Well.
That should get some attention.
I've noticed a trend over the past several months as Drupal's been pushed into the spotlight by high-profile site conversions, publicity, slashdot announcements, and so on. With the flood of new folks checking the system out, installing it, and trying to figure it out, there's a growing category of posts and discussions that revolve around Drupal Backlash.
It's understandable -- you take a group of users and developers who've been working with a system for years on their own terms, functioning as a community and developing their software. They're proud of their work, and while they know that it has weak areas in need of improvement, the majority of folks who use the system have the knowledge or the drive to dive in and help fix those problems as they need to. Then, you inject a large number of people who have heard about how great -- nay, how amazing this cool tool is. It slices, it dices, it toasts your bread and spreads the jam!
And they start working with it. Sure, there's cool stuff. Sure, there are features they couldn't find elsewhere. Sure, there's a lot of cool niftiness. But there's also baffling new terminology to get used to. There are weak areas that haven't yet been addressed. There are decisions for project priorities and directions made eons ago that the newcomers disagree with, or haven't heard the reasoning for. They want to do X and Y and Z with A and B and C on the side, and they want it colored blue. These aren't unreasonable demands, naturally, but as it turns out Drupal doesn't yet support C + Z with blue (It did in 4.5, but no one used it, and it hasn't been updated, see...), or it takes some hacking with taxonomies (what are those?), or you have to figure out how to get the Blue.module working with the Z.module, or you have to write Z from scratch yourself...
And suddenly, all those promises of cool spiffy amazing Drupal goodness turn to laughter in the newcomers' ears. Where's the much-talked of 'simplicity' and 'power' and 'elegance?' They post in the forums. They ask, 'Hey! What gives?' Some even say, 'Hey! Your software isn't good at all! It sucks!'
Some get helpful replies. Some get code written for them by good-natured folks. Some cross paths with deadline-crunched old-timers who blink and say, 'What? Look, we've been at this for years. It works for us. If you need changes in a day, pay someone.' And sometimes, the newcomers hear 'Look, if you dislike it that much, don't use it.' To those old-timers, criticism from someone who's never contributed is interesting -- but won't really register as 'significant' until the person cares enough to dive in and fix the problem. That's how most of the old-timers got involved, after all.
Some of the newcomers are shocked. Others tuck their tails between their legs and shuffle back to reading APIs and lurking in the forums until they understand things. Others fire back a salvo or two of "Hey! Your software sucks AND you're arrogant!" Others wander off to find another CMS. And some stay and dig in deeper and DO find what they're looking for.
I've been working with Drupal for almost a year, now. I found it because I spent almost five years hunting around for software that would do just what I wanted for a particular hobby project. I wanted what amounts to polymorphism for content types -- different types of metadata and display options for a variety of content types, with shared core capabilities and the option to treat all content types as plain vanilla 'content' if I felt like it. I wanted elaborate cross-referencing. I wanted lean, mean CSS-driven layout. but it was a hobby project, and I had real sites to build for clients, blogs to put up for friends, band sites to roll out for acquaintances, knowledgebases for my employers to launch, and so on. My hobby toddled on on the background while I hunted for the right tools.
I'm a web and desktop application developer by trade. I'm capable of building such a system from scratch. I even tried a couple of times -- first in ASP, then ASP.Net when the time came. Reinventing the while is technically amusing, but ultimately frustrating. I decided I'd swallow my pride, save myself a man-year of labor, and use an existing system. I used postnuke, I used xoops, I used Movable Type. I tinkered with almost everything else. (And let me tell you, migrating from a PostNuke-plugin-based wiki to xoops news stories is no picnic.) I poked around with Typo3, Mambo, DotNetNuke, GeekLog, Wikis, and so on. I even returned briefly to the land of roll-your-own, experimenting with open source persistence frameworks to speed up the grunt work.
And then one day I heard someone mention Drupal. This was about year or so ago, before Sun donated money or Slashdot linked, or any of that, so it was a little easier to miss Drupal if you didn't look in the right places. I poked around. I installed it. I thought it was clean and relatively simple, so I mucked with it a it more. I loved Taxonomy, with its cross-referenced soup of metadata, though I spent two weeks trying to figure out how to create a simply hierarchial 'hello world' site. I found aspects of it confusing -- baffling even -- and I spent a couple of weeks asking questions and receiving no replies in the forums.
