I've been struggling with learning Drupal the last two years and still get stuck with minor issues that sometimes take days or even weeks to resolve.

The situation, as I see it, is that Open Source (at least in the case of Drupal) is fraught with hit & miss support, with dated, vague, ambiguous, and unclear solutions to problems.

In the case of D8 vs. D7 it seems we are between a rock & a hard place transitioning to D8. There are lots of modules for D7, but little support. There is a lot of activity with D8, but few modules.

There seems to be no incentive for supporters/developers of modules to respond to problems in a timely manner nor is there an incentive to phrase their documentation for newbies. Everyone seems to assume that everyone is experienced and that everyone knows all the acronyms.

I've invested two years of my life trying to make Drupal work and spent money paying for support at ostraining.com trying to get help. I need your general advice as to where to go from here. Should I give up on Drupal? If I give up on Drupal is there a CMS out there that resolves all or most of the above problems?

I look forward to your advice.

Comments

pixelsweatshop’s picture

The situation, as I see it, is that Open Source (at least in the case of Drupal) is fraught with hit & miss support, with dated, vague, ambiguous, and unclear solutions to problems.

I went through your post history and I didn't see one post where you helped someone or posted a solution to one of these "minor issues that sometimes take days or even weeks to resolve". If you found a solution, why didn't you share? Why didn't you make a blog post to help others that may run across the same issue in the future? Why didn't you update the handbook? You are as much of the solution as "we" are. There is no Drupal "staff". We are all just like you, trying to eek out a living using Drupal and when we can give back, we will. We share when we can.

In the case of D8 vs. D7 it seems we are between a rock & a hard place transitioning to D8. There are lots of modules for D7, but little support. There is a lot of activity with D8, but few modules.

Since you have only been here for 2 years, I can tell you that it has always been like this. It takes a long time for contrib to catch up. There is no incentive to work on D7 fixes/features because developer time is limited (see above), so it is better to spend our limited time on where we will see the most benefit, D8.

I need your general advice as to where to go from here. Should I give up on Drupal? If I give up on Drupal is there a CMS out there that resolves all or most of the above problems?

I have been working with Drupal for 7 years and I still struggle, debug, bang my head and learn everyday. It is too big for any one person to know everything. That is how the open source community works. We are the developers, testers, end-users and we work to make the software we all benefit from, better.

No matter if you leave to wordpress, joomla or whatever, it is going to be the same. It is the ethos of opensource cms development. The only thing you can control is to do your own part. If everyone does that, then it all works in the end.

sprite’s picture

The open source approach ...

While there are various proprietary commercial CMS products around, all involve major upfront financial licensing expense, and major ongoing financial support expense. At the link is a list of CMS systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

(not listed at wikipedia)
http://www.sitefinity.com/

As an example, I've listed Progress Sitefinity, progress.com has built their own website with their own CMS.

--

An open source system like Drupal depends on people who are at least partially self sufficient.
I've been building websites with Drupal for over a decade.
I've found that an essential aspect of learning Drupal often includes answering questions other people have about it.

Before any of that, an open source system depends on users who are willing and able to take first steps, such as by thoroughly reading the documentation, and consuming other pedagogical resources. Over and over and over again, I see questions from people on topics that would have been answered by at least reading the documentation.

https://www.drupal.org/docs/7
https://www.drupal.org/docs/8

The documentation doesn't answer every question, but it provides a reasonable foundation from which to operate.

An open source development system also relies on users with discipline and imagination to setup learn/testin personal sites on which to learn Drupal and test out features. Either a good/fast cloud platform, or a local machine LAMP stack, or both are essential for this.

Another aspect of the open source system is that its builders and professional users must find ways to keep food on the table. Some of the way some knowledgeable people have done that is by publishing books about Drupal, many of which are worth reading. There is also ample video material available. For example the "daily dose of drupal" "level up tuts" series are amazingly helpful. Others create professional services companies. At the top is Acquia, a company owned by the original creators of Drupal, and provides corporate website development services, and related products. For example, even though MySQL (Oracle), MariaDB, Linux (Redhat and so on), are open source, behind them are large corporations like Redhat that function by providing corporate support services. Even with so called "free", there has to be an economic ecosystems that keeps food on the table for people focused on it all day long.

All too often, people who ask questions on the drupal.org forums haven't bothered to read the ample available written material, or bothered to seek out video tutorial (free and paid) that provide a variety of answers.

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At this other level, Drupal has found a niche as an extremely powerful tool that provides a resource for those willing to thoroughly learn Drupal so that they can provide professional Drupal services for a fee.

