID answer the question, will the original poster ever realize that someone DID answer the question.”
In my mind, you’ve really got to follow a certain pipeline or the support chain breaks. In some cases, the planets have to be aligned for support to work.
I wish there was a more convenient way to post questions on a "per module" basis. Some of the questions I have about modules aren't bugs and they aren't feature requests so I don't feel right creating an "issue" for a module. I wish there were a "forum" for each module. If there were, I would periodically check that module's forum to be able to provide support. This would also allow me to go directly to a module’s forum and post a question that would be pointed to a specific audience of supporters of that module.
Those with experience with a certain module could periodically check THAT SPECIFIC forum in an attempt to offer support.
Those asking questions could go right to that forum, look and see if they question has already been asked or post a question seeking help.
Then, the person posting a question could easily monitor THAT MODULE's support. They wouldn't have to wade through the hundreds (guess) of other support questions per day.
I've often thought something similar would be good for the themes.
I am interested in helping others. I've come A LONG WAY in the last few years. Others are making the same journey I did and I certainly want to help out. Currently, I only casually provide support.
I am thankful for this support community. I am excited to see Drupal growing.
Nice article Steven.
New Issue based on this
Just to let you know, I've submitted a feature request to the Project module based on your suggestion. Obviously, I think it's a good idea.
Now I just hope I sent it to the right place....
FYI
Just a quick note in response to above...
For each module, instead of 'bug report' and 'feature request' there is also 'support request' the proper place to put such things so that you can track things to specific modules. Do you think this needs to be highlighted more so people can find it.
Also, if you post issues or forums, you have a link to 'recent posts' - and then a tab to 'my recent posts' so you never lose track of your forum threads..
I say this not in defense of the supprt system, bu just letting you know as I have had your problems till I found these links (which can be obscure if you don't know to look for them)
Sam Tresler
http://www.treslerdesigns.com
Experts Exchange
I understand the problems that the explosive growth of Drupal brings, but I do not think that Steven Sepecks cure will bring much more than disappointment. I have read some of his reactions to other peoples complaints and those are irritated and of the kind: do not ask what your country does for you, but ask yourself what you can do for your country. Very understandable in view of the time Steven no doubt spends on Drupal, but again: not leading to a solution. Some people want to use Drupal to service their own community, that already takes enough of their time and dedication Steven, the way you enlist them as volunteers for the Drupal community will chase a lot of them away.
When I have computer related questions I always go to Experts Exchange ( http://www.experts-exchange.com/ ). It costs me 10 dollars a month (you can cancel after a month) and I can pose any question I like and get immediate and relevant response ( even for Drupal, though sofar they have only answered 77 questions). I am not so much advertising for EE here ( though certainly not advising against), but I think that EE has certain ingredients that Drupal support could copy: let Drupal users pay a small amount to get a question answered, let Drupal users decide whether problem X is really solved, reward the support engineers either with points so that they can bragg about their position in the charts ( with later possible commercial spinoff) or with plain money. I am convinced that works much better than anoth call for someones community spirit.
I don't know about the format, but...
Its not a bad idea.
A) Raise revenue for drupal.org,
B) provide a viable support option for people willing to donte a little something,
C) Model does eist in Open-Source community - Linux Support for Redhat, etc.
Id on't think anyone shoud necessarily be paid for providing that support, but as a forums contributor I would be very inclined to increase my efforts if I knew that every time I helped I was aiding in getting a donation for drupal.org....
I just point out that this might be worthy of discussion as an option for helping the supprt options in drupal scale with the bigger project itself.
Sam Tresler
http://www.treslerdesigns.com
-------------------------------------
"A list of common problems and their solutions can be found in the Troubleshooting FAQ."
...
I am unsure how to respond without garnering further criticism from you but shall try.
Drupal is Open Source GPL software which means it's free. It's growth and development has been due to community contributions. This has come from;
This is all traditional Open Source stuff. If you use the free stuff that allows you to save time and effort, it is often hoped that you will contribute back in some way. This can be code, support, documentation, financial, etc and so on. You of course are free to not do this as well. You are free to ask for help and never return the favor.
