I can see two motivations for changing this:

1) Search engines. If you search for "open source cms" (without the quotes) Drupal doesn't do nearly as well as it should. Hopefully the "Powered by drupal" block in D6 will fix that. It's something that no individual Drupal service provider will ever be able to achieve nearly as well as Drupal.org. I don't care too much about this.

2) Users. These are like, the people we care about. We want more of them (really, we do, some people may say otherwise but the community in general benefits from gaining new members and we put a lot of effort towards that). Community Plumbing does not get them excited about Drupal. They see it and are confused. We are a usable project. With each release we make major usability enhancements. Why not make a usability enhancement on something that is one of our most visible facets?

According to http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://drupal.org Community Plumbing was added between may and june of 2002 (5.5 years ago). Perhaps a community member from back then could enlighten us to the decision process on this (/me imagines some doing it on a whim).

There are certain time-honored traditions which serve our project well (the drop is always moving, code/contributions are gold, join forces with others) but that doesn't mean that they should all be set in stone.

I like Khalid's perspective: let's come up with something that is inspiring and unique but that better expresses what Drupal was, is, and can be.

--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log | The Big Spanish Tour

Community Plumbing actually works for me. Drupal is ever evolving and expanding, I'm not so sure a "label" such as "Open Source CMS" works well....it seems too limited to capture the essence of Drupal. Buzz words such as "open source", "content management", and "collaboration" may all work today but there is no telling how quickly in a year or two these type of descriptive words will fall out of favor in usage.

I of course wasn't around when Community Plumbing was adopted, but some URLs that reference the slogan can be found:

http://kairosnews.org/its-about-the-community-plumbing-the-social-aspect...
http://kairosnews.org/node/4313

I also thought this comment was enlightening... http://kairosnews.org/its-about-the-community-plumbing-the-social-aspect...

I kept thinking that the name Drupal has to be related to drupe (a fruit type) and drupelet, the little globes that make up blackberries and raspberries, and so it is; the connection to the Dutch word for drop expresses that perfectly. I like the metaphoric connection of packets of info to drops in the plumbing of the net.

BryanSD
CMS Report

Although the concepts and proposed slogans would really sound great, I doubt it will sound appealing to most newbies to CMS's.
Imho, I think it the "performance" of Drupal should be a bit implied in the slogans above.

powerful, flexible, and modular --things a developer would want to hear.

I don't know your target market but I bet they'll all give an ear for these slogans. But with a slogan or not, there are still many good reasons to love and grow with Drupal.

marc.robinsone caballero

Are slogans going to be different for Drupal 6?

marc.robinsone caballero

This interesting discussion looks like its set to continue for a while. What happens after all the brain storming? How does the decision finally get made?

I like Community Plumbing. It describes Drupal well even now.
I wrote this up a while ago so I wouldn't have to again.
http://www.blkmtn.org/community-plumbing.

Drupal.org is not a profit center. _{Yet another} 'Open Source CMS' sounds like a generic description rather then an unique and identifiable slogan which we already have.

By going it's own path years ago, by doing it's best to stick to standards and learning from mistakes, by building out it's infrastructure, Drupal has continued to advance as the skill, knowledge and expertise of it's community has grown. This has contributed to a growing number of companies and individuals using Drupal without having to change the nature of the community.

In my opinion, those companies should have tag lines that sell Drupal as a service. The Drupal community has somehow managed to grow with it's current slogan, what is this rush to change that which is identifiable to the community? Using negative attacks, as above, to 'prove' or market your your point does not actually make your point better. I'd see going with a 'marketing' slogan as a serious negative thing for this community and it would disturb me greatly becuase then we would start 'seeming' like a business. While it is true, many of you run businesses, many of us do not.

I'll add a few to the list. Much of what I think about "community plumbing" is already posted at http://drupal.org/node/160765.

• Drupal | Communicate, Participate, Syndicate
• Drupal | The web, made to order
• Drupal | Your web, made to order
• Drupal | The node is the network

I like some of the suggestions above, and would prefer those that capture the end results, i.e. what drupal promises to deliver for different people (developers, website managers, marketing and comms people, etcetera) rather than focus on the process or features (as BryanSD notes). There are many reasons why people could choose for drupal as their CMS, but my view is that in the end it is all about allowing people to turn their ideas into working, effective websites. Therefore, I would suggest something along the lines of "Drupal - Powering Website Hits" or "Drupal - Energizing Online Communities". We may also want to consider some market segmentation to come up with different positionings for different groups (e.g. emphasize ease of use for someone who only wants to publish a blog, flexibility and stability to a developer, RoI for the people who control the budget).

