For psy­cho­lo­gists on Drupal

- Say, what does your husband do?

- Drupal.

- What is Drupal?

- It’s free software.

- Yeah, and can you live on it? Free, hmm?

- Well, I don’t understand what from, but we can quite make ends meet. He gives advice. That’s paid well.

- Why would they pay for it when the software is free?

- I don’t know, come on. I’ll ask him.

About Drupal, without the bullshit

And she asked. It was already midnight, with a long day behind both of us. We’ve been together for over a decade without her inquiring with such seriousness about what Drupal was. I was practically asleep when I heard a distant voice:

- Can you tell me without bullshitting what Drupal is?

My eyelids popped open; I felt a shot of adrenaline pumping in my veins. It’s now or never! It is my chance; if I don’t seize the moment now, I may have to wait for another ten years until she will reach this level of interest again.

Slow down now, don’t let her feel your excitement as it can suppress her curiosity, instead enlighten this whole with some mild analogy, to make the discourse last longer. No indoctrination ‘cause that kills the appeal instantly, leaving us at the point where she tells me to “leave that smarty tone of yours to your buddy PP, Kulcsi” with no amount of attention that could bring Drupal back into focus.

- Drupal allows you to easily create web pages displaying a lot of content to be visited by many.

- ???

- You can create such websites as zanza.tv.

- Is zanza.tv Drupal?

- Yes.

- That sounds serious. And what is pee-age-pee?

- PHP is a language they used to create Drupal. Let’s suppose that PHP is Hungarian, .NET is Romanian, and JAVA is English.

I didn’t take risks: to ensure exact understanding, I strictly narrowed down my choice of languages through the analogy to those we have closer relations with.

- Ah-huh, I get that. So these languages can describe what’s on the web, isn’t it?

- It is more complicated than that, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s say that these languages help convey content. Just like in the case of humans.

- Is Drupal such a language?

- No. Drupal is more like some jargon. There are loads of jargon around on the web, and we have immersed in this dialect. Drupal is like psychological lingo – although we both speak Hungarian, we understand Csaba Pléh or László Mérő to a different extent. The better I know Csaba Pléh, the better I am versed in cognitive psychology and the more ideas I have on how my mind operates. The more I understand about how the brain works, the more thorough concepts I will have about why people think and act the way they do.

- Just stop for a moment, do you state that through understanding Drupal I will understand more how the web works?

- Not necessarily. Understanding Csaba Pléh well does not guarantee understanding humankind in its complexity. Still, however, there will be an essential part of people, psyche namely, that I will understand better than before. If I know Drupal, I will, by all means comprehend to a certain depth how content management works. In this sense, knowing the web and adeptness in Drupal go hand in hand.

Gratis or free. Licensing emotionality.

- I understand that Drupal is a system fabricated in pee-age-pee used to create websites. What I don’t understand is how to earn money with it while it is free stuff?

- The thing is that Drupal is not gratis but free. One can use it freely, without having to pay anyone for the installation. It is a bit like psychotherapy and gossip. To comfort a fellow mum on playground counts as free psychological activity. If she needs more efficient help, she will naturally go further and turn to a psychotherapist. She will pay for the advice, and it will result in a professionally conducted, quick improvement. She does not have to pay anyone for her psyche, feelings, or emotional life. Psychologists have not yet invented the license for emotionality. Thus mind is an open-source platform. We all live our emotional lives, forming the universal mind together.

- Sober up, Kulcsi! I am not interested in your lofty ideas. Let’s stay on the ground, okay? Just tell me what was the business last Friday in your whole company’s working on sharing your code back to the community? Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to work on a project that pays?

- Drupal is some stuff that develops as a result of the collective work of numerous programmers. There is a segment of the market that uses Drupal without demanding professional assistance or contributing to Drupal’s development. There is another segment who face problems serious enough not to try to resolve their web development needs on their own.

- I see. These companies need your kind, having judged that using Drupal is on a different scale from developing Drupal. These latter will always have more in-depth knowledge of the system than the former, I presume?

- Definitely. We work full steam ahead to share our development with the community so that we can be the one's thanks to whom Drupal is as it is. We will grasp its construction and logic deeply, for we have also contributed to shaping it so. We do not learn but form its operation. It is a huge difference. Actively participating in the process results in such empirical knowledge that cannot be achieved from an external viewpoint, via consumer attitude. It’s all that simple.

- Let’s go to sleep.