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: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.
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So it really is like AIDS, Cancer or Death?
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:Navigation (Score:5, Informative)
Drupal is the best of the "big 3" CMSes. Hands down.
However, it has a Matterhorn learning curve, and I choose not to use it in most of my work; opting for WordPress.
The thing about Drupal is that it has an extremely solid extension mechanism. Lots of good hooks, and thoughtful design.
I write plugins for all 3 CMSes. I am extremely familiar with what it takes to extend each. Drupal and WP can be extended with a single file that allows me to provide a powerful administrative interface, content filter and module system.
Joomla, on the other hand, requires -I am not exaggerating- ten times as much work as either Drupal or WP, and, subsequently, ten times as many "problem nodes," for juicy, fat bugs.
For example, if I want to handle AJAX responses, Drupal and WP each offer a simple hook to intercept program execution at a point between CMS setup (authentication, module initialization, etc.) and HTTP output (I need to output prior to any headers being sent out). Since I can use the same module file, I can preserve object context. Also, they each have a very simple CSV options/preferences system that abstracts the database behind a basic functional interface.
In Joomla, I am forced to write an entire system plugin, and use a pretty hairy database "semaphore" system to communicate context. I also need to write a content plugin in order to allow a shortcode ability. In both Drupal and WP, the content filter is simply another functional interface in the same context.
However, for the kind of extensibility that Joomla offers, only Drupal can match it, and Drupal has that learning curve, so it tends to be popular amongst folks that want a heavily-customized site, with less knowledge, than Joomla.
Re:Navigation (Score:4, Informative)
However, for the kind of extensibility that Joomla offers, only Drupal can match it, and Drupal has that learning curve, so it tends to be popular amongst folks that want a heavily-customized site, with less knowledge, than Joomla.
Whoops. Posting before coffee.
Switch "Joomla" and "Drupal."
As noted, there is no such thing as a "perfect" CMS. Much as I may grouse, Joomla is extremely popular, and I need to support it. For many folks, Joomla is the "perfect" CMS.
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I don't know how Joomla has evolved since I last used it several years ago (just after the introduction of joomla 1.5), but its flaws were blockers for me.
It had almost no extensibility (new features had to be written almost like external applications, integrability with the core of the cms was minimal), no adaptability (you couldn't add a field to a content form without modifying half a dozen files, and there were no way to have different content types. Also you couldn't change the site structure: you had
Re:Navigation (Score:4, Informative)
And it used an MVC object structure that looked like the software architect had no idea of the goal of an mvc structure, but had read in a blog that mvc is good.
I'm pretty sure that it was designed by fairly young JAVA folks. The patterns are extremely similar to many academic exercises in JAVA.
Young folk are willing to work very hard, and hit the Kool-Aid like there's no tomorrow. It can be quite amusing to read some of the Joomla discussion forums.
Also, I think that they switch architects fairly frequently, so they tend to rewrite the whole damn system on a regular basis. Keeping a plugin compatible between all the various Joomla versions is a nightmare. The fact that I have to provide four different modules to do what one single file can do in other CMSes means that my installer is a real Rube Goldberg machine.
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It's been a while but try modx. Powerful event system, easy to extend. Good dev community. The maintainer is in Dallas and is a nice guy (more than one guy but he's the head honcho).
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.
Re:Navigation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Navigation (Score:5, Informative)
I think, and find it impossible to port over to version 7 without manually porting over the database table by table. There should be a way to port content tables to new versions without a lot of pain and suffering...
Take a look at:
http://fuerstnet.de/en/drupal-upgrade-easier [fuerstnet.de]
if you are comfortable with the command line. I've done several 6 to 7 transitions (patch the 6 up to the latest before the 7 jump). SIGNIFICANTLY less pain than any other way I've found. It basically uses the Linux patch/diff mechanism. Make sure the 7 has the modules you need from 6 before the jump (some were never ported and have to be replaced in 7).
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R. U. NUTTS?
Have you actually written any Joomla plugins that incorporate AJAX? Ever?
Would you like to see the open-source repository with mine?
Would you like to PROVE that you can do better? I'm EXTREMELY interested in your answer. If you are able to do so, then I would be happy to forgo my way of doing it in favor of yours.
