This post is part of an ongoing series detailing the new personas that have been drawn up as part of our Drupal.org user research.

Chris Ohmstede is based out of Los Angeles, California. An experienced programmer, Chris is new to Drupal but already identifies as a skilled persona. Several months ago, Chris discovered Drupal as he was looking for solutions to build a website for hosting a program he wrote.

"I spent a number of years in the banking industry, and in that industry banks are constantly making connections to everything. I was always running in to problems when things couldn’t connect— it was always an issue trying to figure out what was actually going on. Over the years, I wrote a bunch of applets here and there to figure out what the problems were, and my program whycanticonnect is a conglomeration of those applets that work across operating systems, mobile— I’ve got cloud services approaching me about it, too.

Wanted: Custom Functionality

“Originally, I was hosting my project for download using a different CMS option, but things weren't working properly. Finally, I hit a point where I said “I’ve got to make a change.” I initially went to Drupal because I use Linux as my OS, and Drupal is one of the only CMSs available out of the repositories. I saw that, went and did some research, and Drupal looked big and well organized. One of the cool things that caught my attention is that I could Google around and see that everything I needed was already built. I never had to ask for any help — I was able to roll on through and put my site together easily."

“Also, one of the reasons why I selected Drupal was that I've released my product in 12 different languages, and Drupal looks like it has some decent translation services coming in. I want my site to be usable in all 12 languages I support."

After downloading Drupal, Chris relied on his technical knowledge to carry him through. Though he initially encountered some difficulty getting the modules to do what he wanted, he found after some searching that deriving his theme would fix his problems.

"Once I derived the theme, everything got easier— the way drupal derives themes is perfect. It’s very object oriented, which is fantastic. The nice thing about Drupal was that I could figure out what I wanted to mess with, and I could build variables on the local scope and carry them through the whole page and process, which is surprisingly difficult to do with other systems."

"It gives me everything I need"

“The great thing about Drupal is that you're not limited in how to inject code,” said Chris. "I like my download module because it gives me everything I need. It figures out intelligently what’s the best download to go with, it builds a link and launches the javalaunch, so it’ll work whether java is enabled or not— which was a problem I’d had before. I’m very happy with it, and very happy with Drupal."

For the time being, Chris doesn’t plan to put together more Drupal sites — rather, he’s going to focus on maintaining the one he has.

"I have no desire to become a web designer,” Chris said. “I built my site because I know I'll need to change it often, and with Drupal it doesn’t cost me anything. As far as giving back to the community, I’m mostly focused on working with my product. I need to write an Android, Mac, and iOS version. I’m planning on submitting some of my modules to Drupal.org once I’ve got them in shape, and I’ve made posts for people asking the same questions and encountering the same problem as I have. Maybe someday down the road I’ll have time to do more, though I certainly wouldn’t make any promises about it."

Personal blog tags: drupal.org user researchpersona interviews