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“Use Wordpress when you want to build a website, use Drupal when you want to build a Wordpress.”

Anna, 32
Brisbane, Australia

Goal: To build a best-in-class Drupal website while giving back.

    Behaviors

  • Almost 100% of her work is Drupal
  • Is actively using issue queue, submits and reviews patches, has a few core patches
  • Writes custom modules/themes, writes and edits documentation
  • Answers questions in issues, forums and IRC
  • Is involved in her local user community, attends meetups
  • Attends local and national Drupal events, has spoken at a few
  • Sponsored a few events, is the DA supporting partner
  • Is constantly in Drupal IRC channels
  • Goes to Drupal.org mostly to look for a module or docs, especially API
  • Often looks at other’s profiles on D.o, especially when hiring someone
  • When has a question, goes to Google or asks someone she knows, often looks directly into code, often finds answers on StackExchange
  • Responsible for explaining Drupal to non-tech stakeholders, helps them better understand the complexity of their requests

    Motivations

  • Dreams to build a best-in-class, $1.5 million Drupal site, worthy of being featured on Drupal.org and pointed to by members of the community
  • Wants to contribute more, get more involved with core/contrib development
  • Wants knowledge of Drupal to be spread across her team
  • Wants to figure out how to do things better and constantly improve the structure of her web properties
  • Wants to stay up-to-date with core development

    Attitudes

  • “Drupal is a swiss army knife for web projects”
  • The greatest benefit of Drupal is the community, because someone else has probably run into your problem before
  • Community gives you an opportunity to collaborate with people, find friends
  • Open source is a big benefit of Drupal and a selling point to stakeholders
  • Modules and themes that exist empower her to do more and faster than she could on her own
  • Looking to hire self-starters, eager to learn
  • Feels her Drupal.org profile was beneficial when looking for jobs or clients
  • Thinks that Drupal is all-encompassing, can be crafted into anything you want it to be, flexible, integrates with everything

    Frustrations

  • Has many frustrations with Drupal as a product, but Drupal 8 will fix a lot of them
  • Thinks Drupal 8 is a game changer, though is frustrated she has to learn it all again for Drupal 8
  • Frustrated it is so hard to find good Drupal talent to hire onto her team
  • Frustrated that it takes so much time to get something into core
  • Frustrated that there is no clear product guidance for Drupal since it is volunteer driven
  • Finds the process of becoming a project maintainer or co-maintainer to be extremely hard
  • Frustrated by unmaintained projects and unstable releases on Drupal.org. It is useless to ask for help in their issue queue
  • Finds forums inefficient, rarely goes there
  • Wishes Drupal.org user profiles were more robust and included more of the things she has built
  • Frustrated it is not easy to get involved in core development

    Tech Use

  • Uses issue tracking tools to manage her dev team (Basecamp, Jira, PivotalTracker, Trello, Alfresco for doc management)
  • Git, GitHub, Bitbucket
  • Drush
  • Harvest, Confluence, Bookkeeping tools, Google Apps
  • Dedicated servers, cloud, Pantheon.com
  • Laptop, sometimes additional monitor, Iphone, Ipad
  • Facebook, Twitter

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Photo credits: Alessandro Valli