After our android hack-a-thon, Frank put a page in the MHVLUG wiki to start to stub out Android information that we’re all finding useful.  It’s small, and largely a stub, but it’s a start.  When I went back to shift a couple things around, I started to really wish this whole things was Drupal instead.

Drupal gets a lot of hate in the tech world, so I’m sure that I’ll get complaints or at least scoffs.  I’ll get into why I wish this was drupal in a bit, but first, some theories on why people hate drupal.

It’s popular.  There are over a million drupal sites out there, and you’d loose your tech street cred if you didn’t scoff at that which is popular.  I suspect that our high school experiences dealing with being unpopular probably shape that point of view.

It’s a big php application.  PHP has a low barrier of entry.  This is a double edge sword, because your average php developer is probably less skilled than your average developer in another language (Visual Basic has this even worse, as some time with the daily wtf will show.)  Being both php and big means that drupal security issues come up relatively regularly.  Like with wordpress, you need to keep on top of updates.  A 2 year old drupal install, like a 2 year old wordpress install, is basically a rusty door waiting to fall off.

People learn one tool, then try to make the world out of it.  I’ll brush off the first 2 complaints, as I think they are both addressable.  When talking to O’Connor recently, I found a much more reasonable complaint, which he was in the middle of.  Drupal is a content management system, and if you use it for semi structured content storage and display (i.e. a ghetto database), it’s great.  But because it has a module structure, a lot of people turn Drupal into a web application development framework…. which it really is not.  If you want that, check out rails, django, cake-php or something that actually gives you that level of control.  This is a standard issue – if you have a hammer, everything looks like nails.

If I was doing mhvlug.org over from scratch, it would be with Drupal.

What I’ve found over the last almost 7 years with MHVLUG is that being a wiki was better than being a static website, but that the number of edittors for the site is still in the single digits.  We’re a group of 150 people on the mailing list, 20 – 30 at a monthly meeting, 10 – 12 at our monthly lunch.  It’s a solid community, but it’s one with a pretty well defined reach, that’s been more or less constant now for at least the last 4 years.  People are fading in at basically exactly the same rate as people are moving away or fading out.

The bulk of what gets updated is information around the meetings.  If that was stored in a semi-structured way, it would be a whole lot easier to update in one place, and have it viewed different ways in different places.  If I didn’t have a project list queued out the door, around the block, down the hill, and… well you get the point, I’d seriously think about this one.

I’m pretty happy with how things are coming together in exactly this way when it comes to the farm website build on drupal.  Now that I understand what the right “types” structure is for the farm, the rest of it is just falling into place.

So for people looking to put up a website for a community in this day and age, I’d highly suggest that drupal is a good place to start.  Yes, you’ll catch grief from your other tech friends, but such is life.  Long term, I think it’s a pretty good call.

Update: I ended up redoing the MHVLUG website as a drupal site, with an extensive writeup on how.