WordPress (Score:5, Informative)
For better or worse, WordPress has more marketshare than all other CMS-es combined.
See http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all [w3techs.com] for an up-to-date look.
Many people still think of WordPress as a blogging platform, but it's really so much more nowadays. Security is not worse than with other solutions, it's just that (like with Windows), popularity attracts attention (and attacks), and usually poorly-made plugins are the problem (the timthumb vulnerability was the most notorious one).
I worked with many CMS solutions over the years - Allaire Spectra (anyone remember it?), DotNet Nuke, Typo3, CMS Made Simple, Joomla, Drupal, even hosted solutions like Squarespace and a bunch of others I can't even remember, but WordPress was the only one I could really develop for (functionality, themes, etc.)
Re:WordPress (Score:4, Informative)
I posted up there, somewhere about this.
I tend to use WP for my own sites. It is not as extensible as Drupal, but I can get a really well-crafted site up and going within a day. I would not recommend WP as an engine for, say, the White House. They made a good call with Drupal there. I believe that they actually added security code to Drupal, and returned it to the repository.
Joomla is clearly an engine written by recent grad JAVA lovers that hate PHP. Drupal was clearly written by folks very familiar with PHP, and a great deal of coding experience in the real world.
PHP? <shrug />. I use it, because it is important that folks actually be able to USE what I write. I'm not even slightly interested in pushing a coding philosophy. I need as many folks as possible to be able to install and run my code. I won't get that in any dynamic, database-driven server language other than PHP.
PHP is a suckass OO language. I tend to use OO as a Model layer or as a namespace. A lot of the rest tends to be procedural. I sometimes ROTFLMAO, when I see some of the conversations around the Joomla camp. It's like architects boasting about using mud daub to build a skyscraper.
"Drupal now runs 2% of the world's websites" (Score:2)
Keeping track of that many webservers have to be very time consuming tasks.
A fractal of bad design (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked with Drupal for cms websites and seen it used on other customer sites. You should never use it, seriously. It's remarkably similar to early php in being a fractal of bad design. [veekun.com] They are slowly trying to improve it, but their attempts at improvements are woeful. Some problems (which they've attempted to address, but many of which still plague users):
Hundreds of tables with the most Byzantine schema you can imagine, even for incredibly simple needs
Attempts to allow customers to define the db schema by adding fields etc
Code in the db - that anyone ever thought this is a good idea is a huge red flag
Upgrades are often incompatible
A horribly broken plugin system and ecosystem, resulting in sites which load hundreds of plugins to support simple tasks, and therefore have a huge attack surface and a huge amount of unmaintained, scarily bad code. I've seen sites with hundreds of these modules loaded.the learning curve is huge and the code extremely fragile due to the above decisions
Content is all stored in 'nodes' which are infinitely flexible, and therefore infinitely opaque and difficult to work with
There are no pros or professionals working with Drupal - anyone who was a pro would have run a mile a long time ago, so don't listen when someone says 'oh well you just don't know drupal well enough'
I dread to think what would happen if security professionals looked carefully at many drupal sites due to the above, particularly the modules situation. The closer you look at the code, the worse it gets
If you're thinking of using it for a php cms, think again, look at Wordpress for example - the code is relatively clean (though it is still php of course), the plugins are better maintained and fewer are required, upgrades for security are no hassle, and they didn't come up with crazy ideas like code in the db in the first place. I'd personally choose other options/platforms, but at least with Wordpress the environment is pretty sane for a small time cms, easy to adapt and friendly for an end user.
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Wordpress has also had the most scrutiny by far - I suspect that and their installed base is the reason they've had more exploits, and that should make the code at the present time far more secure as they've had a trial by fire when becoming popular. I agree it's not my first choice for security but I wouldn't be so sure about Drupal.
In contrast, many of the Drupal modules I've seen (and there are many on most s
Drupal for the win (Score:2)
I choose Byzantine schema over everything stored in two tables any day of the week. I pick allowing the customer to add fields via actual database tables rather than stuffing them into a "meta" table in a serialized form. If by code in the DB you mean having a rules/actions engine that is defined with data from the DBI pick that over hand coding anyday. Upgrades incompatible? I pick testing your upgrade rather than blindly upgrading a production site.
