In the tussle among the many Content Management Systems (CMS) communities who are vying for more users is what might be the most common brag; “Our community is the most helpful!” As someone who works within three CMS platforms, i.e., Drupal, WordPress and Umbraco, I have found the Drupal community to be by far the most supportive. The community has many channels available for support. I have been surprised by what a helpful complement Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been.
If time began with the Internet, than IRC and myself are primordial. I saw IRC and usenet as technologies that made sense before pretty user interfaces had become ubiquitous, and thus their continuation represented the equivalent of primary digital water coolers for bearded UNIX admin types. I wrongly presumed it was irrelevant. Additionally, I had been warned that many IRC groups are full of hard-core developers who don’t suffer beginner or intermediate level questions with any grace. As I have recently learned, I was wrong.
The North Carolina-based Drupal group maintains an active IRC channel (#drupal-nc on freenode). Despite my bias, curiosity led me to check it out. Over time, the value of it became obvious. There is on average about 15 people, many of whom simply leave their IRC client running (and thus aren’t there in the “active and watching the IRC stream” sense) but there’s nearly always someone paying attention and responding to questions or to greetings. As for responding, there is ample brainpower on display. These folks answer and discuss esoteric Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Apache, and other supporting technology questions with enviable facility. One can learn much by leaving the channel open and watching the discussions unfold. The group is very eager to help all questions, simple or esoteric.
Since joining this channel was so edifying, I added another channel to my irssi windowed view; the main #drupal channel. The volume of activity is much higher than #drupal-nc, perhaps by a factor of ten. The stream is constant (irssi updates at least every minute, sometimes rapid-fire) and there’s hundreds of “nicks” logged in at any time. The geographic scope is global; and one must presume he is not conversing with a North American, which makes conversations much more interesting. Roughly one in three questions are the type where a cynic might respond with a “Google it” but rarely have I seen that. Indeed, even better than “Googling it” is some excellent functionality that an IRC bot, “druplicon” provides all freenode Drupal channels. You can pass a Drupal URL and druplicon will provide a contextual response that helps to provide clarity in a technical discussion. You can ask it simple questions, such as a module name and a question mark, and druplicon responds with summary project information. It’s a clever way to leverage such a combination of old and new-ish technologies.
Here’s a great page on using IRC on the Drupal channel. Actually, there are several great irc-related pages for drupal there that I just discovered.
I use the irssi command-line client and I love it. It has low memory footprint (unlike the monster that Skype is. Note to self: convince my single Skype-loving client to switch to a private IRC channel?)
So, if you’re going to say you’ve got a friendly community, Drupal has set a very high bar to reach. Yea, I’m looking at you, umbraco!
