Last weekend I gave two presentations at Drupalcamp South Carolina as part of the Southeast Linuxfest. I also attended last year, which was the very first Drupalcamp that I had attended. It was an awesome experience and has directly led to the involvement I now have in presenting all over the US, and soon in Europe as well. This year, however, was very disappointing to me. The turnout seemed substantially less than last year. I feel that the sessions were interesting, but nevertheless I feel that the event was a step back.

This serves as a wakeup call for myself and how I look at the Drupal community. In most parts of the country, Drupal continues to grow exponentially and those camps are reaching capacity without fail. This camp, set in Spartanburg, SC, obviously targets a different market than most of the other big locations. The attendees of this event were much more focused on using Drupal as a way to build many small sites. Most of them cited Drupal Gardens as a great tool for very simple sites, but they all were having a hard time making the jump to slightly more complex sites. This is in stark contrast to how Drupal is growing in other parts of the country, primarily around enterprise adoption and other large clients. Is Drupal outgrowing these single-developer shops? As we all get bigger contracts, can the rift between small town developer and development firm get too big? Can Drupal cast a wide enough net to satisfy everyone?

All of these made me think back to Jeff Eaton's post on Tsunami (now Snowman) a few months ago and how we need to rethink the on-ramp to Drupal by catering more to the site builders, allowing developers to continue on their own with our new Minimal installation profile. Assuming this gets into Drupal 8, it is important to make sure we can target these small town developers again and help foster their growth into a CMS with many more possibilities than their likely alternatives. It seems like this is just as important for the commercial growth of Drupal as it is creating the next wave of talented Drupalists.

How is this affecting other parts of the country? Is this something unique to smaller cities? Is it something that's masked in big cities, because the big clients are increasing more than the small clients are decreasing? How can we maintain this balance and keep moving forward as developers?