Small non-profits are in a bind. Despite the fact that they are small, they often need skilled technical services be it for computers or the need of a website. They are often staffed by volunteers who may have limited time or technical skills yet they need access to people with those technical skills and the time to help them.

Generic history

In small groups, their first website exists because someone figures out how to get a basic website up and they go on from there. Traditionally if someone wants an update, they need 'Bob' or 'Jane', the web person to hand edit and update the sites content. In smaller groups, often the person who is responsible and first put up the site is busy so things get delayed then missed, etc.... There is a bottleneck. Real life emergencies, drifting interests, volunteer burn out, all effect the life of a site. Neglect builds up and deterioration sets in.

If a group gets lucky and a skilled professional helps them out then they can have some valued services. But what happens when it's a custom CMS? What happens when that developer moves on? Then the sites custom features no longer get updated, the next person may not be familiar with the language, back end.... The site again suffers from neglect. The group fails to get it's message out.

Now this was interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

I understand that vbulletin is a popular forum purchased for use on a variety of sites. People using it and another popular open source forum software phpBB often use the 'Drupal forums aren't standard' argument to justify their position.

Neither are standard. They are like Windows. Widely used so people are accustomed to the same look and feel out the box. Not a bad thing, just not a 'Standard'. They are also dedicated to one thing, a feature rich forum rather then a feature rich, flexible CMS.

To achieve a similar setup out of the box with Drupal you have to do a bit more work, add contrib modules, theme appropriately and perhaps a bit of code. Not always the easiest thing depending on what you are trying to achieve. For those who take the effort, I think, the reward of a forum directly integrated into the sites content will out weigh the initial difficulties. You end up with a site that is and looks like yours, not yavbs/yaphpbbs (yet another vbulletin/phpBB site). It has integrated search built right in along with all the other Durpal features.

For those interested in continuing the improvements that have occurred for Drupal 6 for Drupal 7, please help out like minded others on the groups site.

Part 1 on the article can be found here. I am looking forward to Part 2.

note: You can tell they are using Drupal because they forgot to change out the Druplicon favicon. :)

Yay! The first draft is finally posted. The main focus of my spare time for most of this year. If you don't read the front page of Drupal.org, go read the new documentation path currently on the front page now and look at the attached document.

You can listen to some of the reasoning in my interview on the Lullabot podcast which was fun with my system crashing (seems to have been a bad sound card, replaced that and no crashes since).

As this is something I do in my spare time, I want to thank my wife who helped me find the free time to write this up. Without her, I couldn't have done this.

Dries posted about a need for more book authors on his site. Having done this now I think I am going to consider a more detailed book. I have to balance between sustainable documentation for Drupal.org done in people's spare time and something for a publishing house that generates a little revenue to justify the time and effort. I was approached once about it but the time was wrong and life / work hit me all at once. Now that I have a more rational idea of the process I think something may be possible.