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There are also companies that make amazing "ready made" Drupal "website in a box" products. Such companies include zymphonies, theme brain, and morethanthemes.

http://morethanthemes.com/

http://www.zymphonies.com/

https://www.themebrain.com/

I'm a morethanthemes customer. I can tell you that buying their "every theme" bundle paid for itself in an afternoon. In addition to being great themes(more accurately "distributions" actually), their "use case" geared distributions implement all sorts of functional features from which any site builder can learn and discover.

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Also, most Drupal code, including contrib modules, are amazingly resilient, especially since they are free. Since they are open source, they can also be customized and patched. That is very valuable because it means that when a bug/problem is discovered, the Drupal user can insert a fix instantly, and move on. For an example, I'm using a custom version of the soundmanager2 mp3 player module, with a patch for the bar-ui player style. Within a couple hours, I was able to have custom UI HTML5 audio working cross browser, for use on multiple websites.

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Different Drupal people give back in different ways. Some people concentrate on building contrib modules (of which the core of nearly essential modules is about a 1,000, out of a total of 30,000 others that are more esoteric). Other "Drupalers" concentrate on being part of the core dev team, or security team. Those people generally don't focus on general user support, but they've made their contribution in other ways. Especially since drupalmageddon, Drupal is one of the most security conscious web platforms available.

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Over the course of many years, there is always a quorom of Drupal builders who stop by drupal.org daily to answer questions, as a way of contributing.

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I don't know of any CMS that, with contrib modules, has anywhere near the depth and breath that Drupal implements.
I would love to see a list of CMS products, if any, that come anywhere near close to being able to do what Drupal, and its contrib modules, its commercial supplemental products, do together, and I would like to see how they are doing it.

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Dig in - read - then - watch tutorial videos - discover modules - learn PHP - read source code - visita api.drupal.org and study an API a day. Either become an expert themer (bootstrap, twig, HTML5, CSS/CSS3) or leave theme to narrowed experts by purchasing commercial theme/distribution products.

Drupal can be mastered.
Drupal can be worth it.
Drupal isn't for every project.
But when depth of functionality is required, what CMS other than Drupal has the features?

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

samstamport’s picture

Thank you for your very thoughtful & thorough reply.

I have read a lot of documentation, watched a lot of videos, and read some books on Drupal.

My biggest frustration is when I think I find a solution to a problem or relevant documentation or a good video I discover that the material is dated or vague. This greatly reduces my productivity.

I've been programming computers since 1970 and hold a couple of degrees in Computer Science, but these last two years is my first experience as a web developer. I chose Drupal for many of the reasons you stated. I've not used another CMS.

I am the president of a a new, small nonprofit. I am the only one of the volunteers who knows enough about computers to build a web site & support it. I'm a one person shop and I have other responsibilities than building a web site. There's got to be some CMS out there that will meet my needs. My current site is on D7 at columbiablooms.org.

sprite’s picture

Building and maintaining a public website for an organization, a website that includes any level of complexity, is a full time job.

If you ever find another CMS that can do what Drupal can do, I'd love to know what it is, because I haven't found it.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

sprite’s picture

As an example, check out the following demos of commercial Drupal distributions that pay for themselves in a couple hours.

http://demo.morethanthemes.com/enterpriseplus8/default/

http://demo.morethanthemes.com/sportsplus/default/

I'm an MTT customer.
Studying their products is like a "Drupal University" in itself.

--

Over the course of my decade of "Drupaling", I haven't always been on the site to answer questions, but at this point I believe I know enough to help others.

One of the biggest and most important kinds of questions posed is "is there a module for ...", and there almost always is.

I could go on and on about how to develop a good level Drupal knowledge, but trust me, it can be done, and done with available resources like:

- youtube videoes
- smart google searches
- Formal Drupal books
- really reading thoroughly and carefully and then trying out concepts on a vanilla test installation
- a MAMP/XAMPP/MAMP is essential as is heaving a good cloud environment in which to work as well.
- setting up phpstorm and/or phpdesigner on local machine is also essential for PHP debugging.
- also studying free and commercial distribution packages/products.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

samstamport’s picture

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses.

At this point I will investigate Acquia and More Than Themes to see if they offer reasonable pricing to get me going. I am also in the process of analyzing differences between Joomla & Drupal as well as other CMS alternatives.

I consider myself a pretty smart guy, but this business of web site development is daunting!