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Yes, unwillingness on your part to realize that a larger group of people might actually be smarter than your mothers basement commentary.
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It sounds like your complaints are mostly related to the thing that makes Drupal good - it's rather generic nature.
The problem with a lot of other PHP CMS' like Joomla is that if you want anything other than a basic website with a fairly fixed layout, then, well, you can't.
Drupal's generic nature may make it a bit more awkward to understand sometimes, but with that comes flexibility.
I notice a lot of developers struggle with generic, reusable designs in this manner because the abstract nature of such design
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Those benighted, simple developers who value simplicity in an API even have a phrase for those who live on a higher plane - Architecture Astronaut.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html [joelonsoftware.com]
If you're arguing that abstraction and the attendant complexity are usually good, I'm afraid a lot of smart people disagree. I've used syste
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The problem is you're assuming that a sane level of abstraction to provide a level of genericness for the task at hand is too much - you're taking a personal assertion that seemingly only you has made in this entire discussion, and then suggesting that this is what the likes of Joel would think of it too.
I'm also not entirely sure what the point of the appeal to authority fallacy you made with "I'm afraid a lot of smart people disagree" was. That's great, that's all very well, but a lot of smart people also
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I'm sorry to tell you but your assumptions are entirely wrong, about me, and about other frameworks. Try not thinking of people who find drupal distasteful as automatically stupid, it might help. I'm just offering you suggestions re other frameworks, I do think rails, play, grails, django, revel, wp, all compete with drupal, not because I'm ignorant of what drupal can do, but because it tries to do too much, and d
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Quite so - the ecosystem is a mess.
My experience has been related to patching up broken modules, finding out that there's no support for separate writing and reading databases (needed for scaling and load balancing), finding out that the core is database agnostic but modules regularly inline MySQL-specific code, etc.
I actually read TFA to see if any of this is fixed. What I learned instead is that:
1) Drupal 8 will be bold. That was oft-repeated.
2) Drupal 8 will have a WYSIWYG editor in core.
3) Drupal 8 wi
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It's from when I did an install about a year ago, but one should be able to grep a repository for SQL easily enough.
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.."because I have some axe to grind about Drupal"? (Score:2)
Your post reads like a mixture of trolling and ignorance. Maybe it's deliberate, or maybe it's a genuine lack of understanding. Let's deal with it point by point...
You should never use it, seriously.
Some users: The White House, The US Dept of Energy, NASA, Stanford Law School, the Grammies, as well as hundred's of thousands of less high-profile sites. Or we could believe you.
It's remarkably similar to early php in being a fractal of bad design.
At the heart of Drupal is a callback system, with registration by naming. This allows code written by different people to interact. Need to do something that nobody has
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Re:A fractal of bad design (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever used anything else? If so what? Nothing else I've used is so badly organised and so badly put together (Play, Rails, Sinatra, Flask, hell even Wordpress), save perhaps TYPO3, that was pretty bad (shudder). I wouldn't often be so negative about a web framework, and the devs are obviously keen and trying to improve, but the hubris involved in talking of world domination when your product is just awful in so many ways is quite incredible.
If you haven't tried other frameworks in a while, I do think you should try some other frameworks and languages, and then come back to Drupal with an understanding of how things can be better, then perhaps set about improving it. Frankly part of the problem with Drupal is the many people who have invested so much time learning all the unnecessary APIs and working around its idiosyncratic code and db schemas, or fixing upgrades that leave modules behind that they can no longer find it in themselves to suggest the radical improvements required. Drupal is broken, in so many ways, you should at least acknowledge that there are issues if you want to be taken seriously.
That to me is a big part of the problem with the Drupal ecosystem - unwillingness to listen (even in small part) to quite justified criticism and an insistence that anyone criticising is somehow to blame for the problems they have encountered. If you want Drupal to thrive, try actually listening to criticisms and acting on them - it has an awful software architecture for a start, to say that it has a good one is laughable, I mean they only just started try to clean up the mess with fields, and to do that they've introduced CCK! Have you looked at the drupal core or do you mainly set up and tweak sites?
