An Open Letter to Acquia DC (or How I Came to Commons, My Experience So Far and Moving Forward)

Because I've become more fully invested in utilizing Drupal Commons and therefore become a more frequent poster here, I thought I'd share some background to provide a better context for my background and motivations.  I hope that the maintainers of DC find this especially useful in understanding where I (and the groups I represent) are coming from.

First, it's important to note that I lack any fluency in PHP.  This is probably my biggest struggle in utilizing Drupal since it is so dependent on PHP, especially for customization.  Still, Drupal and Commons are robust and have enough community support that I've been able to accomplish a LOT just through contributed modules.  Having limited PHP knowledge means I can't contribute in one of the more popular ways, contributing code.  What I do have, however, is an extensive background in database software development with a keen eye toward use cases, features and usability/user-friendliness/GUI issues.  I also have dedicated some time to developing some sites in Drupal.  So, what I can offer is some solid, experienced feedback in these areas.  P.S. I'm also pretty solid with developing Help documentation.

The path I took to using Commons is also important in understanding the context of my posts and requests.  This all started months ago as I was looking for the best way to host a social internet community for our local group of unplugged gamers.  This was an exhaustive search that included hosted sites like Ning, packaged scripts like vBulletin and other CMSs like Joomla.  In fact, my research was so exhaustive that it resulted in an additional web site, Social Network Reviews.  Here I included my own feature research and editorial reviews of all the hosted platforms and invite others to share their user reviews as well.  All this to say that I have solid knowledge of what users want from an online social community network.

In the end, what drew me to Commons were the following points:

• I had already started learning Drupal and was impressed by the extensibility
• I was impressed by the progress of Drupal Commons from version 1.1 to 1.3
• While DC was (and still is) lagging behind, feature-wise from both Ning and vBulletin, it provides more control/ownership as well as more promise for continued growth than Ning and doesn't carry the price tag you have to pay before you can even TRY the product that vBulletin does.

All that said, the following are what I see as stepping stones (or pieces of pavement in the roadmap) for DC to truly make this an Out of the Box product (yes, I'm saying it's not there yet).  Some of these points are in reference specifically to social community networks, but many apply to anyone that might use it.  Note that part of my motivation in putting this out there is the lack of a clear roadmap for DC at this point.  I believe I've seen acknwoledgement in posts that some of these items are on their radar, but no confirmation that they are "part of the plan for the immediate future".

• As I point out in this post and a comment here, the Group Options/Invitation flow for the OG implementation HAS to be addressed.  I truly feel this functionality will be a deal breaker for the vast majority of potential DC users.  Even if Acquia were to state, "We've decided we have no interest in supporting, catering to anyone but business intranets", this attention is needed.  I guarantee that a majority of businesses that were to implement such a model would want the abilty to create Private and or Invite Only Groups (for example, upper management would likely want to be able to collaborate privately, R&D might not want Production looking over their shoulder, etc.).  There is an unwritten accepted standard for how these sorts of groups are setup and work out there.  All of the sites and platforms I investigated, in fact, provide the same capabilities and workflow.  Organic Groups even purports to have the same setup through the Group Options set up.  Now it just needs to be made a reality.
• Group level permissions need to be addressed.  This issue runs a close second.  Individual groups need to have group-specific permission levels, specifically regarding the ability to create/edit/delete content.
• Forums.  My initial group is likely to work out just fine with the Discussions format that comes with DC out of the box.  This will likely also work for many corporate Intranets.  Many others, however, are going to desire the ability to create multiple forums within their groups.
• Documentation - I see this starting to happen.  As sportzilla has suggested, there needs to be some 'assume the user knows nothing' documentation about the basic features of DC.  The DC engineers don't want to answer the same question a hundred times and the community will be more than happy to reply "There's a FAQ for that" for you if one exists.
• Invite - Along with point one, the entire invitation scheme/methodology needs to be streamlined.  This is another "unwritten accepted practice".  People expect to be able to click "invite" put in an email address and have that user receive an email with a link that leads them where they go.  This goes for the site as well as individual groups.
• Some kind of Event response mod; likely either Signup or RSVP.  I believe RSVP to be the more desired/requested as it leaves less question.  With Signup you have to question, if someone doesn't sign up, did they get the notification.

There are other "pie in the sky" type functionalities (SubGroups, Repeating Events, Private Messaging) that I feel are important.  However, they fall to a second tier of necessity when compared to the items above.  In fact, it could be detrimental to implement some of these without first having a solid base created by the functionality above.

I hope that this information is useful and is a reflection of my desire to support DC as well as my hope that it succeeds.  I truly believe that if this list of items is addressed, DC will be ready to compete head on with any other platform they are targetting.