Hans Across The Interwebs

Former TV-host and allround ‘famous ‘Internet Guy’ Chris Pirillo is starting a community CMS project based on Drupal, and I’m joining him. It’s going to be fun and interesting and it might just be another great equalizer in the social web space. But I also have some serious ponderings I’d like to explore. I can’t help it: I’m a project manager, so after seeing the opportunities comes managing the risks.

But first: “Drupal”?

Well, Drupal is

a free and open source modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to create and organize content, customize the presentation, automate administrative tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors. Although there is a sophisticated programming interface, most tasks can be accomplished with little or no programming. Drupal is sometimes described as a “web application framework,” as its capabilities extend from content management to enabling a wide range of services and transactions.Source: WikiPedia

Such a mouthful. Think of it as WordPress, LiveJournal, Joomla, or whatever Web CMS you happen to know. Drupal is like those, only more powerful because of a virtually limitless model for extensibility. And less powerful because of hardly any pre-configuration.

Drupal’s power has made it very attractive for power users, and less so for casual web builders. Just look at that description above. Great for geeks. If WordPress is a regular car, Drupal is a unicycle, bicycle, motorbike, car, truck, tank, trailer, houseonwheels. Most people just need a car. But not everyone.

I’m a big fan of Drupal. I created the Community website Wordsy using Drupal; my business site also runs on Drupal.
(I understand there may me some confusion as to why this blog is running WordPress. I have a very simple reasoning for this: I didn’t want to do any messing with it. It does what it does - giving me the power to actually blog instead of tinker.)

So what’s this project about?

So this Pirillo guy is also a big fan of the Open Source Web Site Management System called Drupal. On my TechCrunch feed I found an article about what he’s planning to do:

What he’s looking to achieve is delivering a multi-faceted, open source, easy to use end CMS. To break that down further: imagine installing a package on your web host that immediately delivered Digg style functionality, or photo sharing, a community forum, a blog, a social network ala Facebook, or even a clone of the growing number of FriendFeed style sites, or a combination of all or any of them. Here’s the important difference to existing solutions: imagine that you wouldn’t have to touch a piece of code to activate the various aspects. Imagine that a color change made in one module automatically applies across all module or as specified, without the need (again) to touch code.

I immediately emailed him of my wish to join and help and he twittered and emailed me back saying ‘great’ and redirecting me to a guy called Adam Kalsey and the site where we’ll be working together.

My thoughts on the project

I consider myself part of the project, but not yet empowered to freely edit the (wiki) front page of the project site…So I’m posting these as suggestions to myself and others.

1. Do not fork Drupal (agreed)
2. Forgo Glory. Instead make Drupal better. Where you can, involve and empower the existing Drupal Development Community.
3. Sure, creating an easier technical install (the ftp-way) is important, but also create a wordpress.org / .com ecology. The easiest install is a one click install. (I volunteer, just say the word).
4. One of the greatest barriers for a nice Drupal site is not the availability of modules or even installing them. It is the integration of different modules through css/dhtml/javascript/ajaxy wizardy (which completely eludes me too). We need to create great looking cool themes - NOT for a standard empty drupal install - but for completely configured and installed applied community concepts. A nice font, some colors and a sexy image header will NOT do.
5. Understand that any code you create needs to be maintained. New modules should be kept to a minimum, kept as granular as possible (to enable yet newer, as yet unenvisioned possibilities) and pushed into their own maintenance projects.
6. Google is also a big fan of Drupal. Can we do something with Google’s summer of code
7. Find other sponsors, big and small.
8. On the project site it is currently stated that ‘The hope is to integrate OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID.’ It is my opinion that these things are absolutely essential for a futureproof Community project. It could finally lead to being completely in charge of your own community profile through our project / Drupal. Let’s be ambitious here.

So those are my thoughts so far. More to come as they pop up.

What do you think?

I’m going to start posting about how I’m trying to get my little social community around books and reading off the ground.

For those of you not in ‘the know’, I’ve been working on this labour of love called Wordsy.com. It’s kind of a digg-clone, but - as I call it - for a different kind of geek. The service is aimed at people who are into books. Like me.

First off, I’d like to start with a little disclaimer: I am very well aware that there is nothing technologically innovative about Wordsy.com. Nor is the concept of a social community particularly new. What is new however is that I’m focussing on people who like reading books of fiction, non-fiction, literature, that kind of thing.

Secondly, I’m not looking to sell quick or make millions of bucks with this thing. I took great care in choosing the subject for this community. I chose something which I really like, a subject close to my heart (almost as close as technology). So I’m ready to be in it for the long haul. Sometimes I’ll have some money to invest, sometimes not.

But I’ll always try to have as much fun as possible.

And the same will go for these posts. Starting the community obviously has the secondary goal of learning as much as possible about the ins and outs of the many aspects involved.

Tags: technology, UI, PR, marketing, hosting, optimizing, managing people, getting people, planning, financing, etc.

I’ll try to be as open as possible about this thing and share my experiences so others can learn from my mistakes and (hopefully) successes. As long as I’m enjoying myself I’ve nothing to lose.

So if you could ask a start-up bootstrapper anything you wanted, what would it be?