You can go to places like experts exchange and pay someone. You can contract with a support company or developer to assist you. I do believe I mentioned this in my post. You can ignore the community and not contribute help and assistance to others. That too is part of the risk of allowing others to freely download and use the software. That is OK too. There is a cost to that attitude and that cost is less support for those who may help improve Drupal. Less willing support for you when people are short on time. Less people who contribute to building and improving and working on a product that you rely on to save you time and money.
At this point I am interested in trying to help extend the community, not in building out a for pay support infrastructure. I am tyring to educate people on how to contribute easily and without needing to be a developer. How to begin to give back to the community if they are unsure how to help. Trying to make it easier to contribute is one of the things I try and do around here. I don't always succeed but for the most part find my contributions rewarding.
If someone is complaining and demanding something from others and no one is answering them, then I will will let them know of ways they can do it for themselves. Ways that they can lead the effort and coordinate others. This often gets me criticized and sometimes attacked. Sometimes I can only try and help and provide tools, links and resources for them to do for themselves as I don't know the answer or the answers given are not to the liking of someone.
Already in this thread several responded positively. In IRC I received other positive responses. Above, nofue had a positive idea that I have been thinking about as well and we should be able to get something up in the next few weeks.
How many other people read this and decided to contribute back? I have no idea but without trying to provide new people with a starting point of how to help effectively then we have little hope.
I invite you to continue to build our Community and to listen to the podcast I did that inspired this post. These were not all my ideas alone nor unique to our community but the ideas of several people in the community.
I will leave you with this. You choose how you interact with the community and how the community will interact with you. Based on that you determine your path forward. That too is a freedom of using GPL software.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Unanswered posts
People respond to their own posts, once they've taught themselves. Not sure of the numbers, but it happens more than sporadically.
Furthermore, it has been mentioned in varying degrees of tactful language that the Drupal website does not rank very high in conduciveness to self-learning. Asking questions, rather than searching and navigating, may sometimes just seem the least cumbersome option.
figaro
I Agree
I agree this is a very common happening, personally if I ever post a question and then, as most often happens, discover the answer myself later I will more often than not reply to my own post with my later discoveries.
I do this because I find it frustrating that when searching for the answer to a particular question I will come across maybe dozens of identical questions or requests for the same information where it's likely the questioner has since worked out what to do but since the thread ends on questions you are still in the dark.
I'm not sure how best you would handle this situation but ideally you would want threads in the forums to begin with a question and end with an answer, maybe this could take the form of the marking a post as being specifically a question or an answer which would then generate an e-mail or an alert to the original questioner to post the answer they arrived at or keep the thread open in search of the correct answer.
Speaking for myself I visit the forums when I'm looking for the answer to something and if in the course of that search I come across posts which I can help out with then I will but I don't often the have the time of motivation to trawl through the forums or documentation specifically to provide guidance to other people. I think one of the reasons for this is that even in the sub forums e.g. module development, or theming the posts in them are on such a wide range of topics you cannot immediately see any areas in which you may be able to offer advice, partly this is down to people using unhelpful subjects for their posts ( although until you know the answer to the question you're asking it's highly likely you may have misunderstood the question ) but I think some method of categorizing requests for help in a more granular method might be useful.
Very helpful people / forum organisation
Hi
I tried drupal the first time seven months ago, and I am back now after a break of about three months. People always have been very helpful to my questions, I got often amazing fast an answer and I understand well that not all questions can be answered. In order to give something back I started a user manual, where I document all things I do to build my site. When I am finished with my site, I will contribute this manual, hoping it will help other beginners to build their first site.