Ultimately, the main problem I have with it is a philosophical one though, which has driven a lot of the bad decisions on design: the designers seem to think that end users can effectively specify a complex system involving a db and code, which they only partially understand, through the browser and by choosing modules written by other people. That's what has led to massively complex 'general purpose' code to deal with all the possible permutations, to code in the db, CCK and many other problems in Drupal, and it's not going away as they don't seem to have learned the lesson from previous debacles. The result is a complex tangle of poorly understood code which interacts in unpredictable ways and tries to be everything to everyone and ends up satisfying nobody's needs very well without lots of extra work. In other frameworks all that extra work is just not required, the framework helps, not hinders. Here's a report from someone in the trenches who has realised this:
http://benbuckman.net/drupal-excessive-complexity [benbuckman.net]
All that said, I'm not saying this because I have some axe to grind about Drupal (though it has wasted a few months of my life debugging client issues), but because beginner Drupal developers deserve to know that there are much better options out there. Drupal does not rock, in any way.
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Try to play with the Atlassian product line [atlassian.com] databases. Makes Drupal look like a cakewalk.
However, the whole idea is to avoid direct database access. That's a good security best practice anyway.
In Joomla, I am forced to directly interact with the DB (in the installer). Maybe 3.0 is different, but I have finally been able to farm off the Joomla plugin to someone who is a lot more familiar with (and likes) Joomla.
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You just said everything I would have liked to say but wouldn't have been able to write without just getting angry and swearing. Seriously, everyone who's hooked on Drupal needs to try out some other things. Me and my team do a lot of Rails and it's what I like the best, but I'm not going to claim it does everything and I know it has a place. If you've got a team of Java or Scala developers who live in eclipse use Play. Little real-time apps use node.js. Client wants a simple blog in a week? It's hard to be
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Client wants a simple blog in a week? It's hard to beat Wordpress. But Drupal is a system I can't imagine ever using for anything again.
Wordpress is responsible for so vastly much more of the sadness on the internet than Drupal that it's not even funny. You might be web developers and so have your own preference, but people I know who work for ISPs say that the WP sites cause vastly more problems than the Drupal sites. I cannot picture ever using wordpress for anything.
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Personally I'm not a fan of WordPress, and I'm also not the one who does the WordPress sites. They're just easy, and we only do them for smaller outfits that want a quick shop blog or something like that. We don't extend off of WordPress (if something needed an extension or custom data we'd use Refinery) and we host all the sites off of a shared host that separates each install. Honestly if we knew of a full-featured blog-centric CMS that was easy enough to throw together a full site in a week (just design/
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Any suggestions?
I have nothing constructive to add, because I run Drupal.
My only complaint about it, and I do have one, is that upgrading between major versions can be hell. Otherwise, I've overall been very happy. I'm just not really experiencing php-related problems.
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If you've ever looked at Drupal, you'd know what I mean : ) Personally Wordpress is not my first choice, but they have kept the architecture relatively stable and simple and it is great for end-users who just want a custom theme as that is their focus. If all they want is basically a blog with some static pages I think it's quite a good choice - many, many websites fall into that category.
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.
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"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)"
I'm not sure what you're even trying to say with this, it's as if you think number of lines in a file or set of files is somehow an example of bad code.
Where is the c
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if you think number of lines in a file or set of files is somehow an example of bad code
It generally is. The number of errors is statistically tied more or less linearly to the loc. So, more code is usually the same as worse code if the stuff accomplished is more or less the same.
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The drupal date module actually does stuff. If you're comparing kloc without comparing functionality, you're trolling.
Yes the above helpers probably do less, but the contrast is stark, and sometimes less is more (security, maintenance, readability).
And sometimes more is more, like when there's documentation in the code.
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To be fair, the Drupal date module isn't just "the simplest helper module."
Off the top of my head, those 14k lines of code also include:
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Yes but to add a small date function on from this module you have to pull in the whole thing, along with all its complex dependencies and hooks into other code. This was just an example, and loc on its own doesn't mean much, but 14k for a date module indicates a problem to me (and to many drupal developers). This is the sort of thing newer languages like golang were explicitly created to avoid, and its a serious problem on large projects.
