The success of an open-source project such as Drupal largely depends on the quality (and efficiency) of the support that community members offer to each other. Although Drupal offers support through various channels, the Support Forum on drupal.org probably is the most important 'gateway to help' for most users.

My personal feeling has always been that, generally speaking, the support on the forums is fast, efficient, and almost always leads to some kind of solution for the problem being discussed. However, after following this thread, I started wondering exactly how well we are doing in the support forums, obviously staying neutral concerning the actual discussion in that specific thread. One way to express that, would be to calculate the forums' response ratio, being the percentage of topics to which at least one reply was posted. This of course doesn't account for the responses' quality, but it gives an idea of the forum activity.

Well, I keep thinking we need 'Now what' articles. People familiar with web design and mid sized to large corporate sites know what to do to build sites. Folks new to Drupal and CMS's in general get stuck. Sort of a 'Now what' happens. I have been suggesting a configuration guides series for a while but have been to busy so we're going to try this. Pick a target and see how many people's different solutions can hit it. This will show different strategies and how people use different modules from within Drupal to accomplish similar effects. Then pick a few of the approaches and write them up for the handbook to assist those that come after us in the best spirit of Open Source. Also, if someone does some automated profile building, then these perhaps can serve as a base for that.

This weeks target is how many ways to get to a 'Corporate Brochure' type site. We start with an existing target, the goals of the Bryght guide.. Now, it's a very nice guide but when I first read it, I thought, I'd do it differently. Of course, I hadn't thought of using the book module that way either.

BuyBlue.org is proud to announce the launch of their new web site using Drupal’s upcoming 4.7 codebase. Thanks to the many community-driven features Drupal ships with, we were able to save time and money and concentrate on the custom modules developed by matt westgate. We have also designed an elastic 3 column theme that is compatible with all major browsers and operating systems and highlights the possibilities of the Phptemplate engine courtesy John.

Icon is a Digital Living guide published each Saturday in Australia's The Sydney Morning Herald (for Sydney readers), and The Age (for Melbourne readers). In this week's issue, the article Talk The Talk reviews Drupal as a "Free Website Management" tool. From the article:

If building websites was once a walk in the park, now it's a lot more like a walk across a six-lane highway in peak hour. Users expect more from their time online and site managers need smart tools to make updates quick and easy. Drupal is an open source content management platform that can form the beating heart of any website. From blogs to intranets to community portals, Drupal offers plenty of features and a host of plug-ins to deliver what any site could need. You'll need some technical skills to install it on your host server and get it customised, but this is a powerful solution that will take months off any DIY website effort.

Just a note to anyone who is interested. Drupal is doing well in the Portal (CMS) category ratings at the OpenSourceCMS site which compares the many CMS tools out there.

The top 20 (as of today, September 17th 2005) are ...

Congratulations to Angela Byron for her mention in The Economist:

I'm A total geek all around, says Angela Byron, a 27-year-old computer programmer who has just graduated from Nova Scotia Community College. And yet, like many other students, she never had the confidence to approach any of the various open-source software communities on the internet—distributed teams of volunteers who collaborate to build software that is then made freely available. But thanks to Google, the world's most popular search engine and one of the biggest proponents of open-source software, Ms Byron spent the summer contributing code to Drupal, an open-source project that automates the management of websites.…