Personally I feel the slogan should be directly related to what Drupal is. Slogans about Drops make me think of water filters, and slogans about plumbing, well, that's always been a bit icky to me.

My preference would be towards slogans with descriptive keywords that directly relate to what Drupal is. The slogan won't mean anything to anyone except people who don't know what Drupal is at all. Then it will be perhaps the first thing they consider for more information.

Think about what the hit result for Drupal will look like in Google. That's the first impression for a lot of folks.

Should Drupal come up on searches for plumbers? Or ocean currents? What about content management? Website software? Open Source?

Laura
pingVision, LLC

In my case, the top results are:

[1]

"An engine suitable to setup or build a content driven or community driven website. Modular design allows flexibility in design."

--Drupal.org
[2]

"Drupal (pronounced /ˈdruːpəl/) is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP."

--Wikipedia
[3]

"Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website."

--OpenSourceCMS

Common keywords: "community", "build", "manage", and "content".

In terms of reference volume (Google trends)

The term "cms" --> consistent search volume since 2004
* common searches are from Russia, Denmark, Switzerland, India, Austria, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Finland and Australia.

The term "content management system" --> search volume is declining gradually
* common searches are from Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Denmark and Germany.

Observations

* Obviously, the term CMS (abbreviated) is highly searched from European countries.
* Content management system (in full words) is highly searched from Asian countries
I don't know what the statistics mean but I think it could help in using or eliminating the use of the term "cms".

I don't like "Community plumbing" because of the two reasons already stated: it gives the impression that Drupal is for Social networking sites ONLY, and the plumbing part is, well, not flattering.

I am not personally concerned about how the slogan fares for SEO really. It is a secondary aspect of it. My main target here is humans.

For me, as a developer/consultant, Drupal has always been a web application framework that happens to be a CMS out of the box with some social networking features.

Back to the slogan ... I personally like "Drops make an ocean", but I am biased, because I am the one who came up with it.

Drops here can mean many things:

• They can be modules, the sum of which make up a greater whole.
• They can be people, members of the community, which makes
• They can be sites, and Drupal powered sites are popping up all over the place, like rain starting slowly with a few drops, then becomes a torrent.

Also, "Drops" is a nice play on the Druplicon, our logo and mascot, and the "drop is always moving" development slogan, and even the now defunct drop.org domain (which Dries was trying to register dorp in Flemish meaning village).

Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com

I have always hated 'community plumbing', so a big +1 from me on a new slogan. I think the most important points are:

1) Drupal is not a CMS, it is a framework with which you can build a CMS (and lots of other things), which is much better.

2) The 'building block' concept is critical, that's what makes Drupal so powerful and useful. We can't use the work 'Legos' in our slogan because that's a trademark, but we need something that implies that.

3) Many of the components empower admins and users to do things themselves.

Drupal | Web building blocks
Drupal | The Web, your way
Drupal | More than a CMS

Also, we probably need both a tag line (which should be very short and memorable) and a slogan (which can be longer and more descriptive). I may not have that terminology right, so marketing people can correct me on that.

I just thought of another, a little play on the CCK name:

Drupal | Web Construction Kit

"Drops make an ocean" sounds like a great slogan to me as someone who knows about drupal and its flexibility. kbahey is right when he says that it can mean many things and when I read the slogan I thought of all the little and bigger pieces the work different people contribute that sum up in a great product. So I really like the slogan.

On the other hand it is really vague. It is the opposite of the "Connecting people, process and information" slogan and while I think "Drops make an ocean" would work great for people interested in the community people in a position to choose which product to offer to clients or people that see drupal in a pure financial practical view might not take the time to figure out what it means.

To throw something in myself:
Drupal | The Web Management System
Drupal | Web Management System
Drupal | Web Management Framework

I haven't even decided yet for myself where I would want the slogan to aim. However I'm asking myself: Should the slogan describe what drupal is or what the spirit of drupal (community) is?

