Why Drupal is Sooo Good
I am one of those people that gets really excited about something for a little while, then my passion slowly fades out (like getting all excited about scuba and ballroom dance classes, then realizing the time and money investment and losing interest). I seem not to have this problem with Drupal though, because the Drupal CMS is really that awesome. Heavenly even. Below are my reasons why.
Past CMS Nightmares
When I first started working at LevelTen in 2006, our developers were creating the "LevelTen CMS." We had really smart developers working on it, but a full-featured custom CMS proved to be an extreme challenge, and the product was less than fully functional. I had lots of fun nightmare calls with clients reporting broken WYSIWYGs and file uploads. Soon after, we moved to a new open-source CMS called SilverStripe. At the time, it was really lacking documentation, and the bugs were aplenty. Again, we had nightmare calls with clients reporting broken form submissions and page edits.
Then LevelTen gets introduced to an open-source CMS/CMF called Drupal in early 2008. Drupal is a CMS, but its power lies in its use as a Content Management Framework (CMF). We were getting ready to build out a full-featured music community website and thought we'd give Drupal a try. I absolutely hated the Drupal CMS at first because I didn't understand how all the features worked together. I know Tom had some late-night fun figuring out how it all works together too at a code level. After Dustin arrived and provided training on best practices and showing how to properly use modules, themes, content types, and views, we were well on our way to Drupal heaven (sign-up for LevelTen's Drupal Training Courses so you can be in Drupal heaven too). Now, instead of telling a client, "No, the CMS does not support that feature, we will have to custom code it," I find myself saying more often, "Yes, Drupal CAN do that!"
Database Queries = NOT fun. Content Types & Views = FUN!
Even with the previous CMSs we tried, our developers often still had to write custom code to generate listings of content or customize a fieldset for different types of content. The structure of Drupal core & user-contributed Modules makes this functionality possible by modifying settings using an admin user interface. The Content Construction Kit (CCK) & Views modules are my best module friends, as I'm sure they are a lot of other users' favorites too. An article on Drupal.org goes more into the structure of Drupal core and the power for customization.
Smart & Passionate Community
I have never seen a development community as amazing as the one backing up Drupal. The rising popularity of the DrupalCon conferences shows the amount of interest behind the Drupal project and how it is growing. A super smart and involved community means a super intelligent and highly evolving system. Every change to Drupal core is discussed and disputed by the community, and contributed module maintainers always consider community input, with the community helping out with bug reports, feature requests, and even patches to improve the modules. When I'm having issues with a particular module, I usually search the issue queue, groups, and forums, and can most always find feedback on the issue.
Dries in the Lead
With Dries Buytaert as the Drupal project lead (he's also the original creator), the Drupal project is unstoppable. Dries is super-smart, passionate, fair, and has a good sense of where Drupal is headed. The Drupal community drives most of the decisions, but Dries serves as the mediator for tough calls for Drupal core. His cool, laid-back nature seems to attribute itself to Drupal and the community as well.
I love Drupal for these things, but the most important thing to me is it just keeps getting cooler. That's the power of an open-source project with all of these aspects above, and many more. Constantly evolving, with positivity behind it, I cannot think why I'd ever decide to switch to evaluate anything else. Drupal is an interest for me that is here to stay.
