About Community Technology

"Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking." - Rollo May

About Me

Hello my name is Ian Moran and I’m a Drupal developer based in New Jersey available for consultancy, design, and development work.
Originally from the United Kingdom I came to the US in 2010 having worked in a variety of roles in higher education with the recurring theme of empowering people through the use of technology.

I enjoy working with organizations with a similar mission and vision that usually includes small to medium nonprofits and ethical businesses, and I try to balance my year between paid and voluntary work depending on the resources available for the projects. I'm always happy to discuss budget limitations and areas where I can assist with achieving the objectives of the project.

You can read more about my work history at LinkedIn

Why Community Technology

Community Technology was chosen because I believe in the strength of community to effect positive change and that technology plays an active part in facilitating campaigning, communication, and education.

Why Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management framework that allows site builders and developers to add a great deal of functionality quickly and at little cost. It has the advantage of allowing project ideas to be tested with minimal coding, but also has a modular structure to be able to scale into highly sophisticated websites.

My first experience of a content management system was in 2009 when I needed to create an e-commerce platform very quickly for UCL Union and chose osCommerce. Although it did the job and was successfully used for another three years the code was unwieldy and each addition made it harder to maintain the core and manage any security patches.

I then dabbled with Wordpress and Joomla before coming across Drupal. I was immediately impressed with the separation between the core set of modules and the very large number of contributed modules available for free. This separation means that it is much easier to update modules as security and bug fixes are released particularly after the introduction of Drupal 7.

However, the greatest single thing that attracted me to Drupal was the community around the code. All contributed modules are freely available, and thousands of active users volunteer their time to create new modules, write documentation, and help new users through the initial learning curve.

Personally I support Drupal through my individual and organizational membership of the Drupal Association, by submitting patches, providing support, and helping with the organization of Drupaldelphia. I'm user ian-moran if you would like to see my involvement.