Need someone to lead product management at your software company? I create software for people that create software and I'm looking for my next opportunity. Check out my resume and get in touch.

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Not a fork

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 16 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

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.

Recently Written

Video calls using a networked camera (Sep 25)
A writeup of my network-powered conference call camera setup.
Roadmap Outcomes, not Features (Sep 4)
Drive success by roadmapping the outcomes you'll create instead of the features you'll deliver.
Different roadmaps for different folks (Sep 2)
The key to effective roadmapping? Different views for different needs.
Micromanaging and competence (Jul 2)
Providing feedback or instruction can be seen as micromanagement unless you provide context.
My productivity operating system (Jun 24)
A framework for super-charging productivity on the things that matter.
Great product managers own the outcomes (May 14)
Being a product manager means never having to say, "that's not my job."
Too Big To Fail (Apr 9)
When a company piles resources on a new product idea, it doesn't have room to fail. But failing is an important part of innovation. If you can't let it fail, it can't succeed.
Go small (Apr 4)
The strengths of a large organization are the opposite of what makes innovation work. Starting something new requires that you start with a small team.

Older...

What I'm Reading