A Web Development Platform By Any Other Name Is Not Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform with a funny name. The name comes from a typo made by Drupal's founder, Dries Buytaert, who was attempting to register the domain name 'dorp.org'. 'Dorp' is the Dutch word for 'village' which at the time was an appropriate name for his on line community. By accident, Dries typed in 'drop.org'.

A Drop in the Ocean
The notion of a water drop proved to be very powerful. The word 'drupal' was coined by Dries as an English transliteration of the Dutch word for 'drop'. So the home base for the Drupal community is www.drupal.org.

Appropriately enough drupal.org adopted an icon that was a rather cartoon-ish representation of a water droplet. But besides its ninja-style mask, the world's cutest water droplet offers few clues about the phenomenal success of Drupal as a web development platform over the last few years.

The fact is that Drupal, with its inherent capacity for rigorous functional and design extensibility, is a vast ocean of features and resources. Beyond its small cluster of 'core modules' there is a limitless supply of 'contributed' or custom modules created by a worldwide network of largely volunteer developers.

The impact of Drupal's core functionality and its approach to open ended extensibility has been like a tidal wave on the web development world. More and more, this web development platform with a funny name is being sought out by non-technical owners of web based projects. Developers who do not use Drupal, or cannot match its capabilities with an equivalent platform, are at risk of being washed away.

Why We Care

My preferred approach to user experience design is to build upon not only a deep sense of user requirements but also on a solid foundation of technical understanding. Getting to know Drupal from the technical point of view has, frankly, taken considerable effort and has involved years of actual practice building web sites and custom modules.

My colleagues and I are excited by Drupal's capacity to support exploration in design and development. In the Drupal community, the idea behind this sort of experimentation is to incorporate the results into contributed modules so that others can benefit from it. We're not there yet but we'd like to use this web site (and this section of writing) to talk about what we're up to with Drupal and, most importantly, to hear back from you. As creative problems solvers we want to make sure we have a good grasp of the problem, from many angles, before we present a possible solution.

Our Plan for This Section

So tuag.ca/articles/drupal is where we intend to discuss various topics related to Drupal. Some of it will be technical and some will be more along the lines of user experience design. We may occasionally take aim at a few sacred cows and maybe we'll rattle a few nerves. It's our job. We're User Advocates.