Many of the Raincity crew are in Barcelona for DrupalCon, while here in Vancouver, the bonus balmy days gave way to an elegantly understated, greyish Tuesday - a few swirling leaves in the streets suggests hockey season is near.
Stay with me here as, to me, hockey and Drupal go hand in hand since my desire to publish a hockey podcast was the impetus for hooking up with Boris' big Kool-aid pitcher.
Into the 3rd season of shows, the site (besides being woefully under-designed and hardly an example of best practices) has allowed me to concentrate on creating compelling content (and enjoying beverages while watching games) instead of dealing with excess steps in my quest to get content to the people.
I'll resist the urge to digress into a story chronicling my process of publishing daily updates from the SLC Winter Olympics in 2002 - late night ftp batches, bleary eyed coding yet another html page, clumsy photo gallery tools ... ahhh but these times are gone as I learned whilst easily publishing Olympic Outsider podcasts and reading live reports from Turin Italy while sipping my cappuccino at 4AM - thanks to Drupal.
Despite my erstwhile status as a non-techie, through my humble hockey site (which lived as a static site for several years before), I've soaked in enough to know the mightiness which lay under Drupal's hood - the clean code, the sensible organization, the power of the community, the vast configurability, the myriad modules and so on.
Yet to explain why Drupal matters (ergo: is useful) to the non-techies is a whole different conversation. These non-geeks simply want to publish and distribute content (for business or pleasure) without memorizing arcane acronyms and learning arduous code.
So why does Drupal matter to the non-techies?
Whether in a business or hobby context, there exists a big difference between producing quality content and distributing your quality content to an audience - particularly in an efficient and financially sustainable manner.
Whether the content is a company publishing customers case studies as a lead generation tool or a rock band posting photos and recordings from the road - managing the content is key to success.
Enter a "content management system" AKA "CMS" - a CMS publishes, organizes and distributes content (words, pictures, audio/video, pdf, etc.).
This content is organizable and distributed granularly however you choose - the "concrete never dries" and the site is a flexible organism (OK not exactly but hang with me).
With a CMS, you (or anyone you designate) can add/change/delete content - anywhere, anytime desired. * (sorta - some restrictions apply)
With a CMS you publish your content in all sorts of ways: articles, books, galleries, lists, directories ... and organize the content thematically, chronilogically, alphabetically, by author, whatever works ...
Unlike "static" websites, content, code, and design are all separate components displayed together on the screen and managed separately.
Functionality to your CMS is added by activating modules rather than ground up coding. Modules are built by community members and/or someone you hire and then contribute back to the community for karmic good.
Yes there is an organization who manage the community and set standards for the code, visit and particiapte at http://drupal.org.
Drupal is not the only content management system - there are other tools, both open and proprietary.
We like Drupal because the design is sensible and made from standard stuff and the development community has some sort of critical mass.
In short, with Drupal, you can publish and distribute your content without burying oneself in a basement for months to learn new tools.