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By BigJonMX on
I am new to Drupal.
I am not new to programming, frameworks, and databases - by 30 years ! (yes, I'm an old man)
And I'm going to voice my opinion of Drupal 7, which I am currently learning.
First off: where's the documentation? The official guides to doing things.
There are literally hundreds of pages about this and that, usually conflicting, usually out-of-date, nearly always incomplete and lacking important details. Yes I could buy a book, but I could just as easily spend that money on a prebuilt working system !!!
I thought Drupal was a, if not "the" customizable CMS.
But after a few weeks I have the distinct impression that Drupal is for blogs: install drupal, install a theme, enjoy your blog.
(ok, maybe a 'fancy' blog, with books and articles and an image or two)
I was expecting to install drupal, quickly create my own forms, store my data (of whatever I need at the time), and retrieve it quickly and 'easily'. And have a quick and easy interface to decide who (users) can do what (permissions).
So after reading too many pages/websites I've learnt that no-one seems to know the right way of doing this. Everyone has their own solutions: some recommend half-useful modules, others advocate writing their own modules.
- if I'm going to write my own code, why am I bothering with drupal. I've written enough database apps to have reusable login/access/permission frameworks knocking about that I can reuse - only I am tired of the maintenance and upgrades.
I think the users/permissions part of drupal is good enough, but the rest is severely lacking.
This brings me to my biggest gripe: terminology.
Now excuse my French but WTF ?!?!? Why on earth have so many standard, commonly used, well understood terms been replaced with ridiculous and confusing words? It gives the impression that drupal was created and developed by noobs that had no knowledge, no training, no education, and importantly no experience.
Example: "Drupal documentation frequently applies the word "field" to a column in a database table" - I don't care what the reasoning is behind this - and I don't want to hear it! All I see is a fundamental flaw.
How can I trust a system where starting words like 'field' have been redefined?
Now I'm sure many fans of drupal are hammering on their keyboards writing replies already, but if I hear another "you can write the documentation" then you've clearly missed the point. Do you want drupal to succeed, to grow, to evolve? Then we need version specific documentation (for newbies) - written by the people that created those versions.
Example: create a multilingual website. Try it! There are many ways of achieving the goal, but each has pros and cons. Try and do it with v7 only - impossible I say, and I've tried them all.
Well, that's my rant over for now. I hope someone somewhere agrees enough to make drupal better. Now i'll go back to wondering whats the point of drupal when it doesn't save me time...
Comments
First off: where's the
There isn't one. Drupal is a community, and the community puts together guides. You can look at the API site for the documentation, and you can look on Drupal.org for various documentation on ways to do something, but there is no core team dedicated to writing official documentation on how things are done. I've usually just pulled apart code in core to figure out how it is done in core, and copied those methods when trying to do something new.
It is.
It's extremely flexible. It's more a framework than a CMS. I've never actually created a pure blog site on Drupal, though I have added blogs to Drupal sites. Take a look at my portfolio for some of the types of sites that Drupal can be used to build.
Think of it like building a house - you could go to the mountains and mine some ore, then cut down some trees, and refine this into usable materials, then build your house. Or you could go to your neighborhood hardware store and buy some 2x4s and some nails, and start building. Drupal is like the nails and 2x4s, mining the ore and cutting down the trees is like writing code from scratch.
To be frank, no one is asking you to. There are no requirements to use Drupal, it's something you can choose to do, or not. However, there is a robust and thriving community that manages to communicate the concepts that need to be communicated, using the language that we use to communicate it. You are free to dislike that all you want, but as the terms used when referring to Drupal concepts are already defined within the community, and people are using them, getting frustrated about it is just going to be a waste of energy.
Drupal is used by some of the biggest companies in the world, has over a million users on Drupal.org, and is about to release its eighth iteration. By all definitions, it already has succeeded, is growing, and is evolving.
As for the lack of documentation, I agree, this is the area where the Drupal community needs the most improvement. But for every 10 people who complain about it (you are not the first by any means), there are only one or two who actually do something about it. The community thrives on contributions, and flounders with lack of them.
Multilingual sites are definitely difficult, but not impossible with D7. I've created a few.
There is a steep learning curve with Drupal - mainly because of the lack of documentation. The time invested in learning eventually pays itself back however, if you use it long enough.
The best thing to do is read a few books on it, and watch a number of videos. The more you read/watch, the more the blanks get filled in.