From my experience as a new user to drupal I can say that the main pain is searching for information in the forum, since it is very time consuming. I am aware that searching always needs time, but why could we not split up the "post installation" forum (over 20'000 posts now) into some subforums, for example "user rights", "node relations", "image handling", "theming" etc. Also it would be nice to have for each of these topics one anchor-node, where all modules are listed, which deal with it. In the "image handling" anchor-node we would have therefore all modules which have something to do with image upload, image attaching, galleries etc. This anchor-node is regurarely updated and new users have therefore a convenient start to make their evaluations. And if additionally the search function would have the possibility to sort results by last published date, this would improve searching a lot, since often information just half a year ago is no more of interest.
I made a suggestion about forum organisation a few months ago here http://drupal.org/node/54816 and other users (with a lot experience in online communities) came with more ideas and offered their help in doing this.
Especially for new users an easy way to find information is important, it would be nice when some improvements could be done on that.
Beside this, I am very pleased about drupal and it is more fun the more I work with it.
André
drupal.org(anization)
I agree fully with André... I feel like the kid who asked about the flowers and the bees and got Encyclopedia Britannica for his birthday. Help yourself!
homepage and website of the gay swiss
writer martin frank
Organising the forums would
Organising the forums would seem to offer great value for not too much effort, there's lots of information in there but it's very hard to get at - and doesn't really demonstrate Drupal's strengths.. how about making use of taxonomy / categories to tag posts to make it easier to find things?
The other problem with the forums is that increasing numbers of answers aren't 'right' any more as they're 4.6 answers (which is likely to get worse as 5 comes out).. and I agree there is huge confusion and overlap between the Project Support Issues and Forums.
It would also be nice to be able to subscribe to threads without having to put 'me too' posts on them which just up the noise to signal ratio! I currently run a text file with 45 threads I'm 'watching' as I can't seem to work out how to watch them 'properly'
coreb made this feature
coreb made this feature request the other day: http://drupal.org/node/87052
It is called: Allow Project taxonomy terms in forums
Building a Drupal support community
I have been thinking a lot about this post, and I hope I have something to contribute.
I have posted a summary of my thoughts on my blog for further consideration, I hope this promotes discussion and activity.
Building a Drupal support community
Russ
---
Russ @ Firewize
Thanks Drupal -- I'll Help Any Way I Can
I started on my first Drupal site less than 8 weeks ago. I'd heard about Drupal on a podcast and finally came up with a project that was right for it. That site's pretty much done now and I'll soon roll it out to the public. My thoughts about Drupal:
It's fantastic. I love it.
The learning curve is a bit steep, but I've tried to help out where I can. I've answered all that questions that I could answer on the forums. Today, I submitted my first bit of code to fix a bug. (A very, very little bit of code...)
Going forward, I'll help the Drupal project any way I can. I run a PR agency in the U.S., so if my experience is helpful to the project, just let me know.
Good points mentioned
I know about the hassle searching Drupal.org for the right answer, I maintain a large and ever growing set of bookmarks-to-useful-pages, it's already a forum in itself*. Learning to search and sort information on Drupal.org is an art in itself, I sometimes just use google with site:drupal.org.
I regularly 'track' the threads I've contributed to through my profile (my questions and my occasional answers to someone's questions).
I'd love to see module-specific fora, seems like a really quick-win to make.
One suggestion: it happens that a question gets unanswered. That's a pity but can't be helped. It would be nice to display a 'number of views' column next to it, to show if someone actually bothered to look at the question.
* about those bookmarks: serendipity rules! I often find interesting pages in the handbook or forum when I'm searching for other stuff. Hit ctrl-D!!! I've wasted so much time searching for a page I'd seen when I didn't need it and couldn't find again when I did... ;-)
...
This would mean well over 400 additional forums. From an administrative point of view it would be a nightmare. From a performance point of view I'm not sure anyone has tested over 400 forums.
From a searching for information point of view I suspect it would also be unwieldy. Many modules are designed to work in concert or provide an api for other modules to leverage their code. As more modules become further inter-related and connected it makes module specific forums even more unweildy to maintain and search through.
