drupalmill.com on the Planet

The feed is of course http://www.drupalmill.com/syndication/planet-drupal/feed

Also fixing typo in title.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your reply. I realise the site is new. If you look at www.nutshell.nu you will see what I have written about Drupal before. By launching www.drupalmill.com I aim at taking my Drupal content to a whole new level.

I am OK with that this needs work and it wont take long before I have the needed posts to be able to be included on Planet Drupal.

/thomas

@Alex

Have five posts on it now, two that is tagged Planet Drupal, plus a bunch of news stories.

I will most likely not be able to keep up this pace though. I am aiming at adding new content on a regular basis, as well as new content types such as articles, guides, interviews and so on.

As mentioned I am not going to spam Planet Drupal, only content that is worthy it will get that tag.

Soonish the site will be getting layout changes, but it depends on how mature the Drupal 7 modules I plan to use are.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the new review. Unfortunately I have been busy with other things the last week or so and thus haven't had time to post anything new yet. Will do over the weekend though. Not only posts but a lot of improvements using Views as well as new content types, including guides and howto's.

The text in the feed is actually not a trim from the body, I am using the summary feature in D7 for that. I am planning some changes to what will be available in the feeds, but I have a few issues that needs to be sorted before i can enable that.

The site is running on D7 so it is quite limited to how ready contributed modules are at the moment. But since many of those I am using are getting more ready, so will Drupal Mill.

@Alex

There are now 4 posts in the feed. I have also changed it to 600 characters trimmed for the feed.

The Tweet link should not be in the feed, it is a result of this bug for the Tweet Button module. As soon as that bug is fixed it will be gone.

When it comes to the feed content, it will become better but it depends on several contrib modules that are not ready yet. Mainly I am waiting for the Meta Tags module to be able to really dig into this.

I hope this will be enough for qualifying Drupal Mill's Planet Drupal content.

Thanks,
/thomas

Forgot to set it to needs review...

I have no intention of creating a d.o competitor, I thought I had made that pretty clear in the several pages and posts on the site. My goal is to complement d.o with focus on content for using Drupal 7, especially with focus on non coders.

@Heine, @Gerhard Killesreiter and @kiamlaluno: Could you please tell me how you came to the conclusion that Drupal Mill will be a competitor? Would make it so much easier for me to be able to argument against your accusation.

@Gerhard Killesreiter So all blogs, books and every other media entity that writes about Drupal should stop that and put it on d.o instead?

If that is the rule, then in practice every feed on Planet Drupal should be taken down as they clearly are competing with d.o.

I am quite active on d.o myself, even written some handbook stuff. I have also introduced a lot of people to Drupal, everything from beginners to experienced coders. All of them say the same thing, especially the beginners, that d.o is difficult to get a grip on, finding what they are looking for and so on. In many cases these people simply gave up in the end.

I don't have enough free time to spend on helping them get going on a person to person basis. Therefore I decided to create Drupal Mill instead where I can apply my own ideas about how to help people learn how to use Drupal.

If you look at the content on the site, there are lots of links to the relevant pages on d.o. I do that because it is the right thing to do and I am quite sure it will help a lot of users to easier find more detailed and higher level information on d.o when they need it.

I am spending my own time and money on developing the site as well as creating content for it. A lot of the content will to start with be about the modules and configurations used on the site itself. A lot of this content simply wont have a natural place on d.o. The site itself is based on a journalistic/media base and the principles, structure, organisation and needs sites like that has. There are a lot of things I have planned for the site that simply never will be possible to do on d.o.

Sure, in some ways some content will "compete" with content on d.o. But I simply can't see what the problem with that is. In what way will Drupal Mill hurt d.o by providing guides, howtos, tutorials, news, reviews, interviews, etc about Drupal. If visitors to my site likes the content and find it useful it can only result in that Drupal, including d.o, is gaining from it. All of them will sooner or later end up on d.o as well.

The only way the site could be seen as a competitor to d.o is if I created a fork of Drupal and build something that will not be future compatible with it. I can assure you I have no such intentions with Drupal Mill.

@Gerhard Killesreiter

Been thinking a bit more about what exactly you mean by that Drupal Mill should be excluded for competing with drupal.org. I still can't understand it, especially when looking at the requirements for being included.

Anyways, it inspired me to write a blog post about it - http://www.drupalmill.com/blog/thomas/2011/01/22/drupal-mill-accused-com...

Please note, I am not having a go at you or anyone else, I just want to better understand this and how my site can be a threat to drupal.org.

Sure, I agree that Drupal has prospered thanks to the content here. However, Drupal is still growing, and especially Drupal 7 is reaching out to whole new audience that is much less technically skilled or even interested in having to spend time learning code to get their Drupal site going. they want things to work out of the box.

Drupal.org is fantastic, but it simply doesn't cater very well for that group.

That is what I am focusing on with Drupal Mill, click monkeys like myself that want to focus on building the sites and the content.

As I also say in my post, I believe if I can provide a resource for these people to get started with Drupal, they will sooner, rather than later start using drupal.org as well.

I also see another benefit for drupal.org, name that sites like Drupal Mill will act as first line of support for beginners. They will learn the basics there and the result of that will be less beginner questions in issue queues as well, helping the maintainers to focus more of their time on more important tasks.

Lastly, how can a site like Drupal Mill take anything away from drupal.org when almost all content is pointing back to it? That if anything is telling the readers that drupal.org is the main site.

Have restructed the taxonomy paths a bit and the URL in #1 doesn't work any more. Its probably better to use the system path http://www.drupalmill.com/taxonomy/term/7/feed instead, just in case there will be any other future changes.