Sebastian

I agree with the points made by KarenS, adding these to the list:

Drupal | Your web toolkit
Drupal | Your engine for the web
Drupal | Webtools for the world
Drupal | Humanity online
Drupal | For online living
Drupal | Made by humans

Some thoughts:

Drupal | Control your Content Flow
Drupal | Content Management Framework
Drupal | Empowering Web Construction

I'd like a more descriptive slogan whilst preserving the mystic around the name and creating more appeal to a broader audience. Alas, not an easy task..

Drupal is a "open source web collaboration and publishing platform" :) (http://acquia.com/press-release-1)

IMHO, I'm strongly in favor of a new "positioning" for Drupal. "Positioning" > "slogan," but slogan arises from positioning.

After having spent months raising capital to start Acquia with Dries, it is clear to me that if somebody doesn't know what Drupal is, it's very hard for them to figure it out. The Drupal community knows what it is, but it's hard for a newbie to really grok it; particularly if they're not a coder.

Dries and I share a key goal:

Grow the number of sites using Drupal by an order of magnitude (or more), and make Drupal the dominant technology used to build sites on the web.

Which means we need to reach wayyyyy beyond the existing community - even to people who aren't coders. If newcomers to Drupal can't figure out what Drupal is (given its current slogan), Drupal won't conquer the world.

To do so, we (the community) need to be able to communicate a few things succinctly and effectively:

1. What Drupal is. Not a feature list; a conceptual bracketing. (E.g. is it a blog platform or a flexible set of stuff to use to build any application you want; what does "build" mean? - is it a set of tools that only developers can use (a'la Rails), etc.), or something non-coders can start with?)
2. What you get. Benefits. Quick, compelling, convincing, "Doh - why didn't I think of that!" style reasons.
3. Why you would choose Drupal vs. alternatives. A strategic rationale. (And, what do we consider as the competitive alternatives (that we want to sway you from using)?)
4. Why Drupal is good for the long term. Developers tend to think about their construction-phase needs when selecting a platform. But guys with white shirts, ties, and data centers with more than 10 racks think about the long-term care and feeding of a technology first - not development flexibility. The Drupal community doesn't talk much about that. (Ref: Ken Rickard's talks for the last 2 Drupalcons.)
5. etc.

In addition, it's useful to consider the things that came up for me while raising capital for Acquia.

1. There are a lot of CMS vendors. The market is termed "fragmented." There have for several years been predictions that it would consolidate; it has not. It is difficult to stand out in a large, fragmented market. What makes us think we will? (Or, read another way, don't try to win in this market; it's too fragmented, and too difficult to succeed here.)
2. Drupal site builders don't think of Drupal as a CMS. When we did "investment validation phone calls," the number one thing we heard over and over about fast time to delivery. "Drupal core + my particular set of chosen contrib modules = 85% of my end result. I added a theme, developed 1-2 modules for our purposes, a couple of content types + views, and my site was done." This doesn't sound like a CMS. It sounds like a website construction kit, not a "content management" system.
3. Vision. Dries' now infamous talk in Sunnyvale said "We've eliminated webmasters. Now we need to eliminate web developers." Though lots of people making money as Drupal web developers quietly expressed concerns about this, he's right in a key way: Anything that exists in Drupal should be as easy to set up as Netvibes or iGoogle when it comes to adding content blocks, theming, etc.. Developers should be able to focus on building things that don't yet exist. If we take Drupal module assembly to that level of construction simplicity, it's dramatically different than anything else available. What do you call such a thing?

All in all, we at Acquia have been thinking a lot about positioning. And frankly, in our press release about our capital raise, we punted on positioning. We wanted to collaborate with the community on this, so that we are all singing from the same music. Plus, we simply didn't have time to do this level of hard thinking prior to doing the press release.

So, mark me as +1 for a new positioning. And mark me (/Acquia) as somebody who will spend lots of hours thinking about this. (As you might expect, I'm going to be a fan of using "marketing" here.... In fact, when we announce our Marketing VP, one of the first things I'll have him do is to spend a LOT of time in this thread, adding high-caliber branding thought to this community process.)

While it's a bit controversial, I agree wholeheartedly that Drupal is in line for a branding makeover. Druplicon and the 'Community Plumbing' slogan have served the project well, but like a module whose code needs refactoring, we shouldn't be afraid to change things when the time is right.

