Mark Boulton Design

+ Fun.

I think that one belongs at the top of the list.

Educational belongs somewhere toward the bottom (where it won’t frighten people). =D

Drupal is to CMS what Unix is to OS....
Damn powerful but really scary until you learn a whole lot of crazy commands…

I need three words instead of just one. I hope you’ll allow this indulgence. For me Drupal is like hot apple pie. (Instantly people around the world just had thoughts about what that means to them.) For many people the mere mention of hot apple pie brings up thoughts of childhood, community and family. For others it might be memories of the delight of seeing hot apple pie on a dinner menu when away from home. For others it will be bake-off competitions and fund raising events. Hot apple pie with a lattice top, or a solid pie crust covering; served piping hot with vanilla ice cream melting quietly in the corner, or maybe with a splash of cream (or dare I say whipped cream).

Drupal, like hot apple pie, is community staple. It is versatile. It is made by a farmer and a baker with love--its consumption is evocative of people and places. From field to table, or from core developer to end user, Drupal is about people sharing in a common experience. Drupal’s new wordmark must also be inviting--like the smell of hot apple pie cooling on a window sill--the wordmark must entice you and invite you to share in the Drupal experience.

PS You are welcome to substitute “hot apple pie” for “cherry pie” or whatever pie your family and your community loves best.

Inspirational.

complicated & not user friendly

At it’s best: powerful
At it’s worst: tedious

Add this word to Drupal values: “Engaging”.

With Drupal you can start with something simple and later work on something very complex. You are limited only by your imagination.

Also, please stop refering Drupal as a CSM, in fact Drupal is a CMP. Look at Drupal home page:

Drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform.

Let us break away from the System (S in CMS) and work to make Drupal the best platform of our dream.

Thank you again for working with us in this big endeavor.

I love emmajane’s pie. That says a lot of what Drupal means to me: family. Drupal is a community more than software for me. It is the people I love, the people I bicker with, the people I rally round, the people that I love to hate, the people that make me proud and teary.

Aside from my personal feelings of the community, Drupal the software (if I can only pick one word), is flexible. Like an acrobat. A mile high. Making me catch my breath. Every time.

Dynamic
Empowering

I think those two words describe it best for me.  Hopefully this link is helpful, it lists some other examples that were developed before the redesign was officially picked up by your office.  It’s more focused on the slogan, but in case you hadn’t seen it, there might be some useful information here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/7634

Eclipse

I am unable to come up with one word, but a few key things come to mind:
1.) Many of the top drupal developers have a solid computer science background. I think this is an important aspect that distinguishes drupal from other cms/blogging software or platforms and reflects in the quality and elegance of code in the drupal core, many of the contributed modules (think CCK and views) and in the way solutions to technical challenges are found. How does one describe this? Robustness?
2.) Another thing that really excites my clients - especially in the non-profit world - is that they can start with a simple, almost brochure-ware kind of site and keep adding advanced functionality bit by bit. Want donor management? Add CiviCRM. Online donations? Add CiviContribute? Membership site? Add CiviMember. Mass Mailing? Add CiviMail. E-commerce? Add UberCart and so on. Again, I can’t find the appropriate word to describe this, but it’s an integral part of the whole drupal value proposition.

I don’t have better all_in_one words but one word is really missing from the list and it’s ...
modular
The thing that blows my mind about drupal is not only the great api’s that contributed modules can harness but it’s the modules awareness of each other.
Take for example modules that implement pre-existing views or implement views sort plugin.
I think this is where a lot of the power comes from and this synergy is one of the forces that makes drupal rock.

You missed an important word: Opportunity

For many people Drupal is an opportunity to:

- build a better website
- get involved in an awesome community
- make a career change
- learn new skills
- have a say in something important
- become a contributor
- attend cool conferences and camps
- find their voice

For some reason, I’m a bit partial to “unconfined” - it’s so open and non encumbered - which is what Drupal feels like (to me). These sound cool. Although I don’t know that they would sound good as wordmarks.

Limitlessly Unconfined
Perpetually Unconfined
Persistently Unconfined

Plus, unconfined sounds like undefined - in which drupal allows me to use it for most any type of content (not locking me into the concept of blogging software for example).

Free
Open
Educating
Drupal is free and open source software. For many organizations that cannot afford commercial software it is a very import that you do not pay any licensing fees for Drupal.
Since it is open source developers can learn a lot about how to solve programming problems - from easy to hard - and also about good coding practices.

I think there are lots of good words being tossed around but a wordmark isn’t just about attributes it’s a visual representation of who an organization or product is… it’s an avatar.

So, are we talking about the product Drupal CMS : flexible, modular, opensource, powerful, free

or the community of users and developers.
fun, sharing, amazing, collaborative ?

Looking forward to replies.

I guess what’s perhaps another way to look at the question is not what adjectives describe Drupal now, but how do we want it described and felt in the future.

“Drupal is really easy to learn and use!”
(this is currently a questionable statement to both developers and users)
BUT
It absolutely can be.  Everyone is mentioning the community and flexibility, and while I totally agree with these sentiments, I think Drupal of the future will take a page from Wordpress’s book, and focus on making the developer experience and the user experience a painless one.  The site should then encourage people to get involved by not telling them how powerful Drupal is, or all the kazillion things it can do, but how it will ask little of them in terms of time and frustration, and give them a great experience.

I’ll repeat myself in saying that, for me, Drupal is like a box of chocolates, it’s something new and unexpected to discover every day. It’s getting helped by people you’ve never met or seen before, without even having to ask for it, in an immensely generous fashion.

Sustainable

It provides a means of making websites that are sustainable. The software doesn’t go out of date and leave you stranded and it’s open source so you can always find somebody that can work on it if needed.

Drupal is kinda like lego - mostly you just go - oh, this is great, I can build one of these… just like this… and then if I do THIS, I get one of these, wow! And then sometimes you want something with a curve in it and you are screwed

Words for drupalish things:

Hut to Cathedral - build it to fit your clan
Meccano for mindware
Building blocks of fortune
Powered by thought, delivered with heart
By people, for people, with people
Beer and magic
Tribeware
Website Origami

Tough project, respect for taking it on…

Allen

A puzzle… interlocking pieces. You struggle, you figure it out, it clicks together right and you get the a-ha! feeling.

John Albin once likened using the Zen theme to a rubics cube, and that one should not “remove the stickers"- but endeavour to figure it out. I think that extends to a good metaphor for Drupal.

it requires effort, but the pay off is good. It’s fun!

Powerful!

For many people the mere mention of hot apple pie brings up thoughts of childhood, community and family.