Content tagging seems a better idea. Content tagging with links through project module seems an even better direction. Project module is in for some development time right now so people can help get it kick started.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Reply and more free thinking
-- whilst typing this: sepeck, I really appreciate you starting this thread. Please see my post as mere suggestions and philosophies; whenever there's an idea or a questionmark don't feel obliged to answer, or do anything with it at all frankly. ;-) --
Oops yeah, you're right. I was only thinking of CCK and similar, 'large', modules. I'm sure not every module will benefit from having it's own subforum, but for 'CCK', 'blog', 'forum', etc. there might still be merit in it. The suggestion by andre_ of general thematic subfora:
seems sensible to me aswell. Drawing the lines will be arbitrary, but that comes with a forum.
Content tagging is so incredibly obvious, this being Drupal, that of course I support it. How to implement is a different question, do we allow for free format or do we provide a (possibly very large) limited list? (Drawing the lines will be arbitrary, but that comes with
a forumcategorization.) Do take a look at LinuxQuestions.org, an excellent forum for all questions relating to Linux (and more). They have content tagging... except hardly anyone uses it. Make content tagging mandatory? Even for newbies who sometimes don't really understand what they're asking?As far as contributing: I'm a n00b myself and don't have much to offer when it's about coding, documenting or explaining. The stuff I do know I don't mind sharing with anyone newer than me, I'll make more effort of answering questions. I'll provide my theme if I ever finish it. If the forum is looking for moderators, I'd love to help out. And (surprise, surprise) I have 2 more suggestions:
- I'm a member of a forum which has a 'thanks' button under every post. It's a bit of javascript that adds your name underneath that post and shows up on a list in the (personal) profile of the person who's post you just thanked, aswell as in a counter with his/her nick. It can mean anything from "I really appreciate it" to "I've read your post". It can be an incentive for people to be more active for the community.
- About the Drupal learning curve: maybe we can split the forum in 2: the first part is for everyone, the second part 'unlocks' after, say, 2 weeks of registration. Plenty of caveats here but perhaps it's a way to split the "I'm new here"-questions from the "I know what I don't understand"-questions, making it more interesting for different types of people to answer questions.
Subforums for (some?) modules
I think having subforums (either using the forum module or building on top of tagging) is a great idea. Having subforums for only some of the modules which generate a lot of questions may be a good compromise. Currently, each module page provides a link to the Post Installation Forum. I think they may be customized to point to the subforum for the module or can fill a category automatically. Another idea may be allowing some of the users who have some experience and prove themselves by answering questions on the forum to categorize forum posts. So if the original post doesn't have an appropriate tag, they may be added later by more experienced ones.
Seems to me that....
We already have some convenient sub-forum topicspre-defined. When I nvigate from Drupal.org's front page to Downloads->Modules : Browse by category tab, I get the following categories to filter things by:
* 3rd party integration (44)
* Administration (45)
* Categories (11)
* Commerce / advertising (15)
* Community (30)
* Content (68)
* Content display (64)
* Developer (17)
* Evaluation/rating (19)
* Event (9)
* File management (9)
* Filters/editors (36)
* Import/export (7)
* Location (6)
* Mail (21)
* Media (25)
* Paging (5)
* Security (12)
* Syndication (12)
* Taxonomy (23)
* Term (7)
* Theme related (14)
* User access/authentication (19)
* User management (10)
* Utility (58)
Not really avocating this as an option - but it does seem this organization exists eleswhere on Drupal.org.
Sam Tresler
http://www.treslerdesigns.com
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"A list of common problems and their solutions can be found in the Troubleshooting FAQ."
Double Posting
One of the things I find consistently happening is people posting two or three times with the same exat questions in hope of garnering attention to their question. I write because I just dealt with it again. What is the proper way to deal with this.
Till now I have been linking between the two posts in the hopes that someone confronted with the same problem can find the other post that answers the same question through a different thread. This is combersome, inefficient, and frankly a pain in the A..... Neck.
