Last year Drupal 8 finally arrived, and brought the question that comes with every new release of Drupal: when should I update? New releases of Drupal mean two things: new features and cool new tools, and the retirement of an old version. We got the power and flexibility of Symfony and Drupal 6 sites are no longer getting community support. Unlike Wordpress, which has well defined upgrade paths, each version of Drupal is a new adventure in upgrade pain. The more I watch people suffer with this pain, and the more I watch them try to find a way to do upgrades that preserve their site’s fundamental structure, the more I come to the conclusion that this pain is telling us something: we’re doing it wrong. Not because Drupal’s strategy is wrong, but because keeping all your content in the same structures is usually wrong. Drupal 8 should not make it easy for you to continue to use an old strategy, it should encourage us to update old assumptions. ...

I spent ten years working at a nonprofit organization wishing I had the kinds of resources that large corporations can put toward their marketing efforts. A nonprofit the organization’s web site and related marketing are usually seen as overhead, and overhead is bad, therefore budgets limited. Nonprofit budgets are tight in general which doesn’t leave a lot of extra room for fancy services, tools, and consultants. Then I started to work with large corporations. Turns out, all that money doesn’t necessarily bring you people who know how to spend it well. Yes the margins are bigger, and there is less complaining about the basic costs of doing business, but when it comes right down to it they aren’t any more strategic than a small scrappy team of people in the communications department of any organization large enough to have a communications team. ...

The first major online application I wrote was a petition for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in an attempt to build support against the war in Iraq. The Iraq Peace Pledge succeeded in that it gave people a place to voice their frustration and helped encourage the anti-war movement. It failed in the sense that the guy writing the software (me) had no idea what he was doing, MoveOn completely stole our thunder (gathering 100 times more names than we did), and it didn’t exactly prevent the war in Iraq. ...