Why Drupal..

The first major decision that we at had to take at Yuva was about which infrastructure piece to use for the first version of our product launch. Our's is a web-based product. We want to incorporate elements that engage and inform the user-base in various interesting and socially-viral ways. We also want to provide group based interaction, public-private access control features etc. etc. I hope you get the drift! :)

Coming up with hand-crafted code to do all the above seemed a daunting and an insurmountable task given that we want to be out there ASAP. It was then that we started looking around for open-source alternatives.

Drupal and Joomla came up trumps in that research. The idea was to take something off-the-shelf, understand it better and then customize, extend it for our needs. Then come the difficult part of actually deciding between these two. Googling up can actually be a frustrating exercise. For every positive reference you will find an equally disparaging remark too. For every positive user case study you will find an equally pulling-my-hair-off-in-frustration use case too. Tough job!

In the end we have decided to go with Drupal. They seem to have a large thriving community and a lot of websites seem to be coming up on its platform. Additionally Drupal 7 (when it will be launched) seems to further improve on the capabilities provided and the user-friendliness aspects too. Finding good Drupal talent (to hire) based out of India has been an issue so far. But we are trying to build the expertise in-house, because this is a core-requirement which we think we  cannot out-source at all.

Will post back on our Drupal experiences in the coming months - stay tuned!