The folks at South by Southwest (SXSW) recently posted the audio podcast of Content Management System Roundup, the panel of CMS experts that I hosted there back in March. Even though I was fighting a losing battle with the flu and pumped full of DayQuil at the time, I think the session went very well, and the feedback that we got was quite positive. Matt McDermott, Jeff Eaton, Mike Essl, and Tiffany Farriss all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the work that they did to make it such a great session.

One of the things that really struck me about the experience was the tremendous amount of interest in Drupal among the folks who attended our session. Nearly all of the questions in the Q&A sessions were about Drupal, and when Jeff asked how many people in the audience had heard of the software, nearly everyone raised their hand. What's significant about this is that there were close to 1,500 people who attended our session; we had just been at Drupalcon in Boston the previous week, and that entire conference dedicated to Drupal had an attendance of around 850 people.

This disparity in numbers is made more significant when you consider that the audience at SXSW is pretty different from the one at Drupalcon. While Drupalcon is primarily attended by programmers and Web developers who specifically work with Drupal, SXSW attracts a wider audience that includes people involved in all aspects of interactive technology. This tells me that there's a whole lot of people who are interested in and using Drupal that are not currently part of the traditional developer community.

As the popularity of Drupal continues to grow, it's inevitable that the majority of its users will become people who are not involved in or even aware of the community that develops it. There's nothing wrong with that: in fact, in the long run it's a good thing. It's a testament to the quality of the software if people are able to build and use Drupal Web sites without having to rely on others for support.

The Drupal community has done a great job of building software that solves the problems that a wide variety of people face, and as long as we continue to work toward meeting the needs and concerns of this "silent majority" of users, the project will continue to be successful. Recent efforts to improve the software's usability and make drupal.org a better site for both casual visitors and existing community members are very positive steps that demonstrate the community's willingness to keep moving forward in this direction.

But, as the old adage goes, communication is a two-way street. Because those who use and rely on Drupal every day aren't necessarily site builders or software developers, they need to make their voices heard. All too often, users tend to blame themselves when a particular piece of software doesn't work the way that they thought it would, when in fact the real issue is with the way that the software has been designed or configured.

When you're dealing with a system like Drupal that allows for incredibly complex functionality, the needs and motivations of the everyday user must be constantly considered and re-considered. Smart design and established usability best practices can take you pretty far, but in the end, there's no substitute for listening to the user and confirming your understanding of what they're telling you. In this way, the otherwise silent majority of everyday users can keep the rest of us focused on building highly functional, intuitive software that "just works".