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Quicker Drupal adoption: The 10 minute challenge

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Challenge

Spend 10 minutes 3 times a week for 4 weeks answering questions in Drupal.org forums. When? Starting July 1 (2008). What's that? "I don't know enough yet" OR "I'm too busy developing core". Don't make up your mind just yet. Read on...

Why?

If you could measure adoption rate throughout Drupal.org, my hunch is that the Forums create a faster adoption than Drupal Groups, Modules, Issues etc. The forums are lacking responses and that adoption rate is slowly declining (IMO).

Newbie's live in Drupal forums. If they can't find what they are looking for, they will move on - leaving the love from Druplicon behind. In sincerity, why again, because you have knowledge that someone else doesn't. Chances are you started out in the Drupal forums. And, the forums need a new breath of life from the Drupal community.

Drupal Stengths

First, find your Drupal strengths. What are you good at? Theming? Coding Modules? FAPI? Drupal setup? Certain modules? D5, D6, D7? You decide. I suggest focusing on two areas of Drupal you are really good at (or two modules you know inside and out) during the challenge. If you created a solution, not available on Drupal.org, blog about the solution or check the forums to see if someone had a similar problem - then share. Think your strengths and your humble beginnings as a newbie - not about wasting your time on a newbie.

Finding Posts

Here are a some ways of finding the posts you can answer - using your Drupal muscles strengths:

1. If you are new to contributing to the forums you might start on the main Drupal forum page. To search by a specific keyword you can use Drupal forum search. Don't be afraid to use the "advanced search" feature to narrow your results.

2. Chances are you use a RSS reader to keep up with news on the web. All Drupal Forum topics have RSS feeds. Why not add a few Drupal forum topics to your RSS reader; give Druplicon some love and put your RSS reader to work.

3. Use Google and the site: command. One of my favorite ways to find content for a specific site is using the Google site operator. Here is an example.

4. Narrow down your searches using Google "site" command AND date feature in Google advanced search. By narrowing down by date, let's say the last 3 months, you can find recent posts quicker.

Thinking Like Newbies

This next step is actually hard. We have to think like newbies! When searching for posts to answer try to look for keywords that a newbie might use in the post title or body. Remember, they aren't going to know the Drupal lingo just yet.

Refer to Drupal Documentation

The Drupal Documentation (Handbooks) team has worked hard at getting good documentation up. Refer newbies to the documentation when possible, it will cut down their "hold my hand" time and mature them into adoption quicker. If you know of other sources outside of Drupal.org content don't hesitate referring the newbie to that source.

Summary

The goal of this challenge is to enhance Drupal adoption for newbies. The strategy is not to help anyone and everyone but to specifically use your Drupal strengths and refer newbies to reliable sources (Drupal Handbooks etc). If just a small percentage
of active Drupaler's participated in this challenge, we will see a positive change in the community that will have a lasting effect.

Poll

Use the poll on the right to show our participation. Feel free to comment on the poll to be automatically updated on July 1st.

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web