The theme of last week was 'knowing when to bend'. I was hell bent on making my living from designing and building Drupal websites. Except for the last few years every step of the way learning about drupal and web design in general was agonizing. The web is a place of great power and flexibility, but with all that comes a great variety in the way one can achieve a given goal. This ultimately is a very good thing, but to someone who is not innately able to look at and manipulate code, the innards of the web are a total nightmare for those of us who are used to having a few buttons to click to make something work. Drupal is getting ever closer to the dream, but simply having passion for the web and what we humans can do with such awesome connected computing power does not alone qualify one to be a builder of the web.

From a non-developer('developer' is coder speak for someone who writes code) standpoint the allure of an infinitely flexible content management system that doesn't require writing code is the future as we experience computing environments in the movies. Anyone being able to easily think of and apply functionality to any data and share it with the world is no doubt one of the main goals and promises of the web in general and surely that of the Drupal community specifically. That future seems very far away while looking at the problem from the non-developer side. After watching the Drupal project develop over the last 6 years, I read mainly the writings of developers here at Planet Drupal. These are the people who write the code and have the vision at hand. I now am beginning to see that the goal from this end looks so much closer since these are the people that are actually creating that end product. Optimism is always a good thing in my opinion, and I'd say that a developers perspective is chalked full when considering the reality of the ubiquitous programmable web. But I also think there is a bit of built in blindness, or rather too much sight that appears to be a blindness to the non-developers. I think what developers see as functional for a non-developer blurs with what is functional for a developer and we get a skewed perspective.
Personally I was kind of caught in the middle, seeing both sides of it to some degree. I am an optimist, and I believe Drupal is the best and most accessible tool set we have to build our piece of the web. But we are light-years away from my parents being able to use it for their own purposes. And by light-years, I mean sarcastically many years, but It is definitely an achievable dream. The things I can do with Drupal, albeit rudimentary at best, are just amazing. As a designer we can dream up huge concepts of how information could and should be presented and with just 2 solid years of training myself to use Drupal I can do simply amazing things; things of my dreams. Take the Views module for example. It is easy to list and order any content in the database with a graphical interface. For those of you poo-pooing the GUI or any part of views in general, you need to consider what it would take for a non-developer to do the same without Views. I'd have to learn SQL(what the fuck is SQL?) I'd have to write PHP, and those two things alone would take me a decade to get close to proficient at. Anyone who has ever asked the IT guy/gal, "can we see a list of such and such with the data from this and that" can in a relatively short amount of time actually make complex database queries with their own mousing finger! Amazing!
I think the Drupal community is amazing, but like any other community today, it is very isolated in it's views despite being in this age of connectedness. I like to write about Drupal from a perspective of bridging the gap between Drupalistos/as and those who still double-click hyperlinks. Last week I asked to be added to Planet Drupal but was rejected outright, twice, which was a little embarrassing since I know that I really didn't have much content about Drupal in the first place, but it really set my thinking in a different direction. There isn't really any room in Planet Drupal for writing like this as it stands. If you scroll through the feed, it is chalk full of tutorials, updates about module development and generally language that most everyday people would find mind-numbing or confusing. I propose making different sections within Planet Drupal for different topics. For advocates like myself it is impossible to write entirely about Drupal within a single post. There has to be talk of the situations and of visions of where it could be used, which involves writing about "off-topic" subjects. Perhaps this expansion of the small Planet Drupal is something to aim for when the Drupal.org site redesign goes live.