I want to say, right out of the gate, that I'm tech literate, but I'm not a programmer. I'm a comedy writer and film producer and for my new movie, False Profit, my creative team and I wanted to reinvent the special features you see on the DVD, and offer an extensive and interactive behind the scenes look to our backers on Kickstarter.
At first we looked at the usual suspects: open-source forum software, wordpress, etc. Forums offered us the interactivity with our audience we wanted, but most CMS's didn't offer us the ability to block our proprietary data from people who haven't paid for the content.
Then we found Drupal.
I've worked with Drupal before as a writer for a large web magazine, but Drupal 7 was a revelation. It was easy to configure exactly the way we wanted and the built in permissions scheme was perfect. Drupal itself made us expand our idea of what this could be. In just a few days, we were able to build exactly what we were looking for, without once having to hit our heads against a wall.
We'll be using our Drupal page in three ways: as a forum to communicate with our audience; as a CMS to give them a behind the scenes look at the movie as it's made; and as a document management system for us to share scripts, budgets, schedules, etc, with each other as we collaborate and make this film.