With shortage of people already I don't see anyone steping up with any 'This was Just Posted 2 minutes ago' functionality. Is there a proper way to deal with this behaivior. Am I being rude here?:
http://drupal.org/node/87637#comment-160404
Thoughts?
Sam Tresler
http://www.treslerdesigns.com
-------------------------------------
"A list of common problems and their solutions can be found in the Troubleshooting FAQ."
Double posts
If I see the exact same post twice, I just delete one of them. I always figured it was an error, not a way to get more attention.
Michelle
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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com
The same post with two different titles?
The same post with two different titles, phrased slightly differently? Maybe they thought the first one didn't post and rewrote it? You never know. But how do you delete someone else's posts? Also, I've normally found it after both posts have valuable information in their comments....
Sam Tresler
http://www.treslerdesigns.com
-------------------------------------
"A list of common problems and their solutions can be found in the Troubleshooting FAQ."
Same titles
The ones I'm talking to have the same titles, which is why I generally notice them. If one has comments and not the other, I'll delete the one without. If both have comments, I leave them alone because there's no way to move the comments over.
If you find posts like that, probably the best thing is to leave a linking comment so people can find all the information.
Michelle
--------------------------------------
My site: http://shellmultimedia.com
Explosive growth = steeper learning curve. How to reduce it?
In the last 18 months, since I've started to use Drupal, I've seen it growing explosively. This is good news, but also bad news: the learning curve become steeper and steeper, and sometime I'm afraid Drupal will become the victim of it's own succeess. There are so many modules needed to in order to build a real application! One of the main difficulties is finding what all those new modules do, and how to use them effectively.
There are hundreds of modules, and it has become very demaning to track them all the time. And that's even before we write code! Becuse if we aim for re-use, understanding each other's modules and contributing to them is the first step to writing your own. We need more integrated modules!
What can we do? We must ever strive to reduce the learning curve. More features are great. More support is great. But reducing the learning curve is the Key Success Factor.
How to do it?
- Drupal distributions is one solution, but they take a long time to build, and no distribution fits all.
- The next step in maintaining growth is automatic installation profiles and wizards - which should be part of Drupal 5.0 (I hope so - but I am not aware of the current status). This is a great step in reducing the the learning curve.
Amnon
-
Personal: Bring Dolphin's Simple Joy to your Work - Job - Career
Professional: Drupal Hebrew Consulting
Plumbing for non-plumbers?
I've graduated from a Drupal (and PHP) newbie six months ago, to one who has installed and configured nearly a dozen Drupal-based sites, and creating a new classified ads module for one of them (on goatseeker.com).
My background is that of a longtime (25+ years!) software developer - one who has little fear of the unknown, and takes on new challenges with a relish (some might call it zeal). (Fools rush in where angels fear to tread - and I'm no angel!)
I've experienced some frustration with installing and configuring Drupal - I have never complained about the occasional lack of support or answers to my questions. Perhaps I'm atypical in that regard, though.
I think that one of the challenges arising from the growth in Drupal's popularity is due to a recent change in the audience and a mismatch between many of the newer audience's expectations and Drupal's true mission.
Drupal is (or at least was at some point) advertised as "Community Plumbing" (it's a "content management platform" according to the frontpage) - and it is an exceedingly powerful tool in the hands of an experienced plumber (or CMS platform user). There is an existing solution to nearly every problem one might face, or every application or feature one might want to implement.
I suspect that many of those in the newer audience - those who are frustrated and complaining - are looking for packaged, coherent solutions - not an assortment of pipes, fittings, and connectors. My analogy: many are looking for a word processor, not a text manipulation library.
Many are looking for coherent applications that solve problems with as little pain as possible. A significant percentage of this audience is not really able - or willing - to assemble a complete application from an assortment of existing components. Hence the increased frustration. They see what can be done with Drupal, they download, install and configure it, then wonder how the heck they get from here to there.
