General discussion

I've been going into the Drupal Chat IRC #drupal-support, but, like, it seems no one is ever there!

Is this true? Or am I just doing something wrong?

Wondering,

twiggy

How can a module with 2 commits in the last year, the last one more than 6 months ago, and more than a hundred unanswered issues be classified as "actively maintained"?

What sets the bar to say something that appears to be almost abandoned is "active"?

My question is, do you think I should change my forum to a blog instead? I've had a forum on my Drupal site for two years now, for a niche product area, and I have yet to receive one single guest forum post. I've had a dozen or so comments on several forum posts I've created myself, but it's getting embarrassing that no one is jumping in to participate in authoring topics. A blog would restrict visitors to comments only rather than posting their own topics, but that's basically what's happening now anyway. Or should I give it more time and see if a community will slowly develop?

I'd love to hear the opinion of the Drupal community on this subject. Is Drupal a good platform for Internet start ups looking to ultimately expand on a global scale. We've gotten a lot of negative feedback when trying to market some start ups under the Drupal platform. Mostly it comes from having to recently defend Drupal to potential investors of Internet start up companies. For the most part when we're meeting with these people as soon as the word Drupal comes from our team's mouth they frown at us.

Their largest concern is that there is a large misconception that Drupal is slow. Personally I feel like slow Drupal sites are mis-configured Drupal sites. But it goes on past that. The number of bugs filed against the core. They are quick to suggest that we use [insert buzz word of the week here], because it's a much better solution. “You need to be using Ruby on Rails, Twitter was built on Ruby on Rails, so obviously that's what you should be using.” (I'm not saying there is anything wrong with Rails at all. It's a powerful language. I'm just tired of hearing that RoR is faster than Drupal just because it is. I've yet to come across any finite numbers, or actual evidence to support that either is faster than the other.)

I just bough a Beginning Drupal book by the publisher WROX. They are usually good, but I am finding that the interface in their book is far off from the current release and I am just in the 5th chapter. I fear from a small code example and from some examples I have seen on the web that they are going to be far off from what is really current when it comes to coding as I get into the meat of things. I will require getting into advance portions later on, so I need something that is going to be more current, yet I am still just learning my way around as well.

Hi All,

A very quick question - what makes a 'Drupal Developer?'.

I've been using Drupal - off and on - for around 3 years now. I have a good understanding of views, install, blocks, panels. Put it this way, I can create a site without editing the code - besides CSS - I can apply some basic theming.

Worth noting, I don't know any programming codes like PHP or Java, I can't edit modules but I understand the module system.