Is Drupal THAT hard? - The "Drupal Learning Curve" is a Myth!

So Drupal is notorious for its "learning curve" and the mind-bending endeavor that is 'learning Drupal.'

But is it really THAT hard?

Firstly, this question is difficult to evaluate because so many different kinds of people come to Drupal from so many different levels and types of experience.

You have hardcore experienced PHP developers adopting Drupal for the first time, novices that are deciding to move from Wordpress, complete noobs who heard the word Drupal and became psychotically obsessed with it.

For each group Drupal does require a new way of looking at how to build and organize a website.

I think that the biggest problem with learning Drupal is that people are doing it in isolation. In isolation and in a world where the materials available for learning Drupal are not easy to find and if found are not necessarily catered to the newest of new users.

The other problem is that people are trying to learn Drupal where they would be better served to be taught Drupal.

Last week I had the opportunity to teach Drupal 6 to two small groups of high schoolers at a charter school.

I had them for two days for an hour and half.

The first day was spent teaching these kids about the basics of websites. None had ever made a webpage in their lives. Two of the 11 had used wordpress to make blogs.

To many kids these days the internet and websites are like a utility or a car, turn it on and it should go, without them knowing how many cylinders are under the hood or how to change the oil. So I taught them about servers, domain names (they knew what they were but didn't know that's what they were called), databases, and such. (All for the first time, even did WHOIS lookups to see if their own names were taken as domains).

All at a basic level so that on day 2 when we jumped into Drupal, they had some idea of what was going on.

In and hour in a half over the second day, I had them embedding video, using different content types, changing themes, making and moving blocks, turning on and off modules, clearing the cache, using tagadelic, and creating taxonomy vocabularies.

Granted I did pre-install Drupal for them but I think that when teaching Drupal you need to get the user/student's hands on the application FIRST; really get a chance to test drive it, to extend the car analogy.

By the end, more than half were really into this building websites thing.

Granted Drupal is capable of far more than what I was able to get them to do but they were using Drupal.

Long story short, yes Drupal is a challenge but I think the bigger challenge is finding people to teach it and teach it at the level of the student!

So perhaps the learning curve is not a myth but maybe it is more (though not solely) a reflection of the Drupal 'teaching terrain' than Drupal itself.

This blog entry can also be found at http://drupalnorthcarolina.org/blog/drupal-hard-drupal-learning-curve-myth