One of the items that has been recently brought to my attention is that those of us active in the community are assimilated into the 'Drupal way'. This is a hard subject to cover because many of the things Drupal devs and contributors do and the reasons for them seem obscure and insider-ish. It's not, it’s based on experience and perspective that is fundamentally different from the experiences of many of our new people. I hope to figure out some way to write some of these approach and philosophy overview pages but not sure I'll be able to successfully accomplish this. I welcome feedback on it.

Now, for those not 'privy' to the 'Drupal way' should be let in on this secret. It’s not something that happens over night. It's something that happens as you are active in the community and learn how to use and leverage Drupal. You see the answer in many many posts until one day, it just clicks. You figure it out over time and in response to questions being answered. It's not limited to developers. It's a philosophy open to site-admins, doc contributors, everyone. I also should mention, there are several path's to the 'Drupal way' and slightly differing opinions too.

Drupal is not a CMS in the traditional sense. Not in the vein of Nuke and it's descendants and cousins. Drupal's origins were not in managing content, it was in managing communication. This is an important distinction. Drupal originated in managing communications with people and experimentation.

From the history page, Drupal was a message board that evolved into a web technologies experiment.

The motivating factor was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development.

It's development path has been an on going evolution since then. One of the things people most seem to over look is the power of it's simplicity. Drupal is not a CMS out of the box. It can be a usable CMS out of the box with just core, but it is not meant to be. It is meant for you to take the core toolset API's and for you to add to it, to customize it, to make your own site and community interest group. One that fills your needs with no requirement to link to Drupal.org, no need to use features that you don’t need. Does your group need a GUI editor or a simpler solution? Rather than have one solution decided for you, you can pick the one for your end user population. You have that choice. That is what keeps Drupal core small, focused and resilient.

You can also contribute your solution back to the Drupal community and others can then benefit from your work. Of course, you have to decide if that's the path for you. You can be a responsible maintainer a work to gather a mini community around you to build on your work, or share and wander off. The nice thing about Drupal is that Drupal core will continue to be maintained and improve over time.

So, back to simplicity. Drupal isn't a blog, or news site, or forum... it's a tool that lets you build to your needs. Imagine a piece of paper and a set of pencils and crayons. If we were told to draw a house, you and I would probably draw different houses. The difference is in our vision, experiences and our capabilities but we both started with that same blank piece of paper.

Simplicity is deceptive. Simplicity is not easy. Simplicity can be powerful.