Drupal Learning Curve: SIte Builders. How to explain it to non-Drupal people.

Hello all, 

I have been trying to explain the pain of the Drupal learning curve to muggles. These are people moving from an html/css file based web way of thinking into Drupal. They need to know the pain a new "site builder" will face. This is just for Site BUilders, not Front end or Back end Drupal team members. The people I need to explain things to are the top brass who don't code, don't do web, but need to know what to expect from their employees and need to understand what it will take to support the employees. As well as the time it takes for someone to go from going from static html pages to very high level Drupal building. 

See if this sounds true. Simple is better. Constructive feedback is most welcome. I want to be brief but not so brief that I underscore the amount of work a new Drupal manager and team will face, especially if none of them know anything about Drupal.

The Drupal learning curve for a Site Builder can be boiled down to one word. Code. With web pages, the better you know code, the better you are at your job. Code is used in everything from function, design, to troubleshoot problems. Code is the mark of a great web person. It is just the opposite for a Drupal Site builder. Code is not the answer. It helps to know code, but never to use it. In fact, trying to code your way out of a problem is the way to break a Drupal site. A code person coming into Drupal needs to learn to "think Drupal." This is much more than learning a new programming language, it is learning a new way of thinking. In order to do that, they need to begin learning what content is in a Drupal system and how it used by the system. They need to know how content can be used in multiple ways and how to have Drupal do the work for you. Enter it once, use it everywhere. They also need to learn the new tools of the trade. As Yoda told Luke, "You must unlearn what you have learned." Drupal is not a system you dive into and expect to learn. It is not very forgiving. It must be planned, built, and tested properly, especially if you have a large. complex site. Nothing about Drupal is intuitive when you are used to simple html sites. Learning how Drupal works and also learning the Drupal tools to do the things you once did with code is no small task to ask from someone, especially without some long term help from a mentor. Experience is everything. The question new people ask over and over is "Why?" In the beginning, it will not make sense. Even near the middle, it might not make sense. They need someone to take them on the long trip of unlearning and relearning. They need someone who has been down that same path and asked those same questions and has learned to see things in a much bigger picture. 

Is it worth mastering the learning curve? The short answer is yes, because a clean, well planned Drupal database with proper fields will allow you to use your content in ways you never could in a web page. The functionality Drupal will offer and the time it saves in the long run will astound you, but making that climb from why to how is not easy and does not happen overnight, or even over weeks. Someone who does not understand Drupal can't even comprehend what the system can do, let alone plan it, understand how to build it or how to provide ownership of the project. It might seem like an easy out to have someone build it for you, but building it is just the start. Once you have a team leader and site builders who know how to think Drupal, they will start to see possibilities you could never think about on a static web site. Once your team climbs that curve and gains experience, that is when the true magic begins.