Vision. Dries' now infamous talk in Sunnyvale said "We've eliminated webmasters. Now we need to eliminate web developers." Though lots of people making money as Drupal web developers quietly expressed concerns about this, he's right in a key way: Anything that exists in Drupal should be as easy to set up as Netvibes or iGoogle when it comes to adding content blocks, theming, etc.. Developers should be able to focus on building things that don't yet exist. If we take Drupal module assembly to that level of construction simplicity, it's dramatically different than anything else available. What do you call such a thing?

Drupal's flexibility makes it tremendously difficult to describe in a single sentence. Drupal works on two levels: the first is an administrator/non-programmer configurable set of tools for building content-driven web sites and web apps without writing code. he second is an architecture that allows developers to add new capabilities to that set of tools quickly and effectively. Both of those aspects are important, and both of them sell to different audiences.

One of my biggest concerns is the fact that building out #1 can very easily destroy #2 unless Drupal's development philosophy and 'best practices' for developers are firmed up. One of the long-time advantages of Drupal for devs was that it was relatively easy to click a new module into place to do a few simple things. The more configurable everything is at the front end, the more we begin to build things with a mind towards non-programmers assembling complex sites from scratch, the more internal scaffolding and configuration UI/logic needs to be put into place. Handling the edge cases that developers implemeted with a few dozen lines of PHP can easily spawn dozens of complex and baffling screens with tweaky override options and baffling workflow for non-programmers.

IMO, the future for Drupal lies in structured metadata defining workflows, configurations. Designing those structures to be divorced from any UI, and to be configurable via code when necessary, will keep the 'developer tier' manageable. Building use-case specific configuration UIs on top of those systems, with different tools exposing only the capabilities needed by a particular target audience, will be the way to sanity IMO.

Without an approach like that, I'm concerned that the drive to 'eliminate the developer' will end up doubling or tripling the footprint of the average Drupal site, but a programmer's detailed knowledge will still be necessary to use the 'friendly configuration tools' effectively.

Puzzle pieces and building blocks are two conceptual metaphors that work well with Drupal's architecture and strengths.

Drupal: Assembling The Web
Drupal: Build The Web
Drupal: Putting The Pieces Together

Not sure how much sense those make, but they're about evoking an emotional response that's true to Drupal's strengths and merits.

As a newbie, I've been pondering on these thoughts by Mr. Jay Batson & Mr. Eaton:

{ 1 }

Drupal's flexibility makes it tremendously difficult to describe in a single sentence.

{ 2 }

We've eliminated webmasters. Now we need to eliminate web developers.

I'm seeing those things now, especially the great paradigm shift. It's good that the target is to make Drupal a "DIY web-engine".

Good because it is empowering more beginners and web-ignorant alike in setting-up their own web-space. Bad if there exists a developer who is not a fan of "job description elimination" --might sound crazy for them.

Personally, I feel glad and excited that someday, there is going to be a way for new people to manage their own web-sites --freely. It's like one of the ultimate freedom that one can ever have. It's also like eating my favorite ice cream all by myself with no one scrutinizing, or, working in my pajamas. On the other hand, I feel worried about the pressure that this will impose on people "behind the scenes" who are responsible in paving the way to all these great opportunities. That's a job full of hard decisions.

On another light, I think my curiosity is going to kill me... Why just have slogans when we can make commercials? Firefox has done it and it made a very welcoming presence to the world. Mac has done it a lot of times, and Google even came up with an open source commercial. If Drupal peeps can produce cool modules, themes, videocasts and screencasts... then why not even a 20 second movie that shows what the user or the developer wants to know about Drupal? These slogans will surely look and sound slick in one of those shorts with a sexy voice over (Oh, I'm imagining it right now). Maybe there's a way we can describe Drupal in a movie... I don't know.

Other facts:

Firefox is well-loved by web developers
* if so, then the target market will also apply to Drupal since most features are highly compatible with Firefox

No one shies away from a good commercial. Plus the Drupal community have wonderful resources to work with
* Slogans --check. Features --check. Awesome Drupal personalities --check. And.. action!

Feel free to poke me hard if you think the idea is outrageous (that is if you can either get here to the Philippines, or, if by-chance someone arranged a way for me to get there just to poke me)

Cheers y'all!

marc.robinsone

I added some variations: "From drops to oceans" and "Drops make oceans". More descriptive and loftier than "Drops make an ocean", yet accurate, and catchy.

Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com

The Hungarian Drupal site (www.drupal.hu) has just introduced a great slogan. But it is hard to translate. Please someone translate it :)

Drupal: W i D e Open CMS Bah! Already exists

Drupal: Create the web of the future
Drupal: Deploy Rapid Unbrokable Presence Around worLd :) <== Maybe suitable for Acquia?

I'm not sure if the aesthetics should our primary concern. I've Googled 'open source cms' (without quotes) just like greggles at the start of the thread and every single CMS that is before Drupal (and all the big ones are) has either the words 'content' or 'cms' and 'open source' in the title (Mambo serve is the exception). Postnuke and Alfresco also have those words and they have a lower ranking - but that says more about Drupal's popularity. The ranking may be a coincidence but an uninitiated person looking at the list won't see the key thing in the title. Something like 'The internet operating system' might distinguish it in the long list but most searchers won't get that far. So IMO getting Drupal to score closer to the top 10 should be a priority. (But of course the links to opensourcecms.com and the Pakt award page will lead people to Drupal more reliably than a straight search so maybe I'm misplacing the emphasis.)

Dominik Lukes
http://www.bohemica.com
http://tuit.glottalstart.com

Drupal | Web building blocks by the community

Drupal | Extends your web

Drupal | Saving the world, one website at a time

.... Personally, I like:
Drupal | Content Management Framework
Simple and gets the point across.

If the goal is to make Drupal more popular, the best thing you can do is get an SEO friendly slogan.

I propose: "The Best Open Source CMS"

With the goal of making "Drupal the dominant technology used to build sites on the web." in mind, here are a few thoughts:

A slogan is just the welcome sign.
A good slogan will pique curiosity and bring a user in the door, but it won't keep them in the room. I think it will help to see the slogan as just the first step of a larger welcome effort to bring users into the community. A powerful slogan may bring someone to the front-page, but it's the longer, more descriptive byline that follows it, the even more descriptive paragraph after that, the list of things Drupal will enable the person to do, and the showcase list of prominent sites built successfully with Drupal, that will convince the visitor who's taken a tentative first step into the site it's worth their effort to investigate Drupal further and find out for themselves whether it's the best choice for them as well.

Which is to say, i don't think we need to worry about capturing drupal's power and value in three or four words. As others have said in this thread, it's probably impossible. Rather, all we have to do in the slogan is communicate it generally, then expand on it in the byline(s), and then expand on it in greater and more specific detail on the front page.

A Slogan and a longer byline to go with it
That said, I wonder if it may help to brainstorm not just a short imaginative slogan but a longer and more descriptive and specific sentence to follow and expand on it as well. What do you guys think?

Here's how Drupal's fellow web-tools do it:

Django
The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.
Django makes it easier to build better Web apps more quickly and with less code.

Rails
Web development that doesn't hurt
Ruby on Rails is an opensource web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Wordpress
Blog Tool and Weblog Platform
A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

All three of the above follow the same pattern: Product name, slogan, descriptive sentence.
Of the 3, I think Django's is the most effective. It communicates the most information the most concisely. In those 3 short lines, I know the name of the product, who it's for, what it will allow me to do, and the ease with which it will allow me to do it.

Would it help to try the same here as well?

Here's a quick stab at one borrowing from ideas presented by others above:

Drupal
The Website construction kit for everyone.
Drupal enables you to build any kind of website, from blog, to community hub, to e-commerce site, quickly and pain-free.

Drupal | Grab & Use
A free robust and secure content management system that is easy to use.

For myself Drupal has never been a CMS (but can be) nor has it been a 'community building framework' (but it can be). Drupal is an abstract in this regard (the thing I love about it thus far) and to me, it's more like Rails or Django (as previously mentioned).

It's a very basic set of tools like Rails that provide a CRUD interface to application development for the web (less configuring more developing - that makes me very happy)

I think the very basic problem here is that it's something different to everyone, which IMHO makes it incredible that it can reach so many groups of people with different motivations.

As a developer working at an agency that prides itself on its brand accomplishments I'd like to give my 2cents (lol)

I agree that its' very important to use the slogan as a way to get people in the door, once they are through the door, it's important to keep them by giving a nice short explanation of what can be accomplished using Drupal (as previously suggested)

My suggestions would be:

Drupal - Rapid Web Development (or deployment)
Drupal - Create, Deploy, Extend
Drupal - Web Made Easy (probably trademarked already lol)
Drupal - The Power of Many in a Single Framework

Although admittedly I like the spin-off of CCK (Web Construction Kit)