From what I've read so far I may stay with Drupal despite its complexity and lack of hand-holding support for newbies like me.

Update: I just watched "When to NOT use Drupal" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya4NotZNc4Y. Maybe this is what I need instead of Drupal and Joomla. I'm investigating these "Static Site Generators".

Another update: I just now discovered Backdrop (https://backdropcms.org). Could someone comment on it as well as Static Site Generators?

sprite’s picture

Perspective ...

If you run Linux, there isn't free technical support at the level you are looking for.
Companies like Redhat provide that, and it is very expensive.
If you run the Firefox web browser, there isn't free technical support at the level you're looking for.
If you run the Google Chrome web browser, there isn't free technical support at the level you're looking for.
If you run Windows, and you want actual technical support ...
Microsoft charges a hefty fee for that, a couple hundreds dollars per call.
If you operate an Apple Mac, that is probably the one exception to real technical support.

For the price of a single tech support call to most companies, you can buy the entire bundle of ready-made Drupal websites from the people below.

http://morethanthemes.com/store/bundles

They are setup to: install, update core and modules, add content (a lengthy process for any website), and you're done.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

sprite’s picture

Anyone who needs just a half dozen static HTML pages surely doesn't need Drupal.

However, implementing modern "responsive" websites with all the UI features visitors expect from modern corporate websites needs backend support from something like Drupal.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

sprite’s picture

Seriously ...

Watch the "daily dose of drupal" "level up tuts" videos.

Then spend a few weeks implementing all the features presented in those videos.

You will likely know a lot about Drupal afterward.

Get the MTT theme bundle (a couple hundred bucks), install them all (they are fully functioning Drupal websites), study how they are implemented, and you will know a lot about Drupal.

It may be "rocket science", but it isn't particle physics.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

lmspec5’s picture

Google the Drupal Learning Curve cartoon image. There's so much truth to that, I can't even begin. However, I will say this:

Like Sprite mentioned, LevelUpTuts has an amazing set of tutorials on youtube that have been a gamechanger. Try it...seriously.

Also, don't give up. Trust me, we went through several different options prior to Drupal but I couldn't be more thankful that we chose it in the end. It's been a nightmare to learn, but the architecture is constantly growing for the better and your long term is never going to be in question. Most people, especially small business owners, just jump to the first easy basic site they can build (or have built) cheap and fast...2 years later they find themselves doing it all over again...and again, and again. With Drupal you have what's called "scaleability." I wouldn't call ANY architecture infinitely scaleable, but with the community of developers, end-users, and yes, newbies asking all sorts of questions, Drupal grows constantly.

It's tough...and I'm a pretty smart guy too. Double science degrees in physics and chemistry, yet I felt like a 12 year old could run circles around me when I built my first Drupal website. Almost 3 years later, I still feel like a 12 year old could build a site in half the time, but I also feel accomplished for all that I've learned. It's been worth it.

Summary: Don't let it beat you up. We've all been there and some of us will still be there for awhile, but this community has an immense collection of talent from all levels and countries around the globe that, just like you and I, beat their head against the keyboard over something Drupal. We're all in this miserable, yet pretty freakin awesome, creation together. The commenters before had it right...and I'm guilty of the same...get involved. Even if you think you know nothing, I assure you there's that one newbie out there that would give anything to know that one nothing that they haven't been able to figure out yet. Off my soapbox, and back to beating a dead Ubercart horse now ;)

samstamport’s picture

Thanks so much for your encouragement.

At this point I'd really like to use Drutopia (https://drutopia.org/), but last I checked it's not quite ready. I then discovered https://backdropcms.org/. Backdrop is ready to go & seems to be a blend of D7 & D8 built on Drupal. With Backdrop or Drutopia I don't have to throw away what I've learned about Drupal in the last two years, but I'm hoping that I'll get much better support for newbies like me. Backdrop seems to be easier to use than native Drupal.

sprite’s picture

I hope you haven't jump into a fire ...

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

samstamport’s picture

So far, so good. I've ported my D7 site into Backdrop and am receiving excellent support from the Backdrop team. It's like a breath of fresh air! Backdrop seems to have picked the best stuff from D7 & D8 and looks like an excellent alternative for one-person shops like mine. I find it easier to use than D7 or my short experience with D8.

sprite’s picture

I imagine that in the long run you will find you've made a mistake.
It is only the huge size of the Drupal user base that keeps security and feature set strong.

By the way, I continue to be D7 only for production websites.

I do not have ANY D8 production websites yet, only test and evaluation installs.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...