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."
Re:PHP (Score:4, Insightful)
A bloated CMS is bloated no matter what language it's written in. That's like blaming the hammer for the house being crooked. :)
Re:Navigation (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Both to your question and any other "Does it have a sane ______ yet?" questions.
As far as I can tell, the only reason to use Drupal is that it's easy to find and hire people who are familiar with it.
Re:Navigation (Score:5, Insightful)
it's easy to find and hire people who are familiar with it.
who *think they* are familiar with it.
Drupal looks easy to extend for a beginner developper because, like php, you don't have to do something right to have it work.
So it's really quick to have a mess of a codebase that leads to an unstable site that's a nightmare to maintain.
But if you really know the insides of it, you can craft a something beautiful that runs smoothly and is easy to work with. It's not perfect, and "real" coders will look at its non-use of OOP with contempt, but it's pretty good at what it can do.
And, let's be honest for a second: it's one of the least horrible open source CMSs out there (at least in the php world, I don't really know about Java or python or other CMSs).
If you want a good pphp cms, you have Drupal or Ezpublish. There's wordpress that wants to be a cms but isn't quite there, Joomla is a joke, Typo3 is from another time... The perfect software doesn't exist.
Re:PHP (Score:4, Insightful)
There is the difference that with a standard PHP setup, the whole framework must be parsed from the code
Look at APC [php.net] - compile once and cache the code thereafter
establish database connections
Find out about Persistent connections [php.net]
for each page view. With RoR, Django, etc., those things are only done once upon application startup and all pages are then served by the running application. Much faster.
I am not saying that PHP does not have its problems, but it is a good web platform. PHP's main problem is that there is a low barrier to entry, so people who do not have much clue can produce something ... that looks good, but is buggy with horrible security problems.
Drupal rocks (Score:1, Insightful)
However, I think, If you take the time to learn the Drupal API, you will find it preferable, particularly as a developer.
Over the last ~10 years, I've used a range of similar open-source CMS products, from Typo3, Plone, Xoops, Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal and out of all of them, I prefer Drupal. I think in particular, I like the flexibility and extensibility of the Drupal codebase, as well as the Drupal development community.
Re:PHP (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, the quite famous PHP hammer [codinghorror.com].
Re:Navigation (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks for the tip. I have heard very good things about TextPattern [textpattern.com] and EZ Publish [ez.no]. However, the issue is that the folks who use my code are primarily "big 3" users; with a distressing number of Joomla users.
It has to do with "market penetration" and "community support," as much as good code, ease of extensibility, etc.
Why the Drupal hate? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been using Drupal to do site development for 5 years now. I have developed small and medium sized sites for everyone from restaurants to professional membership organizations. I use it for sites of all sizes because eventually someone asks for a feature that isn't available or is painful to implement in WP. I have written custom modules and complex themes in relatively short timeframes because of the flexibility of the platform.
You don't like Drupal - that's great, don't use it. I am not a big RoR fan. I tried it out for a new project at work and it just didn't "feel" right. I was able to get the Symfony2 framework up and running pretty quickly and we are developing a multi tiered app in house with it. I don't hate RoR and I don't need to bash it. Plenty of intelligent developers who know more than me are using it and developing kick-ass software. It just didn't fit for me.
Nah - we can't have that kind of adult response. Quit liking what I don't like!