Drupaltherapy, my Drupal training operation based out of the Boston area, turns one year old this month. So as things go, eight therapies and several housecalls into this effort, I'm holding a little anniversary party for myself. In addition to some new collaborations, new Boston trainingopportunities and a good start on a new screencasting series, I thought I would write up a small reflection on the last year of Drupal therapy practice.

When I first tried these waters in 2006 through some workshops at Cambridge Community Television it was clear that there was a very hungry audience who needed user and admin Drupal training big time. Offering many more workshops through CCTV and then eventually on my own ticket, I've had the chance to train, guide and influence several hundred new Drupal users in the short span of a year. Even more so, I learned quite a bit about this spectrum of the Drupal user base and wanted to share a couple of the interesting lessons I've taken home.

My scope of trainees are often stuck between a lack of in-house development staff and lack of funding to hire capable web contractors, and eventually seek out training opportunities to attempt their development needs themselves. I've learned that this not-so-narrow slice of new Drupal users have some specific needs. There are many, but four issues really come to the top:

Project management skills!
I've had tons of staff from small organizations who don't yet know how to manage process, workflow and evaluation - but want Drupal knowledge fast so they can get started on their new site. As Drupal grows in market share and popularity, there is a range of unskilled non-professionals who will need to develop project management skills or else flounder away precious capital monies on a project.

Language and terminology
One of the great comments I get at the end of workshops is how much more the trainees understand now that they have had the terms explained to them. Regardless of whether the terms themselves make sense, finally the trainees call things by the right names - greatly expanding their capacity to ask for and receive help through some of the best support channels in the Drupal community. The terminology is often acquired through practice in Drupal, rather than taught and learned, and the context is dependent on learning the right pieces in the right order that new users are sometimes in the hurt.

"Lite" tools in the toolkit
There are some superb recipes of modules that give developers the flexibility their clients need, but complex recipes confound many of the trainees I've worked with. Granted, as their experience working with Drupal grows so will their capacity for implementing more complex solutions, but this is a slow path for some. There is a great need coming from this spectrum of users to have one-stop solution modules, even if a one stop solution is not a bright idea. I try to identify "lite" tools in many of the beginner trainings in order to speed that user to the easiest solution. Sometimes I've pointed users to the Image module rather than CCK + Imagefield + Imagecache, even when Image is soon to be unsupported. This is when I usually hear a lot of, "But with Wordpress I could..."

Migration from an old site
And this comes in such a wide degree and scale that it's no wonder there are data migration businesses popping up. On one end, I worked with a Chicago police department on moving criminal records out of PDFs, and on the other end oceanographic researchers needing to move marine data into a meaningful format. These are not Drupal skills, necessarily, but certainly technical needs that the trainees have to address on a limited budget. With only a few modules to "help" lots of my trainee migration projects are on the slow, frustrating boat to next year's funding.

There is even a fair amount of apprehension for small and large organizations to migrate at all, because why migrate to Drupal when maybe they have to migrate to another platform at some other time down the road. Good question, right?

I like to cite the Knight Foundation presenter at the opening session of Drupalcon Boston when he said he wants to contribute to building tools so simple that even his grandmother could "do it."

There is such a high premium placed on enterprise level development and developer training that many of my trainees experience frustration and doubt when they can't meet needs or get help with Drupal. They are a huge slice that aren't served especially well.

So Drupaltherapy is playing a very meaningful role in the new user segment of the Drupal community, both for me and them. I enjoy working within and serving this slice of the Drupal world. And doing this for a year has been a lot of fun, getting to know a lot of people and seeing a lot of hopes for projects, and I'm happy to say this is where I'll be for the foreseeable future.