Geek Austin Aaron Stanush, of Four Kitchens, on things Drupal

<understatement>Four Kitchens is one of the premier Drupal consulting firms</understatement>. Fortunately, they call Austin home. In the last few months, I've had the opportunity to work with and get to know them. Aaron Stanush, one of Four Kitchen's co-founders, is also a member of the Drupal.org Redesign Team. I recently coerced him into meeting me for coffee and talking about Drupal.

Lynn Bender: Following your trip to Paris to work on the upgrade and redesign of the Drupal.org, you took the lead on the redesign effort. That's a massive site. How is the process going?

Aaron Stanush: One of the things that really helped focus the redesign effort was that we had an actual style guide to work off of. The Drupal Association hired Mark Boulton Design to rebrand the Drupal product as well as the drupal.org website. Even with a rich style guide, it's a massive site and it takes awhile for the community to decide the best way to re-engineer the content/layout or to remove elements all together.

Lynn Bender: Does this mean the end of the Druplicon?

Aaron Stanush: Haha. The logo everyone hates to love. The Druplicon could have never been a *real* logo for Drupal because it's GPL-licensed. MBD has designed a new wordmark that will finally provide Drupal with a proper logo. I have no doubt the community will continue to Photoshop the beloved Druplicon for their meetups and DrupalCamps.

Lynn Bender: You come from an art/design background. What advice or cautions can you share with WordPress/Typepad folks who are considering a move to Drupal but are apprehensive about having to theme for it?

Aaron Stanush: In the 2 years I've used Drupal -- starting with v4.7 -- the theming process has greatly improved in every major release since. On one hand you have the various new technical features like pre-process functions -- seriously, look into these. On the other you have a lot of great community resources to learn from. Starter themes are bare bones templates that let you hit the ground running toward building a look and feel of your choosing. There are also a few books which focus solely on designing for Drupal. The most recent of which I'm very excited about but haven't got my hand on it yet called Front End Drupal.

Lynn Bender: Other than the books, like Front End Drupal, and the starter themes, are any specific resources you would point new Drupal designers to?

Aaron Stanush: Of course, how could I forget! During DrupalCon DC, Drupal themers finally made their voice heard and started the "Design for Drupal" group. The purpose of this group is to rally the design community, share knowledge, and make sure that future DrupalCons cater to the often-neglected themers.

Lynn Bender: So, it's safe to say that someone with solid HTML/CSS skills can dive right in?

Aaron Stanush: You can get pretty far with those skills, but the more customization you want to see in your themes, you're going to need to wrangle some PHP. This is where the books and Theming Guide really help. You won't need to be able to write PHP from scratch, as long as you get comfortable reverse engineering and copy/pasting some snippets.

Lynn Bender: Let me open a can of worms. I often see large companies base their content management/distribution on a proprietary system -- presumably so that someone can be held accountable, and can be sued, if the implementation fails. Yet, these 'enterprise-ready' systems often cost 50-100K, and the professional services needed to add the required features can be double that sum -- or more. For those wanting to steer their organization toward an open source solution, what are the most compelling arguments?

Aaron Stanush: The hardest pill to swallow with a proprietary CMS is that not only are you locked in to the rigid development cycle of the software, but your choice of vendors is usually limited as well. This means if you have a poor relationship with your vendor it can be difficult to find another one, if another one even exists. There are a lot of merits of open source software, but I think a lot of clients can appreciate it when you can tell them "we don't ever want you to feel like you're locked in to us as your vendor."

Lynn Bender: Let me take this a bit further. I've heard a few folks argue that enterprise tools like Vignette, Pluck, and OrgSync don't have any built-in functionality that Drupal doesn't offer as well -- without the expensive licensing. Are they missing something?

Aaron Stanush: These services usually only provide a temporary solution. Sure you can bolt-on an expensive plug-in to your crusty homegrown CMS and like magic your users can leave comments! To be fair, it's a pain to migrate a massive website like a newspaper to another CMS. But you're really just prolonging the inevitable.

Lynn Bender: One of the powerful features of Drupal is its ability to create extremely sophisticated taxonomies with multiple document and media types. The Drupal.org site itself is such an example. Since we all can't run out and get a degree in information architecture, can you offer any advice for people who are charged with architecting a multi-function site?

Aaron Stanush: I think as long as you're enthusiastic and focused on creating a well-organized site it's not that hard. If you're not constantly keeping the user's experience in mind, your site can become an unusable mess very quickly. The primary module you'll no doubt want to learn inside and out is Views (http://drupal.org/project/views) – almost every site, regardless of size, uses this module to sort and filter it's content. Because Views is so powerful the admin UI can be quite intimidating, but once you get in the flow you'll love it. Drupal's Taxonomy system can do a lot by itself, but you'll definitely want to leverage the use of Views as well as the many contributed taxonomy-related modules (http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/71).

Lynn Bender: Do you think we're on our way to making Austin a DrupalTown? What kind of things Drupal would you like to see happening locally?

Aaron Stanush: I'm surprised it's not already! I think the spirit of Austin's community totally aligns with Drupal's goal of providing open source software to build community spaces on the web. We have a large student population, so I'd like to see students using more open source software for their projects if they're not already. It would also be really cool to see the University itself using open source software for its infrastructure. I'd also like to see more local companies which provide professional services for Drupal. A lot of media and publishing-oriented websites are starting to look to Drupal. Since we don't have a lot of those companies in Austin, we may have to look at others. I know a lot non-profits are big fans of Drupal, and I think Austin being a capital city we have a lot of those types of organizations. My hope would be for those groups to not have to look far to tap on the shoulder of a friendly Drupal professional.

Lynn Bender: In the course of locating folks for the GeekAustin Drinks and Drupal party, I identified about 175 folks in Austin who are either using Drupal or wanting to learn it. Do you think we merely need to raise the visibility of the community? If so, what are your suggestions?

Aaron Stanush: The one thing that's going to keep people coming back to a meetup is fresh ideas. Showing off the latest modules, or better yet, showcasing your finished website. Open source software is an ideal vehicle for innovation, and Drupal is no exception. The more people you have to draw ideas from, the better the chances for keeping the stream of demos and conversations interesting. I think the best example of this is the L.A. group . Some of their DrupalCamp attendee numbers approach the annual North American Drupalcon. L.A.'s a much bigger city, but that's motivation and organization to aspire to.

Financial support for GeekAustin interviews provided by Smart Bear Software.