How Commons came to be

In late 2009, the sales team and management at Acquia kept hearing from current and prospective customers that they were looking at implementing a "Social Business Software" solution from one of a number of vendors. So we started an internal project code-named Spinnaker where we did a bit of a "gap analysis" between these solutions and Drupal. The results were clear pretty quickly: What was missing was a packaged solution that made Drupal do these things "out of the box."

Well, that problem sounded easy to solve.

Thing is, we didn't want to build some kind of solution in a vacuum.  We really wanted to have customers drive it for a couple of reasons:

1. Competitive targets.  These customers were actively looking at solutions from vendors like Jive Software, Teligent, KickApps, and others.  These applications became the bogies that we could target.
2. Implement just enough.  It's never good to slavishly replicate feature sets; sometimes vendors implement things because they can, not because customers want the features. We wanted to only focus on those things customers wanted.
3. We don't sell software.  Drupal is open source. We like it that way. No way did we want to (and couldn't, really) build something and try to charge money for the software. So we weren't about to invest in speculative development; but we were happy to build things for customers, then invest in turning the collections of stuff into a solution everyone could use.

Fortunately, there were plenty of customers interested in building a social business site in Drupal, and we were quickly able to put a couple together who, between them, wanted the same things.  Our crack professional services team built the sites, and we then used some bench-time to add some things we knew we'd need competitively to those customer-driven capabilities.

So, what were the key design factors in building Commons?

• Keep it Drupal.  All the customers we've met with want to preserve as much Drupal-ness as is practical (in contrast to working to hide as much of Drupal as possible).  Our customer prospects are looking for both Community _and_ traditional Drupal web content management capabilities in the same site, and want Drupal's normal flexibility preserved as much as possible.
• Focus on community-building.  Most customers weren't looking for a project-oriented intranet solution.  Instead, they were looking for a site where people of like interests could come and have loosely-structured interactions.  They may want to create documents and such, but the likelihood is that they'll do Discussion things more than anything else.  So focus less on "project management" and more on encouraging user interactions.
• Make it easy to brand.  All the interested enterprise customers wanted to have the site adopt corporate branding as quickly as possible.  What they asked for was a solid, but flexible base theme that provided a wide range of freedom to customize. Some just wanted tweaks, others wanted wholesale changes. BUT, all wanted the process to feel like all the other theming things they'd done with Drupal.  (For this, our choice was clear: Go to our great theming partner - CollectiveMinds / TopNotch Themes - and build on their increasingly-terrific base theme, Fusion Core.)

We named the resulting bundle (Drupal install profile) "Drupal Commons" for several reasons:

• Community gathering place.  The goal of all the capabilities provided by Drupal Commons is to provide a community of people a place to interact.  Being that we're from Boston, and the place where early Boston residents did that was the Boston Common, the name "Commons" sounded good.
• Functions in common.  When we were building early Commons-like installations for customers, we identified the functions that were common among them.
• The common good.  We really like the sense of "building for the common good" that is so pervasive in the Drupal project.  "Common(s)" fit that notion, too.

So, Commons stuck. We tacked Drupal onto the front to make sure people evaluating it know it's based on Drupal.

The result is what you're seeing on this site.  We hope to continue to advance it's development - both ourselves, as well as get contributions from others in the Drupal community - as we go forward.  Let us know what you think of it; we'll listen to all comments - complementary, critical, and simply informational.