Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Talking to Clients About Drupal

When talking about Drupal to clients, the biggest mistake you can make is to start talking to them about Blocks and Nodes and Views, and using other DrupalSpeak™. While some clients actually do understand this stuff, it’s been my experience the majority of them don’t, and frankly, it’s not their job to know it. I’ve had this argument with many a well-meaning Drupaller, who insists that “educating” the client is actually useful, but I see the same result every time someone tries: start speaking to a client about Taxonomy and Views, and watch his/her eyes glaze over.

My favorite way to talk to clients about Drupal is to start with the concept of a News page or blog homepage. Each individual post is its own piece of content, with its own fields, categories and tags, and Drupal’s job is to organize that content on the page for you. The client’s job (or their copywriter’s) is to give you those individual pieces of content, with all their various fields, categories and tags, so that you can put them into the system and set up the rules for how they’re organized.

Figure 1-1. A sample blog page (like this one, from a site I created for newleaflegal.com) is a great way to start explaining the concept of Nodes, Taxonomy, Views and Blocks to your clients. Just don’t call them that.