Dreamweaver is dying. Long live Drupal.
By following Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) on Twitter I've got to this very interesting blog dreamweaver is dying It's a great story for a my WSDB course so I've made a blog for my student on the course-side.
I must say, ever since I'm following Twitter (only after FOSDEM 2009), my work feels less lonely. Creating and following such micro-blogs fits me much better than blogging on this site. I'm hoping it actually will boost both my blogging as contributing to Drupal. Specially for the last I've been in trouble for years now. Maybe this is a good time to reflect on it.
I learned about Drupal after a lunch meeting with Dries on 23 november 2005 and been a Drupal evangelist ever since. I've been trying to contribute to Drupal for three years now, with little result. In 2006 I've put all the code in Drupal CVS but never branched it, why, because I've never been satisfied with it. The problem was that we had to deliver in a certain time frame, but it was not inline with ideas dwelling in the community at that time. In drupalcon-DC state-of-the-art, Dries explains you should replace planning by coordination. I guess that is exactly the problem we faced. A research project is planned to test something, while Drupal is coordinated. I've spend much time to create framework for access, where you could manage node access to roles, groups and users. I see that with Drupal 7 with its fields and "bypass node access" I'm seeing many similarities, but I haven't contributed at all to it. So why?
We had our own deadlines to make for the research project, so community contribution was not on our mind in the first months. Later, there was a gap, we didn't work on community issues, we worked on our own research issues. There were to many entwined modules, it seems simply not good practice. I was trilled when Dries asked me to co-ordinate the Drupalcon Brussels 2006, I've hoped get involved with the community at that event. It became quite clear to me that I've missed out on something very important: interaction. The gap between research issues and community issues are not related to a problem I'm addressing in my research. I wanted to contribute but inline with my own motivations. So I got a totality other opportunity, teaching about Drupal. I've spend most of 2007-2008 working on my course an research, no time for anything else. So I've missed out on Drupalcon 2007. I only did a small presentation of my course in FOSDEM 2008.
On March 25 2008 I've got a mail from Kristof Van Tomme to FP7 funding for a semantic web code sprint. As I'm interested in research and Drupal, this looked like a great idea. I've know FP7 a bit, been going to several of the events. So I've searched an communicate with the FP7 administration, but the solutions were below expectations. FP7 isn't really fit for what we where looking. It ended up as a totally disaster when the BoF in Drupalcon2008 got merged with a BOF on "hacking the climate change using the semantic web", my presentation didn't make any sense any more. I've also tried to collaborate with an initiative on training and Drupal, but I added only confusion it seems. Again it is a problem of working on similar issues but with a slight different motivation.
Why is the interaction so hard? I've been unable to blog about my work as it all is much long-term thinking and often quite hypothetical. I've been working on a new project, that should be ready by the end of this year. In Drupal terms, that is to long. However, with Twiter, I do got the impression that interactions may get better, as you can have small snippets to react to. Well we just have to see.