"Drupal, make waves"; also, MySite running into the spotlight fast

By Gábor Hojtsy, 23 September, 2008

From time to the time, the topic of forming a new slogan for Drupal is coming up again and again. Admittedly "Community plumbing" might be a bit worn out. One could only wonder if a new slogan is part of the drupal.org redesign underway now or not.

A prominent thread on groups.drupal.org lately was the Slogan Proposal Wiki which highlighted opinions from lot of people. It is a great thread which spawned Lullabot's "Do It With Drupal" conference brand even. Christefano suggested "Drupal | Making waves", which I think is driven home on recent mockups by Roy Scholten (not sure he made up this version) as Drupal, make waves. I think this gives more personality (ie. you make the waves, not Drupal), even if it has some negative connotations. The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms defines "makes waves" as "to change an existing situation in a way which causes problems or upsets people.". So this might not be the best option on earth, but to me it sounds disrupting in a great and uplifting way.

In related news, it looks like drupal.org's new face might be a Netvibes like "drag and drop-it yourself" widget screen as suggested by many people. This sounds great! And it brings Ken's MySite module into direct spotlight. This is what is closest to what we need to have drag and drop blocks with configurable content, even if it needs some user experience love. The only slight problem with it (for drupal.org) is that its current roadmap calls for alignment with the Panels API, through sharing common parts with the Panels module (which has "similar" features but for site admins, not users). What we have seen in delays to drupal.org functionality to perfect Views, it might indeed be useful to change plans at this point for MySite and do a straight port to Drupal 6 before remodeling it based on Panels. I think we will see some interesting debates here again on sooner deployable drupal.org functionality versus even better architected and generally reusable module code.

I think we will see some

I think we will see some interesting debates here again on sooner deployable drupal.org functionality versus even better architected and generally reusable module code.

That's definitely where this is heading :)

Ken and I have talked a fair bit, albeit not _that_ recently, about the merging of Panels and MySite. His comment (#17) over on Leisa's blog about a Panels Collections notion, which would essentially be built on a genericized version of the pattern OG Blueprints. That genericization is something I've been wanting to do for months (I even had it in mind when I originally wrote blueprints), but other work on Panels has been more pressing.

I think, though, that there may be a bit of a middle path. In my mind right now, there are a handful of panels components that either exist and need abstraction into a separate layer, or are well-sketched out conceptually and need writing. Taken collectively, those components do assemble into rather nifty holy grail (but an attainable one!). It's true, though, that I don't know exactly when all the parts will come together.

Incidentally, Panels User is the place I'm seeing a lot of this stuff merge together. Ken and I had the beginnings of a disagreement about it being the appropriate direction in IRC, but I'm posting an explanation on my soon-to-be-existing blog with my thoughts on panels_user, what it's supposed to be about, etc., very soon.

Sorry, screwed up the link

Sorry, screwed up the link to Panels User.

Just responding again to

Just responding again to note that I did finally get up the post talking about the potential future platform that'll provide MySite/Panels integration: http://blog.samboyer.org/content/user-panels-proposal

Re: Drupal, make waves

Thanks for the mention! I agree that it's a great thread. Now that the comments are turned off on it I wish that viewing revisions were turned on so that proposed slogans can be credited to the right people.

Riding the Drupal wave

You can download the first chapter of the new Hello! Drupal book. On page 15 there's a big title "Where will you ride the Drupal wave?". Although it reminds me a bit too much of Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today" I really like the drop/wave/ocean/infinity metaphors and how we can play with them.

Reminds me...

...of the baseline used by my friends at WCube back in 1996: "Don't surf, make the waves". One of the founders still uses it as a signature in his emails.

"Drupal | Making waves" what

"Drupal | Making waves" what a cute way to say nothing. There were far better suggestions in the thread. Hope there is a more democratic poll before something is picked.

great

Thanks for your opinion. I am just one of the crowd, who can have his own opinion. I am not sure a democratic poll would work, given that the slogan should work with the proposed logo and design anyway. By the way "Drupal, make waves" would not work too well with the current wordmark proposal as far as I see.

Drupal | Make Waves

I have to COMPLETELY agree with you Gábor,

"Make Waves" is a great slogan, with an fantastic connotation. Making Waves is technically "negative" but as someone who uses that phrase from time to time, I can see it in a positive light, and I really like it from a "message" standpoint as well since that's exactly what Drupal is built to do. The product makes waves. It's upsetting the balance ("stop rocking the boat" would be another way of saying it) and that's a good thing in our industry.

I'm going to have to check out my site. This is totally out of left field, but... a lot of what slows dev on this sort of stuff down is that we do it in our free time... would the palantiri in question have more time to do it if the DA were to come up with money to make it happen? That may not even be a doable option, but I thought, "ask" maybe it's an option.

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