But I saw Drupal's relatively clean, focused core codebase and I recognized something that I wanted to stick with. Not because it was a 'turnkey, ready-from-square-one' package. I'd tried those, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. Customizing them to fit my needs was like unknitting a sweater. No, I decided that Drupal was what I wanted: a relatively robust software framework I could use to develop the kinds of sites I want to build. Since then, I've used Drupal as the basis for almost half a dozen sites, and my own blog. A number are still under development and haven't rolled out yet. Another is behind a corporate firewall. All have taken a fraction of the time the would have with another tool. Not because Drupal does everything, but because Drupal doesn't do MORE than what I need it to do. For some of these sites, I write a handful of custom modules. For some, I write themes from scratch. For others, I've simply throw up a stock drupal core, add a third-party theme and a fe modules, and it's live.
I am a web developer. Drupal is one of my most valuable tools.
This is not an attempt to evangelize Drupal to those skeptical of it. It's not an attempt to preach to the choir. It's not an attempt to argue with those who soured on Drupal after wrestling with it. Drupal needs work. It always has and it always will. There are weaknesses in it that ARE shocking considering its maturity in other areas. I don't mind that, though. It will always need work because the things being done with it keep changing and evolving.
Drupal is not a turnkey "Site Management Tool." It is not the be-all end-all Web Content Management System. In the future, someone might add the features necessary for it to be those things. But if you're looking for those things now -- if you are an end-site user who wants software that will do all of the things you want it to, quickly, without going in and hacking the code, Drupal may well Suck for you. I wish it were not so, because I like Drupal and I want everyone in the world to use it and love it.
But I have my own tools I'm building with it, my own problems to solve, and my own sites to build as well. I've chosen Drupal as my starting point for solving those problems, and I don't regret it. Drupal is, for me and for many of the others who use it, one of the most powerful tool around for building complex and content-rich web sites. This does not mean that you're stupid if it doesn't work for you, or if its ideiosyncratic bits are baffling to you. This doesn't mean that it's a piece of overyhyped crap, either. It's what it is, just like many other open source projects.
I'm sorry if I -- or any of the other Drupal 'zealots' -- have snapped back at you or attacked you when you posted your frustrations. We've all had them, even the zealots. It isn't rocket science, Drupal, but it sure isn't riding a bike, either.
And to the folks who put far more time than I do into developing Drupal? I'm sorry that some frustrated folks (not all, not even MANY mind you, but enough to make it annoying) say nasty things about you because you've spent your time solving different problems than the ones they have.
I love Drupal. I see its flaws and I see its strengths, and I use it. A lot. If Drupal isn't quite 'there' yet for your needs... don't despair. It might not be ready in time for your current deadline, but that's only because it's busy meeting a few dozen others. If you'd like, stick around. Dip your toe in. A few months down the line, you might be able to make it work for you, too.
Comments
A good perspective...this
I think this is a good way to look at Drupal. I am trying to create a myspace type of functionality. For the reasons that you mentioned in your post, I have decided to
1) Develop it in straight php and mysql
2) Continue to tinker with Drupal and learn continue to ride the learning curve so that maybe in the future I may be able to:
a) Figure out how to do these type of projects in drupal and save time rather than coding everything from scratch
b) Maybe learn to integrate what I have developed with drupal and extend its functionality
I like your approach of keeping it going in the background till one is familiar enough with it for it to be useful to you...
In the meantime though it is going to be straight coding to put the sites up, as I want them, quickly....
Thanks for the overall perspective and for sharing your experience in such depth, this helps me and i assume others who are new to drupal to see things from a better perspective
Nice
That sums it up perfectly for me.
I also started by just playing with Drupal without any fixed site design in mind - I did have a nagging feeling that other existing systems were too limiting and inflexible though. The site designs I wanted to do slowly took shape as I learnt more about Drupal, and they were quite different (in a good way) from what I would've come up with otherwise. Drupal allows a whole lot of information architecture concepts that other systems usually don't.
I think it is wise to learn how a new system works and what you can do with it on your own before you ever have to deploy it 'for real'. Of course that is a luxury some people don't have. But having to learn something quite different while trying to build a production site with it is a very risky proposition no matter what the tools are.
--
Anton
There are weaknesses in it
Kind of amazing, ain't it? For all its power and maturity, a default install of Drupal still doesn't support basic things like images.
Puts me in a real love/hate relationship with this thing...
For all its power and
For all its power and maturity, a default install of Mambo still doesn't support basic things like comments.
(each cms is different....)
silverwing
www.davidinwords.com
Poor comparison.
Which do you visit more often, sites without comments, or sites without images?
my point is
whether you want images in drupal or comments in Mambo, you have to download and install something.
silverwing
www.davidinwords.com
Perhaps. But to me, and I
Perhaps. But to me, and I think to a lot of people, the choices made as to what to bundle with Drupal by default and what to make users download seperately are often... bizarre.
