Crowdfunding Platform For Drupal Development Launches 38
angry tapir writes "A team of developers has launched a new crowdfunding platform — Drupalfund.us — that's designed to help accelerate development work on the open-source Drupal CMS, as well as potentially fund new training material and other projects of interest to community members. I had a long-ish chat to one of the co-founders about the goals of the platform and how crowdfunding can be used to push forward open source development."
Puncops, run! (Score:3, Funny)
What, are their sales druping off?
A confession... (Score:4, Informative)
I have a confession to make, my dear Slashdotters. Up until now, you've all believed me to be nothing more than an ordinary, weak Slashdot reader, but in truth... I'm a professional snap dancer! Such a thing!
Re: (Score:2)
destined to (Score:1)
fail. dreams of bringing in $1 million + per month [drupalfund.us] is just that, a delusional dream.
Re: (Score:3)
There are over 970 000 registered users on Drupal.org. If only 0.5% of them would donate $22.2 (0.5% of the average monthly salary of US programmer) each month, we would raise $1.3M every year which equals 24.3 full time developers.
But if 1% of us would donate 1% of our salary each month, we would rise $5.1M - enough to feed 96.2 full time developers. And if we add the money that companies, from small to enterprise level donate for Drupal development each year, these numbers could be even higher.
Wow. That is delusional like you don't often see. Why would 1% of the registered users donate 1% of their salary all of a sudden? They should be happy if they raise 1% of that.
Re: (Score:2)
...But if 1% of us would donate 1% of our salary each month, we would rise $5.1M - enough to feed 96.2 full time developers...
Wow. That is delusional like you don't often see.
True, they aren't typically this cheap. Usually they want 10% of your salary to promise that everything will be swell after you die, as long as you followed their orders. This one's on sale.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh wait. That would make them a commercial company, like Adobe, or Oracle. Sorry guys. No salary for you.
Re:destined to (Score:4, Insightful)
To add to the delusion, check those figures. 970000 * 0.5% * 0.5% = 24.25, so their figures check out only if employing someone costs no more than their salary. Reality check: it costs between 50% and 100% more. They also assume that two dozen developers won't need any management. And frankly they would be better off employing 6 technical writers to document the system.
Drupal sucks. (Score:2)
I work for a hosting company, Drupal is the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen, along with all the other CMS/"frameworks".
These people hire some cheap agency (usually outsourced), they throw something together with Drupal, then the customer screams and yells when it completely fails at actual high traffic loads.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Drupal is capable of handling high traffic, if you spend a large amount of money on hardware, especially MySQL servers, and cache the hell out of everything.
FTFY. I say that as someone who's dealt with Drupal performance issues for nearly a decade.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you need SQL servers if you cache everything?
Well, someone hasn't heard of a cache invalidation strategy.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
First, they are serving content from a varnish cache. That is how they cope with the load. Which is fine for anonymous users, but it's not really Drupal handling the load.
Drupal sucks badly for personalised content. Just look at the simple advice myphpadmin gives to see how badly it's tables are indexed by default, or it's own 'devel' module to see just how long some of those queries to it's own caching system (mysql backed) take.
Keep throwing hardware at it and it comes good (at a price). So do most things
Re: (Score:2)
Normally I hate throwing rocks at any particular technology, but Drupal has some issues.
Using module A will often require modules B-ZZ and the maintainer of A has nothing to do with B-ZZ. If one module falls behind, often everything begins to fall behind with it. If you are just using it for a blog or small news site, Drupal is awesome, but moving beyond that becomes problematic.
Perhaps if Drupal Core began bringing more common stuff into the fold I'd have a different opinion, but as is the ecosystem feels
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that kind of a design trade-off? To tune stuff well its best to be integrated to avoid reinventing content access wheels and having version dependency combo problems. However, integration complicates and bloats the core: feature-itus. If you make many features be relatively independent add-ons, then you simplify the core,
Re: (Score:1)
Allow me me to rephrase, "using a cheap outsourced agency to build a Drupal/CMS/framework based site usually leads to customers screaming and the site failing under high traffic loads".
Re: (Score:3)
"building a site usually leads to customers screaming and the site failing under high traffic loads"
Re:Drupal sucks. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
I'd love to know of a drupal-capable hosting company ... mine, currently, isn't quite up to scratch.
Re: (Score:3)
I've had great speed on http://www.hotdrupal.com/ [hotdrupal.com] (no affiliation, just a satisfied customer). I use them for all my freelance clients. But I'm too cheap to use them for my own small sites.
Re: (Score:1)
WCMS is an immature black art so far, it seems. Nobody's happy with them. Plus, there's constant change in web fads where you need new gizmos and services to keep up with the Jones' and everybody wants them yesterday to avoid being left in the fad dust bin, meaning they are rushed to market.
Re: (Score:2)
Drupal is better than you think, becasue the other offers in this world do suuuck even more.
That may cease to be true the day you need to upgrade your Drupal.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
1. Do you offer a specific Drupal distribution that you manage, or do you just give the customer a LAMP stack and let them set up Drupal any way they want?
2. How much do you charge?
Drupal can be set up to be extremely scalable, but someone has to do that setup.
If you offer a Drupal distribution and it doesn't scale, that is your fault. If making it stable and scalable is "too much work", charge more.
On the other hand, if your customers are setting up Drupal by themselves, then it isn't your problem if
Drupaleer (Score:3)
I made a logo [botaday.com], if anyone wants to use it.
I love Drupal. I've been using Drupal 6 since 2008, running Botaday on it since February of 2012.