Stay For The Community

The Drupal Community is, in a word, massive.

More importantly, it is friendly and filled with great people.

Come for the Code, Stay for the Community

I cannot re-inforce this enough. Drupal = Good people and a great community.

Most documentation on d.o tends to avoid directly name-dropping, but I will do so here so that you, as a new entrant to the community, can understand just why Drupal has survived the rise and fall of more than a few competitors over the years and remains strong to this day.

My initial introduction to Drupal happened in late 2006 when I mentioned in World of Warcraft Guild Chat that I was trying to update my Web Development knowledge. @illepic just happened to hear this statement and immediately recommended Drupal, currently The introduction took around three hours and started (for me) at one o'clock in the morning. Good times.

Honestly, I only vaguely remember playing in the Drupal 5 server 'way back when', but the system for contrib-modules was odd, there was no package manager, and the less the said about the Admin Menu the better. In other words, I was immediately hooked.

TimeSkip: Drupal Camp Austin - 2011:

Having been learning Drupal off and on for a few years from @illepic (and from scratch), I decided to attend my first 'convention' to experience the "Community" a little better. I already interacted with a lot of people via the #Drupal IRC chatroom, so I felt confident to not make a fool out of myself.

This plan worked out well as Drupal Camp Austin happened less than two months later in November 2011.

Imagine, if you will, a lone Developer armed with nothing but a semi-new Mac laptop, a love of Drupal, and a bad sense of direction walking in to a Convention with thousands of Drupalistas and Drupalleros without even the courtesy of a Wingman.

The first person I met, while walking in the door, is a friendly guy named Chris, who walked with me up to the Four Kitchens booth, where I learned about the Camp line-up, tutorials, free resources, and best places 'to be'. Chris, as it turned out, is rupl, a really good HTML/CSS guru I had already been learning from. (Really good as in rupl was one of the largest contributers for the module Modernizr, which has been integrated into Drupal 8 Core because of how ridiculously awesome it is. )

Then I went to my first live tutorial where a rather detailed speech was given on Responsive theming, the Omega theme, and the growing support for HTML 5 across the Web Development community.

Or, well, I tried to. I really did.

Unfortunately, I got turned around and ended up in an empty room where I met a nice, unassuming, and totally friendly Drupalista named 'Angie'. Angie escorted me across the building while recommending three books, five people to follow on Twitter, four websites to learn from, a full learning progression path, and explained the difference between 'Responsive' and 'Reflexive'. The whole conversation took about three or four minutes, but I spent half the session on Responsive Theme Design on making notes from what Angie said instead.

Then, on a lark, I looked up 'Angie' for the Drupal Camp participants. Turns out, she's kinda 'big' in Drupal. Drupal Association's Secretary, an Acquia employee, kick-started the CVS to Git migration (you'll learn those words later), and, oh yeah, was interviewed by The Economist once on her Drupal knowledge.

Further Reading:

Note:

As of writing this page, permission for name-dropping of the above has not been received... so don't tell.

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