IMHO no plugin should be that big, even some frameworks are smaller th
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My approach has generally been something like this:
1. If all you want is a straight-up blog, use WordPress. Up and running in no time, plenty of themes out there, and you can have a blog immediately.
2. If you want something fast and (relatively) lightweight for a CMS, and you'll be managing a lot of media files, Joomla may be your best choice. (Note that I don't really care for Joomla, but it's hard to beat for performance.)
3. If you have complex needs that go beyond having a blog and managing media files,
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However, the code freeze may cause some issues that surface later to be difficult to fix in core for UX/UI issues, and could possibly have to wait until a later major version of Drupal to fix. Don't get me wrong, I love Drupal, and use it almost exclusively, unless I'm forced to use one of the other CMS's....
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Drupal definitely has a "cleaner" code base and better software architecture than Wordpress
That's like saying being shot in the back of the head is better than being shot in the face.
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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.
Along with a bunch of other shit that users couldn't care less about.
It's easy to set up. There's a vibrant user community. The content management interface is easy to understand. End of story.
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Usually people pick abstractions based on the domain they're working with (DSL), so they'd have one products table and perhaps some joins to things like customers, orders etc. Instead drupal might have nodes and then lots of joins to them, like say 65 tables (count em!) of uc_products, uc_price_per_role_option_prices, etc etc. just to sell some products. That's because the CMS and modules try to do all things for all people. All
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I didn't choose uc but that was just an example - all drupal tables have several levels of indirection because of the overabstraction.
Unrealistic Expectations (Score:2)
It's probably a rather safe assumption that most of the Drupal implementations that give it a bad name were done by developers who "also use Drupal", and were rushed out the door due to limited budget.
This is not a problem inherent in Drupal, necessarily, but rather these types of projects will tend to gravitate towards Drupal (and the sales departments that whore out their developers).
I have no doubt that if you took a team of experienced Drupal developers, gave them a proper budget and appropriate sched
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!
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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.
Now how exactly does that enforce an MVC architecture? Anyway, PHP is a great templating language and I use it in MVC. Twig is also nice, they use that on Lemonstand. Plus Drupal shouldn't enforce a templating language; that's not core.
With Drupal 7 I probably tried to make the mistake of attempting to understand how the system works. var_dump is not your friend here. The render array that gets dragged through each request is absolutely byzantine and fairly hopeless as a tool to understand the system.
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re MVC - DBTNG is a pretty solid db layer, adding TWIG as a templating engine disallows adding PHP on the View layer. hook_menu has always been a controller of sorts, and the move to Symfony routing solidifies that.
MVC is nothing special anyway.
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its all in core now - http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/ [drupal8multilingual.org]
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Drupal vs WordPress (Score:3)
What Dries say in this article:
"The "sweet spot" for Drupal is larger sites rather than smaller ones. "I think when people think big websites, they usually think Drupal, and when they think small blogs or limited small websites in complexity then they think WordPress," Buytaert said.
"At Acquia we never compete with WordPress. We don't see them ever. I'm sure the smaller Drupal shops run into them, but in the enterprise we never run into WordPress."
"I think with small sites I'm not willing to give up on them but I think we just need to say we're more about big sites and less about small sites, but then the small sites are still very useful to get people into the community," Buytaert said."
I would have liked to know that before... I moved from Slashcode to Drupal years ago on the advice of a few. While I can appreciate how Drupal is flexible and powerful, now I understand that what I really needed, as a non-expert and for my small website, was just WordPress. But too late, won't do another painful migration anytime soon...
What annoys me most with Drupal: no straightforward way to update major versions (e.g. from 6.x to 7.x), especially since a lot of user-contributed modules doesn't exist in the new version or require a lot of work to do so. The admin interface is pretty bad. The user community is much much smaller than WordPress (thinking of mature/maintained user-contributed modules here). Etc.
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 :)
Lambda the Ultimate (Score:2)
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Drupal? It's Liferay in PHP (Score:2)
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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!
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US Government (Score:3)
Drupal has made huge inroads in running US government websites in the last few years. The White House, Departments of Commerce and Energy, and a bulk of the House of Representatives (most on one install, I believe) are all running Drupal, to name a few. As a former government contractor, we ended up selecting Drupal to run one of our sites for a couple of reasons.
