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Speaking at WordCamp SF 2011: Suggestions?

Wed, 08/03/2011 - 18:16 -- webchick

On Saturday, August 13, I'm going to be speaking at WordCamp San Francisco, after being graciously invited by Jane Wells, WordPress's UI Goddess. :)

For Drupal community folks, are there questions you have about WordPress and/or its community that I could try and find answers to? Are there things you think I should particularly highlight about Drupal and its community before an audience of several hundred WordPress fanatics?

For WordPress community folks, um, HI! :) I'm glad you somehow found your way to this post! Are there burning questions you have about Drupal and/or its community? Any topics that spring to mind to cover in a 20 minute or so talk?

Tags: 
drupal
acquia

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I don't know anything about the Wordpress community.

I am interested in these even if you don't talk about them:

- how many wordpress core developers are there?

- how many wordpress core developers are Auttomattic employees?

(and to what extent is that part of their official job description - i.e. some core developers work for Acquia but that's mainly because they had been working on core for years beforehand and it's not necessarily part of their job description there, same with other Drupal shops).

- what is the distribution of those groups in terms of short/long tail in terms of contributions.

Also generally anything else about their core process and/or how that interacts with contrib plugins and themes.

- What is the distribution of long/short tail with those two numbers?

Ask if we can borrow Jane Wells for a weekend in exchange!

From WordPress:

  • What are their UI practices, is it always kept in mind when developing?
  • Sharing plug-ins and themes, are these different groups of people working on them with different collaboration practices; to what extent and what are the differences?
  • Any conscious effort at forging a community out of an expanding ecosystem?

For WordPress:

  • Drupal.org tools that support multi-collaborator projects, up to and including sub-ecosystems around Drupal extensions while remaining fully free and open source and part of the larger community (Views, Commerce, Features).
  • The extent that we've kept a coherent community around front and back-end developers, configurers, new users seeking support, business and marketing types... can all be found interacting in the same IRC room, camp, or issue queue on occasion.
  • Our first steps at funding what we communally need.

Are there places we have shared needs and should be collaborating?

i'm a Wordpress user who has just started dabbling in Drupal, so i'm impressed that you'll not only be attending WordCamp but also speaking.

i'm finding that the learning curve to working with Drupal is a bit steeper than i expected... so, maybe a little something on how to get up and running would be greatly appreciated - or a basic functionality comparison even. i'm willing to wager that the several hundred Wordpress users who come to hear you talk haven't even touched Drupal yet!

I develop sites with both Drupal and WordPress, and for me, the biggest difference between the two is that of community culture. For example, while Drupal's contrib modules are centrally developed with a hosted repository and bugtracker and so on, WordPress' third-party plugins are usually "owned" by a single developer. The result of this is many dozens of options for, say, Google Analytics integration on WordPress, as opposed to a single module in Drupal's case.

When it comes to third-party plugins vs contrib modules, there's no question in my mind that the Drupal Way is more reliable, secure and confidence-inspiring overall, but it'd be interesting to examine potential advantages to WordPress' culture. The one I personally appreciate: there's no political problems in getting a "duplicate functionality" plugin approved, since that's not a concern for them.

Submitted by webchick on

Thanks for the input, folks. Unfortunately, due to unforseen circumstances, I will not be able to attend after all. Jane and I are going to work on a plan for another cross-project opportunity in the future.

Submitted by Richard (not verified) on

I just read this post. But maybe useful, so I'm going straight to the point:

1.) Let's take her a Drupal tour, on topic we did tested (maybe with recorded video) , and ask how she think Drupal can be improved.
2.) Let's take her a Drupal code tour, what she want to have to improved usability, readability.

I mean we may not exactly ask the question straight. But you know, we can really have expert review from Wordpress perspective, without actually doing real review ;)

Submitted by Dave (not verified) on

I enjoyed your sppech at Sandcamp. The problem with Drupal non growing 5% (approx) market share is it's complexity with newbie users. If you ever want that market share to grow and become more popular, you need to provide more step by step instructions and simplify the interface, all the options can still be on the interface, just have them turned off for newbie users. Most if not all the newbie users just fustrated with it all and go to wordpress, and never come back. Wordpress is simplier interface and the plugins (modules in drupal) work from the start. -- Angie you are great, but things need to change!