Crowdfunding Platform For Drupal Development Launches

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Crowdfunding Platform For Drupal Development Launches

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 22, 2013 @06:56PM from the not-just-a-money-laundering-scheme-any-more dept.

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."

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Puncops, run! by Tablizer · 2013-09-22 19:09 · Score: 3, Funny

What, are their sales druping off?

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Table-ized A.I.
1. Re:Puncops, run! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 20:03 · Score: 0
  
  Keep your day job funny man!
2. Re:Puncops, run! by Cryacin · 2013-09-22 21:50 · Score: 1
  
  Good GOD no! Imagine what shenanigans he gets up to there!
  
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  Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
destined to by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 19:54 · Score: 1

fail. dreams of bringing in $1 million + per month is just that, a delusional dream.
1. Re:destined to by dingen · 2013-09-22 20:42 · Score: 2
  
  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.
  
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  Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
2. Re:destined to by cstec · 2013-09-22 21:07 · Score: 1
  
  ...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.
3. Re:destined to by pjt33 · 2013-09-22 21:36 · Score: 3, 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.
4. Re:destined to by Cryacin · 2013-09-22 21:55 · Score: 1
  
  You know, they could just request for 0.5% of the income of the companies that used their system. That would certainly equate to more than 1.3M every year, and would mean more than 96.2 full time developers. (I'm not cutting 80% off that last developer for the team).
  
  Oh wait. That would make them a commercial company, like Adobe, or Oracle. Sorry guys. No salary for you.
  
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  Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Drupal sucks. by poptix · 2013-09-22 19:58 · 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.

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Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
1. Re:Drupal sucks. by JaredOfEuropa · 2013-09-22 20:32 · Score: 0
  
  Apparently it's good enough for the White House (and various other high traffic sites). Drupal is capable of handling high traffic, if you take care setting it up right.
  
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  If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
2. Re:Drupal sucks. by mmsimanga · 2013-09-22 20:34 · 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".
3. Re:Drupal sucks. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 20:45 · 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.
4. Re:Drupal sucks. by Zedrick · 2013-09-22 20:54 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I also work for a hosting company, and Drupal is not a problem (unlike Joomla, for example). Not even for slashdotted sites. Oh, we also use drupal for our own (very high traffic) main site.
5. Re:Drupal sucks. by JaredOfEuropa · 2013-09-22 21:01 · Score: 1
  
  That was our experience as well (on the one Drupal project I've been involved in). Especially the database load was a lot higher than we anticipated.
  
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  If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
6. Re:Drupal sucks. by cute-boy · 2013-09-22 21:09 · Score: 2, 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.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Length: 68471
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  X-Drupal-Cache: HIT
  P3P: CP="NON DSP COR ADM DEV IVA OTPi OUR LEG"
  X-Varnish: 403065529
  X-AH-Environment: prod
  X-PF-Uncompressing: 1
  ETag: "1379926554-0"
  Expires: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:57:06 GMT
  Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache
  Pragma: no-cache
  Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:57:06 GMT
  Connection: keep-alive
7. Re:Drupal sucks. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 21:36 · Score: 0
  
  Why do you need SQL servers if you cache everything?
8. Re:Drupal sucks. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 21:55 · Score: 0
  
  Why, to ensure everything doesn't come to a grinding halt before it gets cached.
  Drupal has been known to do unfathomably brutal things with/to SQL. (Though it has been getting better, in all fairness.)
9. Re:Drupal sucks. by Cryacin · 2013-09-22 21:56 · Score: 1
  
  Why do you need SQL servers if you cache everything?
  Well, someone hasn't heard of a cache invalidation strategy.
  
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  Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
10. Re:Drupal sucks. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 22:07 · Score: 0
  
  "using a cheap/moderate/expensive outsourced agency to build a Drupal/CMS/framework based site usually leads to customers screaming and the site failing under high traffic loads"
  Just personal experience.
11. Re:Drupal sucks. by epSos-de · 2013-09-22 23:32 · Score: 0
  
  Drupal is better than you think, becasue the other offers in this world do suuuck even more.
  
