Marketing

Hi Everyone. I wrote a quick review of Drupal 5. This may help you create your marketing materials.

This is just an idea.

We've built sites on Mambo/Joomla in the past. mosforms, an extension to build and output custom forms and store the input much like CCK works for Drupal, was yet a simple, but great component to design site contact and other forms for Joomla. mosforms has evolved and is available as Fabrik - Joomla Application Builder now. There is nothing that might compete with our CCK here, but the last line of the published roadmap for Fabrik sounds quite interesting to me:

How many developers/designers have contributed to the project in the last 6 years?

Paul

In preparation for starting the 5.0 drumbeat, I was able to get killes (thx Gerhardt!) to run some analysis on drupal.org. I think if we can keep up this kind of growth (and with the spiking numbers of developers, projects, and activity on the site I think we can) 2007 could be a sort of tipping point for Drupal!

UPDATE: here's my blog post on the subject.

The source XLS file is also attached for your own viewing pleasure.

Greenpeace UK is in the middle of an evaluation of CMS's. See http://importantprojects.co.uk/archives/000077.php for detailed information about their process. I will be making a presentation this Friday to them and addressing how Drupal could meet their needs. I am looking for help in this, specifically I will want to show them working examples of each of their areas of interest. Check out their requirements spreadsheet and give a hand here.

For the record we (CivicActions) are not being paid for this work. This is not a decision making regarding who will implement any of their sites in the future. We will give full-credit to anyone who contributes here (as a matter of fact I will show them this group during the presentation). We believe that Drupal would be a great platform for Greenpeace UK, but more importantly we believe that the Drupal community is the right community for Greenpeace.

According to drupal.org there are plenty of Australian sign-ups. No doubt most of these are not active for whatever reason. But what about the others who were interested once but moved away when they saw little activity in their area? Personally, I signed up with Drupal and then tried two other CMS systems before the worm turned.

Another thing I'm interested in is any group which might share an affinity with Drupal. Obviously we shouldn't bombard other organisation's mailing lists, so any news about related meet-ups and whatever would be more than appreciated. Anyway, the topic is here so go postal!

In Vancouver a few of us did some talking about the various Drupal companies "giving back" to Drupal in some way. Shortly thereafter Zack and I did some thinking about a more formal "rallying cry" type slogan that everyone (including individual consultants, developers, and end users) could get behind.

The following is my DRAFT proposal for a "3% for Drupal". There are still SEVERAL missing pieces to this puzzle:
1) There is not currently a "proper" place to actually donate money.
2) There is no infrastructure in place to determine how the money is used.

Eventually, I would love to see a page that lives at Drupal.org containing much of the following information along with a "donate now" button and several banner/badge images that sites could display (perhaps a simple module that would display this in a block). These badges would link back to the Drupal.org page (drupal.org/3percent ?) containing a nice clean explanation.

That being said, here's what I've got (please excuse the cut and paste from my outliner application):

The Draft

3% to Drupal Campaign