John Eckman — the CEO of 10up — discusses whether there is a singular WordPress community, or a singular Drupal community.
He notes that there is often very little overlap amongst communities, and WordPress and Drupal communities have pre-existing opinions about one another:
At Drupal events, people would joke about WordPress as being “fine, for a blog,” implying or sometimes stating outright it wasn’t powerful enough for “real” web needs. At WordPress events, people would joke about Drupal being big and expensive, and fine if you had a team of twelve developers and 6 months or more to throw at a site build.
He finished by noting that even within WordPress and Drupal, neither are monolithic, which I agree with:
There are, in both the Drupal space and the WordPress space, multiple communities, with interests that often overlap and sometimes compete. The open source nature of both projects means that often, those communities within communities can broadly ignore each other and go about doing what they believe needs doing. Occasionally, we see a healthy debate between communities within the larger platform community – and that’s good, as that’s how open communities evolve.
I like the chart Ryan Imel used in 2010 on WPCandy when he argued that WordPress is not one community, but one big community made of many smaller communities.