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  ~ Best man at your service.
12. Re:Drupal sucks. by Rhaban · 2013-09-23 00:00 · Score: 2
  
  "building a site usually leads to customers screaming and the site failing under high traffic loads"
13. Re:Drupal sucks. by mjwalshe · 2013-09-23 00:15 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah when I worked for an agency we had a few "drupal" and "joomla" sites that where very poor it got to the point that some of my team refused to work on them (basic updating using the back office tool not coding). They where afraid something woudl break after they did a trivial content edit and they woudl get blamed.
14. Re:Drupal sucks. by hetta · 2013-09-23 03:12 · Score: 1
  
  I'd love to know of a drupal-capable hosting company ... mine, currently, isn't quite up to scratch.
  
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  -- Henriette's herbal -
15. Re:Drupal sucks. by claar · 2013-09-23 04:29 · Score: 2
  
  I've had great speed on http://www.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.
  
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  I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
16. Re:Drupal sucks. by Steauengeglase · 2013-09-23 05:35 · Score: 1
  
  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 hacked together and weak. I don't enjoy saying that.
17. Re:Drupal sucks. by Tablizer · 2013-09-23 09:26 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps if Drupal Core began bringing more common stuff into the fold I'd have a different opinion, but as is the ecosystem feels hacked together and weak. I don't enjoy saying that.
  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, but create potential redundancy and version mismatches.
  There is no perfect solution, only trade-offs, and perhaps there is a least-evil balance in the middle somewhere.
  
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  Table-ized A.I.
18. Re:Drupal sucks. by Tablizer · 2013-09-23 09:31 · 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.
  
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  Table-ized A.I.
19. Re:Drupal sucks. by manu0601 · 2013-09-23 13:46 · Score: 1
  
  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.
20. Re:Drupal sucks. by RoloDMonkey · 2013-09-24 02:48 · 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 they don't set it up correctly. If you don't want cheap customers that hire cheap agencies, charge more.
  I know this sounds glib, but you wouldn't believe how often I have seen talented people bogged down with problems because they simply weren't willing to ask for the money they were worth. Higher rates = more money = less clients = less work. It may seem scary, but if you really are good, the good clients will stick with you despite the cost, and the problem clients will go be a problem for your competition.
  
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  Long live the Speaker Bracelet
  Rolo D. Monkey
A confession... by AlphaWoIf_HK · 2013-09-22 20:02 · Score: 3, 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!

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Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
1. Re:A confession... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 21:17 · Score: 0
  
  That was actually pretty good.
2. Re:A confession... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-23 04:45 · Score: 0
  
  That was actually pretty good.
  As opposed to your post, which sucks.
Good model by amoeba47 · 2013-09-22 23:29 · Score: 0

Drupal is an awesome CMS framework for web development. It's widely used and has a thriving userbase and developer community ( see http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites for a good list of Drupal sites. Such crowd-funding initiatives are a good way to enable users to "put their money where the code is" and support their favourite open source project.
1. Re:Good model by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-22 23:46 · Score: 0
  
  Drupal is a nice CMS framework to use if you insist on using PHP. There are better frameworks for other languages that are easier to maintain and can perform more advance tasks than simply being a CMS. PHP had a great head start but other languages are eating away at its marketshare with good reason. Unfortunately for Drupal (like all web frameworks out there) development is tied to the popularity of its programming language.
Drupaleer by carrier+lost · 2013-09-23 04:08 · Score: 2

I made a logo, 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.

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XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Drupal SUXXXXXXX by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-23 04:15 · Score: 0, Insightful

OK, I guess I will have to be the first one to be honest enough to just say it: Drupal SUXXXX! Like many CMS systems, they started off OK, but then got drug down into the muddy depths of trying to do everything. The original lure of a CMS was that ordinary users could add pages and maintain their own website without needing a programmer. Haha, it now takes a drupal expert to maintain the mass of spaghetti code and dependencies. And the expert always have to create exceptions to make it do what they need. If you go beyond a Hello World website you have a complex mess that even an IT person would have to spend a lot of time figuring out.
what's a drupal? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-23 05:22 · Score: 0

A collection of php scripts/code, that can generate new php code and html with user interaction, is called drupal.
php is a programing language that can be added to a webserver. the thus "super-charged" webserver
will pass php-code embeded in a hosted html-document to php to be executed ...
okay?