Not a fork

A question has come up here and there about what we’re doing with this community platform, especially now that’s it’s been dubbed "Gnomepal." Are we forking Drupal?

We have no intention of forking Drupal. That would be nuts. Drupal has such a great developer community, why would we want to toss that aside and build our own little fiefdom? What we’re doing is creating a pre-configured instance of Drupal with the right themes and modules woven together. With the custom code that’s needed to get it all to work.

Drupal does a lot of things. We’re taking one of those things (community) and building all the little things that are needed to make it work right out of the box. Much of it already exists either in the Drupal core or third party modules. But getting all those things working together and working well is a challenge for the non-developer. It’s not going to be for everybody and not appropriate for every site. And that’s okay.

Someone made this apt analogy. We’re Ubuntu to Drupal’s Debian.

We’re creating a way to install and use Drupal. We think it’s a better way for the types of sites we’re targeting. We think that Drupal’s power and flexibility makes it a fantastic platform to develop content sites on top of. We hope that lots of people still build their own custom sites using it. But for those non-developers who want to put together a site for their school PTA, their baseball team, or their department’s intranet, we’re building an app that can be downloaded and launched in minutes.