Our Drupal journey has been amazing! It’s been over 7 years since we first used Drupal for one of our clients who wanted to build an information–cum–learning–cum–community portal. We were completely new to Content Management Systems as all our earlier experience were in building business applications – both web-based and client-server - for enterprises. With several days of research, we evaluated a few top open-source CMSs. Since we were planning to use Moodle for the LMS needs, support for integration with Moodle was an important criteria. Even though not absolutely essential for the project, our minds hardened by our experience in building large enterprise applications gave high weightage for a clean architecture with extensibility and scalability as the central goal. Here, Drupal won hands down.
The real challenge was in waiting. With limited documentation, it was hard, at the same time fun, to understand the design concepts and start building the site. Every day we would meet and discuss that day’s learning and try to arrive at certain conclusions. Since integration with Moodle was involved, it was quite a challenge for a group of first-timers to work with Drupal. We slowly understood the core architecture, CCKs, Views and a number of key modules that were required to build the site. Looking back, today we are glad that we had several challenges thrown at as in the first project itself which allowed us to learn Drupal in depth. The next few projects were less challenging – technically.
Drupal has grown tremendously since then. So has our association with it as well as passion for it. Drupal community has grown too. We get great support from the community and always try to give back in the best possible ways. We have conducted several training workshops for professionals as well as for students. We contribute to the community in the form of answering queries and fixing bugs. Our involvement in the community is getting deeper.
Today, a major portion of our revenues comes from Drupal projects. The reason why we continue to love Drupal is that in spite to its exponential growth – both in terms of functionalities as well as adoption-, Drupal has retained its design simplicity at the core. Its ever growing library of quality modules and passionate community of high quality developers provide no reason to look for another platform. If a solution can be built on a CMS, most probably, it can be best built on Drupal.
Being listed in Drupal Marketplace as “Featured Service Provider” is a great feeling. More importantly, it gives us a lot of energy and confidence to engage with the community at higher levels and make contributions that are of greater significance.