First, Drupal can run using SQL Server on the back end. I know that sounds horrible, but for us, spinning up MySQL/Postgres was not really an option, and the .Net management systems were either too expensive or a joke in terms of features. So we got the community of Drupal on the hardware we already ran.
Second, its taxonomy features are really unparalleled, at least from what I have seen. Coupled with Views, you can create a page out of just about any combination of vocabularies. We used it to show a category of content, and then let users filter based on keywords. Think categories and tags from WordPress, but on steroids.
Now, all that being said, I hated developing in Drupal. I was able to achieve the goals for the site, including letting non-developers handle content updates with minimal support. But getting there was the most excruciating three months of my career. People aren't kidding when they say the learning curve is enormous.
Overall, I am happy to see Drupal making progress, and think it is fantastic in handling certain types of websites. But at the end of the day, I hope I never have to build another Drupal website again.
A simple CMS may be an impossible goal (Score:2)
Our org created a wish-list of CMS features. It currently has about 50 items, and these items are often different than what other orgs seem to want. The total "known" potential features seems to hover around 100, if not more.
And orgs want CMS's to be able to be a kind of application development platform to create lower-end CRUD systems, or at least half content management and half CRUD.
It's all a tall order to get so many potential features to work together. Plug-ins are one approach: only plug in what you
Do we really need CMS's? (Score:2)
My personal prejudice is that CMS's are a throwback to when HTML sites were serving 'documents' (and stitched together fragments thereof). But nowadays I use HTML more like a UI specification language, which is populated and driven by an AJAX backend. In other words, it's a client-server application with a free-form UI. If I need to use templates, I use jquery templates, SSI's, or a combination of both.
Managing templates in a database as always struck my as cumbersome, with a lot of bookkeeping work (rea
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:PHP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:PHP (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, the quite famous PHP hammer [codinghorror.com].
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This is not a language issue. It is an architecture issue. No one forbids you to run php script once and serve multiple pages from it. There are even several well known implementations - google fastcgi for instance.
You are effectively saying that the english language sucks because people swear a lot nowadays.
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Language does not advocate you to follow anything. Just because humans invented the language to coordinate attacks agains mammoths does not mean using a language advocates hunting.
The only reason why php is often served the way it is - a script that is compiled every time - is because it is convenient and often even practical to do so in a virtually hosted environment.
Look - i am no fan of php - i am just pointing out that "PHP code is reevaluated for each page call" is simply a false statement.
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.
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Even though our government uses Drupal (or, rather, the people they pay tens of millions of dollars per website to make that end up just being done with Drupal), I tend to advise people against it as often as possible. The whole PHP foundation of it just doesn't cut it for me. Granted, it's a decent system -- especially for free -- but the PHP part gives me discomfort after watching it on the web for the last decade and a half.
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PHP has its problems (which are well-documented pretty much everywhere), but it's popular because it works. Trying to steer people away from something that works strikes me more as zealotry than sound judgment.
I tried Python based (Score:2)
but seems you have to have the framework already installed on the server. i love Drupal and Ubercart but was looking for non PHP alternatives.
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.
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Sure, PHP has its fair share of design flaws,
I think you seriously understate what's wrong with PHP [veekun.com]. Beside all the things that is mentioned in that article, I love how you suggest several php frameworks that attempt to be like Rails but all built on such a flawed language.
And Rails is not hard to deploy any more... that argument is several years out of date.
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Sure, PHP has its fair share of design flaws,
I think you seriously understate what's wrong with PHP [veekun.com]. Beside all the things that is mentioned in that article, I love how you suggest several php frameworks that attempt to be like Rails but all built on such a flawed language.
And Rails is not hard to deploy any more... that argument is several years out of date.
Rails is great, providing you are willing to do everything exactly the way you are supposed to according to best practice. The problem is that some times in the real work you have to do things wrong (either to meet a deadline or just because you are stuck interfacing with a shit legacy system that nobody will pay to rewrite) and then Rails just refuses to play ball.
Short cuts are a part of commercial development unfortunately, that is why so much commercial stuff is written in PHP.