I am still having a hard time understand how a site that clearly complies with the guidelines for inclusion on the Planet, that is devoted to help spreading Drupal and that will drive a lot of traffic, more than likely users that will after visiting the site have an easier time to get into d.o, can be seen as a competitor to d.o. So far your explanations simply aren't good enough.

Frankly, what @chrisguselle point out "protect your turf" is how I read it as well.

@Heine: You seem to think that the only way to contribute to the Drupal community is to do it on d.o. I completely disagree with that. D.o is a fantastic place, but Drupal is growing, it is entering new markets and a lot of new kinds of users are finding it. Sure. D.o should have content for all kinds of users, but it is not able to cater well for everyone, especially due to that all work on it is on volunteering basis. Nor should it have that as goal. Who do you expect are going to produce all that content? Sure, I could do some of it, but my time is limited as well.

What about content producers, designer, themers, click monkeys, administrators, etc etc. The number of different roles involved in managing and administrating a Drupal site is constantly growing and they all have different needs. Do you truly believe d.o will be able to have tailored content for all of them any time soon?

I am convinced there will be lots of new sites like mine that specialises on certain areas and roles and provide focused content of high quality. It is already happening for many of the Drupal Distributions that are available that have their own specialised community sites for their distributions. Some modules have also their own websites. There are plenty of more examples of this happening and I can assure you it is not going to slow down.

However, none of these sites are trying to split the community, they have been created to fill a purpose d.o clearly are not able to. They also link back to d.o and are making sure their visitors knows that Drupal still is the central hub for them.

The only place I see this is an issue is here at d.o, where initiatives outside d.o is being treated badly. This is especially true if your not a coder or tech wizard, because then it is much more difficult to find things you can do here that gets the "approval" by the "elite" because code seems to be one of the few accepted ways of contributing.

You are volunteering your time and effort, but only want to do so on your own site.

I take that as a personal insult. The hours I have spent in the issue queues (my track page is 16 pages) filing bug reports, spending time finding ways to recreate and explain how to reproduce the bugs, test patches, suggest and discuss improvements etc are countless.

Last time I counted I had around 40 issues for Drupal 7 core I have been or are involved in. The majority of those are discovered and filed by me. I spent the whole of last year testing D7, and then when I started to build test sites, preparing for Drupal Mill, I found lots of them. In several cases I found problems that required rewriting of code and features. Many of those bugs wouldn't have been found if I only had been playing around. They where found when I used the alphas, betas and RCs to try and build real things with.

Isn't that a great way of contributing and volunteering?
Isn't that of value for the whole community?
Didn't that help D7 get finished quicker and with higher quality?

When it comes to handbook pages I can admit I haven't done much, but I am at least the author of http://drupal.org/node/390448.

And just before you posted your comment I wrote a suggestion, http://drupal.org/node/1035184#comment-4020812, on how Planet Drupal could be managed, including offering to take responsibility for the main role in that suggestion. Even if my suggestion is of no interest I am still happy to help with things where I can.

Please note that the suggestion and offer has nothing to do with Drupal Mill being included or not in Planet Drupal.

Moving such activity offsite would diminish the value d.o.

That for me sound more like you want to protect d.o (for the wrong reasons) instead of what is of benefit for the Drupal Community and the growth of Drupal.

Please explain to me how it would hurt Drupal if there are hundreds of good sites with quality content that focuses on certain aspects of Drupal?

Wouldn't that instead have the opposite effect?

@mlncn I will focus on quality content on DM. Also I would not "spam" Planet Drupal if the site was included, as I stated already in the OP. Only the odd post, article, howto, etc that has the quality will be tagged for it.

Personally It doesn't really matter for me if Drupal Mill is included or not. However, the reason I continue to discuss this is that I simply cant understand the reasons behind the "competing" accusations and now also that a site such as mine would diminish d.o. If this keeps growing here on d.o, it can very well get a lot uglier and the main loser would be Drupal and the momentum it is building up.

I can take this, but as cweagans point out, what if I would have just discovered Drupal and this would have been one of my first experiences on d.o? With D7 there are going to be a lot more beginners coming here and they should be welcomed, not looked down on.

I truly hope I am wrong about this.

Haha, thanks Alex. Needed a bit of a laugh in all this.

Will see what I can do to comply with your points :)

@arianek

I wrote the http://drupal.org/node/390448 a few years ago. I also made some efforts in trying to help with docs on d.o around that time, but got wage responses and eventually lost interest.

I want to do more on d.o, but unfortunately things like this issue is really putting me off. This and the endless pointless, often negative, debates instead of focusing on what is actually going to drive this community forward. I don't have the time, or energy at the moment, for this. I have already wasted far to much time in this issue for example.

All this for trying to do something positive for Drupal! For me, it only makes me want to spend more time on my own sites, especially Drupal Mill. At least there I will be able to focus on producing good content that Drupal users actually have use of instead of wasting time and energy debating petty things.

Please note, I am not having a go at you, I am just really frustrated about this. I don't like it and I am sure it is not good at all for the future of Drupal.

People should be welcomed to the community no matter how they want to contribute. Contributing to the community can be done in many ways, doing things on d.o is only one of many ways

I can take this "crap" because I know how good Drupal is and I have spent far too much time learning it to go somewhere else. New users will easily run somewhere else though.

Thank you so much for adding my site, wont disappoint you.

The site is currently on hold. Still got grand ideas for it, just that other stuff got in-between so to speak.

Setting this to postponed for now.