For example, can you really justify the throttle module as being more useful to more people than image handling?
That's why Drupal is more
That's why Drupal is more referred to a framework than a content management system.
Hint: Try to implement a throttle module in Mambo......... do you get the point?
Daniel 'sun' Kudwien
makers99
That's why Drupal is more
Eh? On the front page and about page, Drupal is described much more as an advanced CMS than anything.
I think I get what you're saying, though. In many ways, Drupal tries to bridge the gap between a CMS and an application framework. Personally, I think this is the root cause of a lot of the tension within this community. You've got users of Drupal-the-CMS, and you've got users of Drupal-the-framework.
For better or worse, a lot of Drupal users just want a CMS that works and really don't give a fllip about The Open Source Waytm.
For better or worse, a lot of Drupal developers just want to develop their own projects on top of Drupal and really don't give a flip about the needs of Drupal users other than themselves.
This culture clash leads to some rather heated exchanges between users who wish Drupal had $cms_feature_176 or $documentation_piece_284 and developers who brush them off with a 'do it yourself' reply. The user gets upset about the callousness of those they met here and proceeds to bash Drupal, and the developer grumbles something about the good old days and wanders back to the developers mailing list where they don't have to listen to the peons.
When it comes down to it, I think they're both right.
They have unreasonable expectations of each other. Users expect perfection (by their own definition) from a group of developers with finite resources. Developers try to tell users to do things that frankly they're not capable of (telling them to walk before they've learned to crawl).
Other than personality issues (arogance, whineyness, etc) getting involved, there's only one thing I really take issue with - Of the above two parts of the conflict, the developers are the ones who should really know better. The core contributors, the general developers, the community regulars - they're the face of Drupal to everyone else. But from time to time, that face starts to look really ugly.
I think that's a little
I think that's a little unfair to the developers.
It's true that developers often do seem to say 'do it yourself' but, how is it they're supposed to know better? Should they buckle and just do what users want without pay or thanks just because there's a lot of whining? There has to be someone actually interested in doing a particular thing before it gets done, that's just the way of it.
I think the only part I really disagree with in what you said there, is the "developers should know better". Course, I don't actually hear a lot of the developers whining about the peons, so maybe I disagree with that part, too.
-- Merlin
[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
-- Merlin
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
I'm certainly not saying
I'm certainly not saying they should just "buckle and just do what users want without pay or thanks". I'm just saying the callous attitude sometimes displayed by certain devs gets on my nerves just as much as whining by newbies. But while whining newbies reflects badly on the newbies, a callous attitude by developers can reflect badly on Drupal.
THANK YOU DEVELOPERS!
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE RESPONDED TO MY 'SIMPLY SILLY REQUEST' WITH AN HONEST STREIGHT FOWARD ANSWER. I KNOW YOU WHERE UP LATE AFTER 10-HRS AT WORK.
THANK YOU FOR PROVIDING ME, A NON-PROGRAMMER LOOKING FOR A NEW CAREER WITH THIS INCREDIBLY POWERFUL WEB APPLICATION THAT I DIDN'T PAY A DIME FOR (yet!-you'll get your booty when I finish my first payed job ;-), soon ) THE CODE THAT IS TEACHING ME AND GIVING ME AN EDGE ON OTHER LESS FORTUNATE DEVELOPERS.
Thank You All for Helping in these forums when I really didn't even know how to ask the question with a lick of intellegance
We'll, I Love Drupal and this great community.
Thank You Developers!
t4him
I think the lacking support
I think the lacking support fort real user access control is a worse problem than the lacking support for images. There are several modules that fill in the gap for images. There are no user access modules yet that offer enough control to be considered competitive compared to some other CMSes, such as TYPO3 which is a system hog and bloatware deluxe but it can do user permissions!
--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency
There's actually quite a bit
There's actually quite a bit of access control available. Taxonomy access is quite powerful; og does some access control. I have a couple of different access control possibilities out, and with more coming.
I'm not sure what there needs to be to be 'competetive' with typo3, but there's stuff available, and an enterprising module developer could likely put together more.
-- Merlin
[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
-- Merlin
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
I agree, and I do believe
I agree, and I do believe there's room for improvement here. In order to set up adequate restrictions at a site we are deploying, taxonomy_access wasn't powerful enough, in some cases it was easier for users to share a user account than assigning roles. The whole role management system is clumsy, it needs to be redesigned, and rethought, preferably taxonomy_access as well as a more powerful form of access control should make it to core.
