The notion of a Drupal community and how it interacts is not only complicated by the other representations of Drupal above, but also by the different virtual communication spaces hosted as a part of drupal.org and the way in which users create their own Drupal community. Users may interact with the mailing list, the discussion forms, use Drupal ID's to login to other Drupal sites, subscribe to content on other Drupal sites using RSS, etc. Generally, when people speak of the Drupal community, they commonly refer to one of the following:

• The Drupal development community which consists of developers who write code and users who contribute bug reports, feature requests, and other ideas.
• The Drupal website, drupal.org, which is made up of developers, site administrators, users, and those not yet using Drupal wanting to learn more.
• The community of Drupal sites and their site members, a subset of which can be seen on the Sites that use Drupal page on drupal.org.

The drupal.org website

As the locus of development and support, the Drupal website serves many purposes:

• Providing information. The website is a resource for information. It is where users and developers can find information either in the manuals or on the forums.
• Connecting users and developers. The website is where users and developers meet. The Drupal website gives users and developers a voice and enables them to share ideas, report bugs and help each other. As it stands, the Drupal website hosts an active community which is invaluable for any project, and in particular for an open source project or project that is developed in a distributed manner. When community members feel connected with each other and with the project, they help maintain the product, provide support, educate each other, help brainstorm, and engage in setting the roadmap. Drupal provides the infrastructure.
• Steering the project. The Drupal website is a project management tool which helps set the Drupal vision, eases development and steers the project. Site features which support this include forums, a bug tracker, a feature request tracker, CVS, a CVS log tracker, mailing lists, and so on.

The trouble with communities

The Drupal community has been expanding rapidly ever since Drupal first came into existence. Each step in its growth introduces new growing pains. Just like how a child moves from childhood to adolescence, the community moves from a flat structure to a hierarchic structure and from "no rules" to a more bureaucratic entity. It's a natural part of the growing process and the job of developers to address, prioritize, and solve problems during Drupal's growth. For example,

• Technical problems. For example, as individual Drupal sites grow, they become become increasingly popular requiring more resources. One such Drupal site is http://kerneltrap.org/, Jeremy Andrew's hobby site which is, at times, Slashdot-ed twice a week. Another example; in the beginning the Drupal community was very technical and consisted largely of developer only. As the userbase grew, more non-programmers joined to the point they started to complain about the lack of `normal' documentation and Drupal's bare bones user interface. Drupal developers were faced with two problems; (i) opening up the community to accept a new group of users and (ii) implementing the changes they requested.
• Information flow. As the community grows, so do the number of active and static conversations on the Drupal website. At various stages in Drupal's growth, new features have been implemented to manage the discourse. For example, bug report email subscription and recent post tracking. With 24,000 users, 22,000 nodes, 39,000 comments, and 100 GB of traffic per month as of May 2005, it has become even more difficult to access and track useful information. Dries suggests that one solution is a filter/moderation mechanism to sort the wheat from the chaff and to make essential information bubble to the top.
• Social problems. The Drupal community has had to learn how to set policy and how to make decisions. It develops processes based on experience.
• Better user documentation. Like the discourse of the community elsewhere on drupal.org, the resources available in the documentation available Drupal handbook is ever-expanding necessitating improvements to the collaborative book module which manages the handbook.
• Usability improvements for Drupal. As community grows, the application grows with it, necessitating constant improvement to the user interface.