My Love Letter to Drupal

There are many reasons why one could love Drupal…

1. It’s an incredibly extensible CMS platform built in php

2. Drupalistas know how to party (and they’re a little gangster)

3. The founder is a lovely Belgian whom *some people* call “Driesus” because he’s sort of like Jesus

I was first introduced to Drupal as the CMS that houses Standing Cloud’s front-end. Then I joined 3,500 Drupal community members at DrupalCon Chicago in March of 2011. After traveling to a number of open source application events, DrupalCon was a breath of fresh air for a number of reasons.

I’m a non-technical girl living in a technical world. At Standing Cloud, we call it 'tech curious.' It was my mission to attend DrupalCon, figure out what the community was like, and see how the Standing Cloud system may be of service – but I didn’t speak the language. Varnish? Drush? Nginx? Pressflow?

I was clearly a n00b and the friendly and helpful nature of the community was astounding. Folks contributing to Drupal Core would take the time to explain technical components of Drupal, their deployments, or to be quite honest, components of the technology I was representing. No judgment, just awesome. I decided that if Boulder were a web application, it would be Drupal.

Also, there was some serious female representation. @webchick is one bad-ass technical talent, and she’s one of many in the Drupal community. Many conferences I attend can be quite intimidating. For example – one coding language conference I attended this year had ~3000 attendees and I was one of maybe 10 females in attendance! It’s the nature of tech – but I’m proud to see the effort that the Drupal community has put into promoting female involvement. Big up to my Drupal ladies!

When I got back from DrupalCon Chicago, we decided to do a ‘deep dive’ on Drupal. Though Standing Cloud offers a deployment and management system for more than 100 applications and development languages, we wanted to make sure that the system was up to snuff and truly useful for someone who lives and breathes Drupal – beyond initial deployment. So we put it to the test. We invited a number of Drupal developers to check out our system for free. We asked them to tell us what they liked and what sucked. As it turns out – we were missing some stuff. We didn’t have Drush installed by default. Nor memcached. Nor APC.

Whoops.

So we made our deployment better. We added those missing components, and built a tool called the Druplicator to make it easy to port existing Drupal sites to the Standing Cloud system – so users can choose to have them run on ANY cloud, with just a couple of clicks. We continue to listen to the community to work on building features that help them make Kick-aaS Drupal sites for their clients. Up next: Varnish.

I’m so thankful to the Drupal community for all of their support and willingness to help us build a tool that is truly useful for Drupal developers; for answering our emails, for taking time out of their day to test our system, and for eventually using the system for client projects. Our cloud provider partners are excited about it too.

We look forward to aiding in the increasing use of the Drupal CMS and continuing to work with its amazing community! See you on our home turf at DrupalCon Denver!