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Daniel Sipos
25 Mar 2013

This is a written interview with G+ Drupal community creator Chris Weber. I wanted to ask him a few questions about this awesome thing the Drupal community now has, but also about the man behind it.

I learned quite some interesting things doing this interview. But also had some suspicions confirmed. Chris is a very passionate guy when it comes to Drupal. I mean, you gotta be if you’re out there everyday on this 2800+ member community, moderate it and even host a morning talk show before starting work.

So enough of my blabbering, let’s see what the man has to say. And by the way, if you are a Drupaler on G+ and have not yet joined the community, reading this article strips you of excuses for not joining.

1. Who is Chris Weber?

I'm a software engineer at The Nerdery who focuses on Drupal and .Net development. I've been interested in Drupal for many years and now have the ability to participate in core development and build Drupal sites out from a code-first perspective.

2. How did you come up with the idea for the G+ Community?

Having a community for Drupal on G+ was a natural conclusion. I'm a big advocate for most of what Google does and I'm an enthusiast of Drupal. Putting them together was like Chocolate and Peanut Butter.

I created it mainly because I knew I was going to be pretty active in the G+ Drupal community as I tend to be that guy at the party that doesn't shut up about Drupal. That's really awkward when most of the folks there don't know what I'm talking about but I love explaining.

3. 2800+ members. What do you think about this speedy growth?

It's fun to see the numbers increase but what I'm most happy about is the quality of the posts we're seeing in the community. For the most part, we don't have to deal with spam too much. And the things people are posting aren't just links to things from Drupal Planet. They're posting about their own experiences with Drupal, what they like and what they don't like, and things that related to Drupal that they find interesting.

Also, we're starting to see a few examples where folks come to the community looking for help with a concept or a strategy and finding it. That's something I didn't think would get much traction but it is.

4. Drupal and coffee in the morning. How’s that going?

The "Morning" talk show was an idea that grew from a desire to connect members of the community through face-to-face communication. I love meeting new people and talking about Drupal so it was a good fit. Communities are stronger when you get a sense of a neighborhood.

The main reason why I'm still working with Drupal is the community of people. I'm fully vested. I like to think that everyone who is working on Drupal are my friends. I want to see them succeed and I want to work with them on anything, even if it means I have to learn PHP and Symfony 2, and SASS, and really complex JavaScript, and Twig.

5. What are your plans for the future when it comes to Drupal?

I'm working hard to learn as much of Drupal 8 as I can. There's so much potential there and at this point it feels like it's much more than a simple evolutionary stage beyond Drupal 7. Even though the term is overused I think Drupal 8 is a revolution for Drupal.

As for as the community on Google+ we're looking to make a big splash during Drupalcon Portland. My co-host Andrea Soper and I will be there and we're going to try to put together a morning show each day we're there.

As a side project I'm starting to explore how we can leverage the G+ API in Drupal websites. I'm hoping to extend Ryan Szrama's early work on the Google+ module.

Connect with Chris:
Google + | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Youtube | Flickr | Nerdery | Drupal.org

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Daniel Sipos

CEO @ Web Omelette

Danny founded WEBOMELETTE in 2012 as a passion project, mostly writing about Drupal problems he faced day to day, as well as about new technologies and things that he thought other developers would find useful. Now he now manages a team of developers and designers, delivering quality products that make businesses successful.

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