I always compare Rails to
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Because sometimes web sites are used to trigger some form of processing behind the scenes that you don't want the user to have to sit and wait for and that might otherwise result in a time out anyway?
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Because sometimes web sites are used to trigger some form of processing behind the scenes that you don't want the user to have to sit and wait for and that might otherwise result in a time out anyway?
You can do this if you cough up and buy Zend Server. Zend keep this as a paid for add on it seems
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Is it proper actual threading support? the closest I've seen to date in PHP have been based on hacks using curls.
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Is it proper actual threading support? the closest I've seen to date in PHP have been based on hacks using curls.
Probably not. It was just a plus point I remember from evaluating it was the ability to kick things off from the web application then let them continue in the background and track their progress somehow.
Whether it is true threading was not really that relevant to me, if it does something I don't really care how providing it just works.
As it was there were not enough plus points to justify the cost.
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I presume you are talking about Zend Framework 1? I stayed clear from it, but I just started playing around with ZF2 and so far it looks nice. It gives impression of over-engineered framework, but after a couple of days with it, it's actually very powerful. I am still to start writi
Re:PHP (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, as PHP CMS' go, Drupal is one of the better ones.
Things like Joomla really are bloated in that they basically dictate how your site must be, and sure you can change that but you have to jump through so many hoops you're probably better off just starting from scratch unless you want anything other than their boiler plate.
Drupal at least was much more modular and generic and so made it easy to pick and choose what you do and don't use, and to decide how you wanted to do things so you could do more, and do them your way. As such I'd say it isn't bloated because you can strip it down to a fairly bare bones setup and it is fairly quick and easy to do, and fairly bare bones to start with even.
But at the end of the day it's still a PHP CMS and when you have Python now (a dynamic language that has at least some solid CS understanding behind it) then there's little point using any of the PHP CMS'. I've always been a best tool for the job type of person, but as time has gone by I've found that the jobs where PHP is the best tool have rapidly begun to dwindle towards extinction, simply put, there always just seems to be a better option now.
Personally though the more large projects I've done with dynamic interpreted languages the more I prefer to stick to compiled. They're great for getting something up and running quickly but when your code base reaches any reasonable size then it's far more useful to have the compiler catching things before execution that can only turn up as uncommon and hard to reproduce bugs with a dynamic language and as your project grows, the more the scope for that increases. This means that for larger projects, compiled languages actually often make development quicker because less time is wasted debugging. Beyond small projects interpreted languages quickly start lose their benefits, though this is in part also because compiled languages like Java, C#, or even C++ seem to have better, more mature toolsets built for them.
But regardless, whether you sit on the interpreted or compiled side of the fence there's little place for PHP now given that it doesn't even have for example, any proper threading support, the sort of thing which is becoming more and more important, and is outright essential to some applications.
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But at the end of the day it's still a PHP CMS and when you have Python now (a dynamic language that has at least some solid CS understanding behind it) then there's little point using any of the PHP CMS'.
mod_php is everywhere. more ISPs actually support mod_perl than mod_python. If I expect to be able to shop around for hosting I'm not even going to consider a Python CMS. As well, name a Python CMS with even 80% of the functionality of Drupal...
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No surprise there. mod_python has been deprecated abandonware for years.
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Re:it will never happen (Score:4, Informative)
Check out the lastest 8.x version by going to http://simplytest.me/project/drupal [simplytest.me] and choosing 8.x. The site will install 8.x-dev for you and you can play with it.
Some things to look at:
- In place editing
- CKeditor in core
- Responsive out of the box (check the new admin menu)
- Views in core
There's a heap of scary awesome changes going on in the backend though
- replacing lots of sub systems with Symfony components
- RESTFUL services by checking a checkbox.
- TWIG as a templating engine
- Configuration management initiative
- HTML5 and mobile
- Far better multilingual support than previous versions.
check out http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-initiatives [drupal.org] for more info.
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Drupal is more of a platform that facebook, just sayin'
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10% = World Domination?
Yeah... 'cos if they had 100% of the market, then they'd have no one else to dominate over! :D
Re:Drupal is horrible (Score:4, Funny)
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