Drupal's Creator Aims For World Domination 192
angry tapir writes "Open-source content management system Drupal has come a long way since it was initially released in 2001. Drupal now runs 2% of the world's websites — but Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert thinks that this could easily grow to 10%. I caught up with Dries to talk about Drupal's evolution from a pure CMS to a Web platform, cracking the enterprise market, and the upcoming release of Drupal 8, which features significant architectural changes — incorporating elements of the Symfony2 Web framework to replace Drupal's aging architecture."
Navigation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:PHP (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and other very popular CMSs and frameworks which are all a strange mix of procedural and oo code, and lack a proper distinction between model, views and controllers.
Its problems are certainly not the things that are often quoted, like mysql_real_escape_string (which just follows C api [mysql.com] and is deprecated anyway), or inconsistent naming conventions. The problems are deeper - things like lack of threads comes to mind.
Still, the reason why I like PHP is that with a good framework (e.g. Zend Framework 2 is promising, but there is also CakePHP, FuelPHP, CodeIgniter, etc.) you can build a very solid application. Procedural PHP is actually a fantastic and very powerful template engine [php.net] and otherwise you can write relatively clean and easy to read code in it if you structure the program correctly. It's very simple to deploy (especially compared to e.g. RoR) and has extensions for pretty much any database or graphics library or anything else a web developer may need.
Drupal rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
Drupal is a great fit for many web development projects. It's 100% GPL open-source software with a thriving development community.
It has a solid a reliable core architecture extensible via a modular plugin system.
Although there's a learning curve, it's worth it.
Like every release, Drupal 8 is making taking steps to improve on the previous, for D8 these include.
1. Integration with the Symfony PHP framework.
This lowers the barrier to entry to Drupal by allowing developers familiar with the Symfony framework to easy transition to building Drupal websites, leveraging the power of both.
2. Enforcing MVC architecture
Drupal 8 includes a new, non-php, default templating engine called "Twig" ( http://twig.sensiolabs.org/ [sensiolabs.org] ). No more PHP code in templates.
3. Pure core Drupal 8 includes more in core to achieve the functional requirements, without the need for additional plugins. For example, Panels style layout builders and the Views style report query builder as well as the ctools framework are now in core, along with the usual frameworks such as the Entity and Field API.
I've used Drupal with a wide variety of government and corporate IT projects.
Common server architecture includes, Linux, Nginx, Postgres/MySQL, PHP5, APC, Memcache and Varnish.
If you're looking for a solution for your next web development project that's easy to set up, and supports and extensible and scalable architecture, checkout Drupal, it rocks!
Re:A fractal of bad design (Score:1, Interesting)
Wordpress 'clean'?? Seriously??
The only place where I use Wordpress is in my 'Secure Web Progamming' course. Wordpress is a beautiful example of how NOT to write your code. It has no MVC structure and has no single entry-point. The Wordpress developers probably never heard of functions, because every file is one big piece of lineair code. It offers no secure API for plugins, hence the very long list of insecure plugins. Wordpress is nothing more than a piece of junk that should be avoided by EVERYONE!
You want a good example of a secure, clean and solid PHP framework? Try Banshee [banshee-php.org].
Re:Drupal rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be interested to see some concrete examples, I have a hard time understanding why you would say that, save perhaps that Drupal has far more *abstraction* - that's not the same as being cleaner and leads to greater complexity if overdone. I don't really want to defend WP as it's not my idea of brilliant architecture (far from it), but they have kept it much simpler and procedural than Drupal, which is incredibly complex when it comes to rendering or even the simplest helper modules. For example:
Drupal date module: 14kloc (YES > 14,000 lines)
WP date helpers/calender: circa 1kloc
Rails date helper: 970 sloc (doesn't include visible calendar, I'd use jquery-ui for that)
Yes the above helpers probably do less, but the contrast is stark, and sometimes less is more (security, maintenance, readability). I didn't count the loc of some clients sites I've looked at, but wouldn't be surprised if it was in the hundreds of thousands for relatively simple sites due to core and modules.
Re:Drupal vs WordPress (Score:4, Interesting)
There's been a lot of discussion in the Drupal community recently about making major updates easier by offering backwards compatability, the consensus (best as I could tell) was that web technology is moving so fast that we need to be able to refactor quickly, though maybe in a few releases (6 years or so) Drupal will have completed the move to Symfony / OO and it will be worth looking at then.
I love Drupal & its community - I've been working with it professionally for 8 years or so, and the constant improvement in the tools keeps things interesting for me. I spend most of my time working on edge cases where modules don't quite work together and I submit a lot of small patches to improve them. I've got a lot better at grokking other peoples code - a talent I think is more valuable than 'writing my own cms from scratch', though I've done that before too. I also dabble in various other techs after hours to keep up with new languages, and run my blog on Wordpress. Wordpress horrifies me from a technical perspective, but I just want to post content, and using it keeps me focused on that, as opposed to tweaking my Drupal install all the time.
I used to freelance for smaller clients, but now i just refer them to Wordpress folks. They get better bang for their buck, and I don't have to deal with annoying budget overruns. Drupal is insanely good for big business who need complex workflows, asset management, community management, service integration and migration. Its really hard to build something that complex in a way that makes sense, stays stable and provides an upgrade path (however difficult that may be) and security support.
I feel your pain though :)