Put bluntly: perhaps those new users would be better served elsewhere, at least for now. Drupal cannot be all things to all people. Or can it?
If Drupal continues to attract this new audience (the members of which have high expectations about what can be done with Drupal, but do not realize that Drupal at its core is mainly a toolset rather than a packaged application suite) then the frustration and support load will continue to grow.
How to solve this problem? I'm not sure; perhaps it would be best to try to clarify Drupal's purpose and true power to the new audience members - along with a clarification about the effort level required to implement a fully-featured site beyond the core functionality. I know there are some guide books ("Is Drupal right for me?") - do we know how many people actually read those sections before downloading and trying Drupal?
Another alternative might be to repurpose Drupal itself - focusing more on coherent application sets rather than the core (plumbing) aspects of Drupal. I've seen some discussions along these lines in the past, but to be honest, I'm way too busy trying to wire things together on my new sites in order to offer the desired features - I've little time to spend following these discussions or to contribute. Sorry. This might change six months hence.
THIS IS NOT A COMPLAINT, but an observation: Come to think of it, perhaps this is part of the inherent cost of using Drupal - as powerful as it is, I spend a lot of time discovering & connecting the pieces (modules) together, configuring the systems, and sometimes finding & diagnosing bugs - rather than focusing on deploying applications, and have little time to spend on providing support to others - even though, if you check my activity on drupal.org you'll see that I have been 'giving back' by helping to fix bugs in modules I've used. (I admit that I am not a true Drupal guru, so I may learn easier ways to do things as time goes on.) This is the cost of using an open source CMS platform, and I accept them willingly. Others may not be prepared to accept those costs, or even understand that those costs will exist until after they have invested some time and effort in using Drupal.
In any case, I'm very happy with what I've been able to accomplish with Drupal, and I think it's the best tool out there for my needs, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to a non-techie, or someone who wants to deploy a full-featured site quickly (unless they want little more than a blog-style site - full-featured in my world means: modern forum system, feature rich image/media gallery, etc.. Yes, I know it can be done, but I don't see how it's trivial for a newbie.)
---
Michael Curry
Goatseeker.com - free online ads, goat info
Exodus Development, Inc.
Drupal Center of Excellence
Hi Steven
I started getting my hands on Drupal some 8 months ago and after initially working through the challenges and extensive research in drupal.org forums ( thanks fot the wonderful posts), I took the entrepreneur route and started my company.
We will be 25 Drupalites in India by mid November and I will see that I will have my organization spend around 30 to 40 hours a month answering questions in forum.
I definitely think its our time to give back. Agreed that we all are busy but I think our cost structure in India allows us that flexibility to have a concentrated effort. We really want to see Drupal increase its dominance in Open Source CMS and we are already setting up Drupal Center of Excellence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Drupal is evolving faster than I can staff up and have expertise in all areas but we all love the direction we are all going into.
Roshan Shah
--
http://www.drupaldesigns.com - A BPO Canada Global Services Company
http://www.bpocanada.com
On-line, synchronic-realtime support
I have set up about a dozen sites and done some customization of themes and basic module development.
I'm on-line usually over 10 hours a day, I wouldn't mind providing on-line volunteer support through an open chat room or Instant Messaging (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, ICQ, etc.). Advantage of a chat room is that we may make the logs open to others, but most likely they would require some editing, disadvantage is having to set up such a system (although I can offer a room for Drupal as part of the service I already pay for with parachat).
While the main disadvantage is that it's most likely that knowledge generated through this kind of support will be lost or difficult to add to the community knowledge generated through the forums, it may be a nice addition for some newbies who have a difficult time getting acquainted with the platform (the taxonomy/node dislexic syndrome, etc.)
I would also be happy to provide support and assistance in Spanish and Portuguese to others and on generic issues.
As many have said above, we have all been helped a great deal and most of us are willing to give back to the community and the product that have helped us and empowered us so much.
Regards.
------
Con paciencia y calma,
sube un burro a una palma
Already have one...
