About DrupalRadar

Since DrupalRadar posted its first article in July 2010 we’ve had a lot of emails, tweets and DMs asking about the site, who’s behind it, and our plans. In fact we’ve been really surprised by the response and how quickly it has come - we don’t officially launch until Drupalcon Copenhagen, and so far have only been posting content so the site isn’t empty at launch! I guess that shows there was a need for a site like this.

Anyway, in response to all the questions… here’s our report on us:

What is the aim of DrupalRadar?

As the Drupal community has grown it has become more and more difficult to stay in the loop about everything that is going on, and for newbies to get up to speed. And that’s just for developers - for clients and others who are not at the development coalface it’s even more difficult.

In most industries a trade magazine exists to report on news, events, companies in the industry, people in the industry and more. We believe that Drupal has now grown to a size where a trade magazine can be highly useful. In particular, as Drupal appeals increasingly to enterprise markets, this kind of reporting can become even more useful to help present the project to a professional audience.

So, the aim of DrupalRadar is to be the independent magazine for the Drupal community.

Who’s behind DrupalRadar?

The founder and Editor of DrupalRadar is Steve Parks. Steve’s background is as a BBC journalist reporting for the UK national radio stations Radio 4 and Radio 5-Live, as well as for the BBC World Service.

He left the BBC to launch a production company. Because of this, in 2004 he was commissioned to write a series of books on entrepreneurship for Pearson’s Prentice Hall Business imprint (see Steve’s books on amazon.co.uk). Steve wanted to build a community website on which readers of his books could share their experiences and support each other - and he decided to build the website on Drupal.

As with many other people, he quickly became fascinated by Drupal, and built some sites for other people out of interest and for fun. Then clients of his business began to ask for sites, so he started to do more and more, and hired another developer to help. Then he decided to form a fully fledged Drupal shop - Pilot Internet.

He’s now full time in the Drupal world, and wanted to give something back. He started by contributing some documentation for the Aegir project, and then has been working on some Features and install profiles. But in the main he wanted to use his journalism background to benefit Drupal - so he came up with the idea for Drupal Radar.

Do you have the approval of Dries/Acquia/Drupal Association?

No, not at all. DrupalRadar is independent. But more to the point these people are too busy for us to be on their radar, let alone give us any kind of approval. We have applied under the Drupal Trademark licensing scheme (first application was in late 2009, second was in July 2010), but haven’t heard anything back from either, although that’s probably because our usage falls under the automatic license grant category.

When you say ‘independent’ do you mean you’ll sometimes be critical, or publish things people don’t want published?

Yes, we’re not afraid to ask difficult questions, or tread on toes with our articles. But we love Drupal, and we want to help the project mature and grow, like everyone else in the community, so all our writing is done from that point of view. Also we don’t believe that news has to be ‘bad news’ to be news - so you’ll see lots of positive stuff on the site too.
We’ll also declare any interests in our articles so you can be clear about how independent we are in any story.

What will DrupalRadar report on?

We’ll cover a wide range of stories that are of interest to people in the Drupal community - but we are going to have a slight bias towards the ‘business’ of Drupal, rather than the code, as that is well covered by developer blogs.

Who built the DrupalRadar site?

The site was designed and built by Steve Parks (you may recognise the name from the paragraph above) of Pilot Internet. :)

Can I write for DrupalRadar?

We welcome guest posts. In fact, that’s an understatement - an offer of a guest post makes us grin from ear to ear with pure joy. We’d be honoured to have you write for us. There are just a few provisos:

• Your article has to meet our editorial and quality standards (we can provide information on these)
• Your article needs to be really interesting to our target audience.
• We will edit your article - but all changes will be checked with you. This is mainly just for quality purposes, and not to change the meaning of anything you want to say (though we will take out promotional plugs!).

Boris Mann has stepped forward to become a regular contributor - so watch out for his posts soon. Jerad Bitner of Lullabot is also in the process of writing a guest post.

Can I sponsor DrupalRadar or advertise on the site?

We’re still considering whether to accept any sponsorship and/or advertising. We want to remain strongly independent - but on the other hand we have some big ideas we’d love to be able to make happen, such as full professional coverage of Drupalcon, a Drupal webTV show, and plenty more - and that takes a bit of funding. For the moment we’ll take sponsorship for occasional special projects, but probably not the site itself. We’re not aiming for DrupalRadar to be income generating, just to cover costs of its activities and be able to fund new activities.
At the moment DrupalRadar has a budget of about £30 a month for web hosting :)

Shall I send you press releases?

Yes please. We’d also appreciate Drupal shops and other organisations dropping us a note with their media contact details so we can get in touch when we’re researching stories. So for example, at the time of writing, we’re planning a feature on the Drupal jobs market - and are contacting a range of people in the community for their comments. If you were on our contacts list you’d get a chance to have your say.

How can I contact you?

You can email us at editor [at] drupalradar [dot] com - we’d love to hear from you!