3 years of Drupal love

Like many web developers, I’ve written a lot of applications from scratch and I inevitably got to that point where I thought, “It will be much better if I write something re-usable that will help me with any application I want to build in the future. I should write my own framework!”

And, that worked out great for a while, until I realized the fatal flaw with my idea was that I had put the emphasis on “re-usable” and had not realized the implicit “I write” part of it. Every little feature my client wants, I have to write myself. oh. joy.

So, since I was also really damn tired of having to tweak my clients’ content (“Add bike shed to the 4th paragraph and make that text blue…”), I started evaluating open-source CMSes, the usual suspects: Typo3, Mambo (soon to be Joomla), and Drupal (4.6, btw.)

It was pretty clear, coming from the I-need-a-framework mind set, Drupal was the right choice. Good code with a backwards-compatibility-leads-to-crufty-APIs attitude. And 3 years ago today, I signed up as Drupal user 32095.

And, I did get some well-written code that fixed my DIY-misadventures. But great code turned out to be the least of what I received that day. When you join the drupal community, you get people, not just code. Brilliant, funny, heart-warming, pain-in-the-ass, cheeky, supportive, cranky, witty, lovely people. So much more than what I was looking for.

So, on the third anniversary of my joining Drupal.org, let me say thank you! Thanks, everybody!