We already have a channel for support. #drupal-support on freenode. Feel free to join and help. :)
Michelle
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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com
I meant not-IRC
Chances are, if you are IRC literate you are not a newbie or, better put, most newbies are not familiar with IRC, accessing it or using it.
------
Con paciencia y calma,
sube un burro a una palma
Not true
I don't know why you'd say that. There's plenty of people who can find their way to IRC and still need help with Drupal. I've been in the channel about a year and a half, starting as a newbie and working up to being able to help people. Believe me, we get new people all the time. I really don't see a need to split up live support even further when the channel is working just fine.
Michelle
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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com
Anything that adds an extra-layer is not newbie-friendly
If it requires installing a plug-in or downloading and installing another piece of software, you are adding an additional step and making it harder for newbies and users with limited skills or time...
To use myself as an example, I did install the IRC plug-in for Mozilla to access the channel sometime last year, but I keep moving from one computer to the other and have never returned to it... To the support forums, I always come every now and then, since all I have to do is browse to drupal.org
Please note that I am not trying to undermine the value of an IRC support channel or suggesting any split. The nature of my post was to make the point that some of us may be willing to provide volunteer support through Instant Messaging or uncomplicated web based interactive tools such as a chat room. I am on-line most of the day and wouldn't mind helping others find answers if contacted via messenger...
If my suggestion is completely irrelevant, please disregard it and excuse my ignorance.
I'm still up for helping others in any other way possible -- including support with Spanish and Portuguese languages.
Regards.
------
Con paciencia y calma,
sube un burro a una palma
IM needs software
You need to install software to use an IM as well. There are web based methods of accessing IRC that could be added if people think it's warranted. Given the number of newbies we get in there, though, I don't think getting on IRC is a huge problem for most people.
However, if you want to provide support via IM, that's up to you. I don't know where the best place to advertise that is. Maybe Steven will jump in on that when he comes back from his break.
Other language support is a good idea. We get people in the channel who don't speak much English and it would be nice to have a place to send them.
Michelle
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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com
options
1) I like the pay for support option
2) I like the idea of putting on number of views. When I post a question and get no answer, I have no idea if no one looked at it because it was poorly titled, or if 100 people looked at it but none of them knew the answer.
3) sometimes I post a question as an issue (hoping the maintainer will get back to me) and as a forum thread (hoping people will pick it up from recent posts.)
I try to space them out a bit (say 24 hours) but if it's completely holding me up I may post them pretty close to each other.
If this is against the policy, I apologize, and I think we should make clear that this is not okay.
4) I like the idea of being able to close a forum thread.
5) I like distinguishing between resolved and answered
6) I like idea of views block.
I know that solutions are complicated and these may not all be good to implement.
I try to answer simple questions.
7) we could put a line somewhere (even like the subtitle) such as "Give as much help as you get." I think about that line (which I saw on another cms site) and so I try to answer the simple questions and post back when something is resolved.
What about paid online training and tutorials
Apologies if something like this has been mentioned, but I recently revisited an online training site where I used to be a member (http://lynda.com/). Personally, I'd happily pay for very detailed, thorough site recipes, howtos, and other tutorials/training that could be presented in this style. If enough people would see the value in paying a reasonable amount, it could cover the time/labor cost of production.
Does anything thing like this exist for Drupal and/or would it seem to be a good idea?
I'm having a related discussion over here at Bryght...
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Gus Austin
Paid Drupal Support
It's funny that you mention that.
I asked a similar questions on the Drupal forums some weeks ago:
Would you pay for Drupal support?
It didn't exactly trigger unbridled enthusiasm. :)
Repeal the .PNG picture and
Repeal the .PNG picture and Quicktime-only movie format policy to allow for formats that cater for the widest audience and lowest common denominator.
It's difficult enough for help-authors to explain concepts (particularly for non-native English-speakers and vice-versa). The burden makes it a more timely affair when picture/video support could do it quicker and with more effect.
Mike