--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency
No; taxonomy access
No; taxonomy access shouldn't be in core. For one, it's a horrible way to do access control; it just happens to be the module out there with the best support.
Really, I think the problem is that the obtuseness of the node access system and the easy availability of role-based security mechanisms has convinced people (and myself included until Moshe straightened me out) that everything is role-based when it is, in fact, not.
Check out na_arbitrator for the current 4.7 stuff. It makes it a lot easier to do more specific access control systems, and comes with a couple of demo modules. I either need to write or con someone into writing a 'friends groups' module for it (ala buddylist) and a version of node privacy by role for it.
-- Merlin
[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
-- Merlin
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
On the money
This point about access control being the #1 weakness (for 4.6 anyway) is bang on the money. I whinged about all sorts of things in the early days, but as the weeks turn to months the thing that hurts most is access control, and it is certainly something that I naively assumed would be inherent and integral to either a CMS or a framework.
Every day I marvel at the brilliant ideas Dries and others put in. Every week I cuss at the security.
I hope to be on 4.7 by the end of the year: here's hoping it will be a new dawn for my access control issues
Node based access control
wasn't even part of Drupal 4.4, there was core API support in 4.5 but no real user interfaces. So 4.6 was the first version where you even really got the option of using it. The whole concept is still being thrashed out as to what the best approach even is - it is still a relatively new area. Generally functionality has to prove itself worthy in contrib before it is deemed good enough to go in core.
I don't think any of the currently released approaches are robust and/or flexible enough. The way Drupal is heading more and more core functionality is just provided by APIs leaving contrib modules free to easily provide the different user interface approaches. From what little I know, it might turn out that na_arbitrator could possibly get adopted as a sort of core access API that other modules extend. But even then that might approach might not be mature enough by the time 4.8 is frozen.
Even so, I prefer the current situation to that of most CMSs. We get to choose between 4 or 5 different approaches based on the site we are creating even if some of them are usually incomplete. Most CMSs will only have one way of doing it that is just as incomplete.
--
Anton
New to Drupal? | Forum posting tips | Troubleshooting FAQ
Example Knowledge Base built using Drupal
Well said
I came across Drupal about 8 months ago purely by accident, I don’t even recall how it happened but I’m glad it did. I have just enough PHP/MySQL knowledge to make me dangerous, but this is also enough to realise the potential that Drupal offers.
No, you may no get answers immediately. No, Drupal may not do exactly what you need out of the box and yes it is a steep learning curve, but it is well worth it.
If you really need certain features there are plenty of people in this community happy to assist, it may cost a couple of bucks but at the end of the day what’s a few dollars to get the functionality you need when the bulk if the system is already there.
Drupal is now definitely the first thing I look at when I pull out the tool kit.
www.slickfish.com.au
Excellent Post
Thank you for this wonderful post.
I came across Drupal in the summer when I had an idea and I didn't want to roll all the code for the idea. BTDT, and it takes too long and is ultimately unsatisfying because I code exactly what I need, which can sometimes make it hard to expand.
Drupal, at its core, is a fantastic piece of work. I love the basic design. And you're right, there are surprising areas of weakness. But I think these areas will be addressed over time, as things move forward. The core development team works quite hard to improve Drupal, as anyone can tell by following the 4.7 work, and looking at the differences between 4.5 and 4.6.
A problem lies in that what one web developer thinks is basic functionality, another web developer thinks is advanced. And the functionality that comes with Drupal is a direct result of what the people who work the hardest on it thought was important.
I've been converted to Drupal; I now run 3 sites using it, and will likely run more. I recognize that it's probably not the right solution for people who don't know PHP. But then again, designing a website is a complex process, and the bar has been raised rather high over time. We've had more than a decade to watch websites grow from simple gopher pages to the vast variety we have out there today. And I'm sure needs will only get more and more complex as time marches forward.
-- Merlin
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
Drupal vs Nucleus
Drupal is very promising, but its weaknesses drive me nuts.
I'm not a PHP coder, but that doesn't mean I'm looking for an out of the box solution. Drupal is not the only "modular", "expandable" PHP/MySQL out there. I'm sort of stuck between Drupal and Nucleus that I've been using for years.
They're structurally different and I'm not sure yet which one is the most "future proof"...
Two different kinds...
I think part of the problem is that code-munching developers and less code-inclined folks have different ideas about what constitutes 'modular' and 'expandable.' I took a look at the Nucleus home page, and it does look pretty clean. It seems to be a PHP-based multi-user blogging tool that takes a lot of UI hints from MovableType.
It supports plugins and UI skins, it supports RSS feeds and so on. If I was talking to someone who wanted to set up a blog and run, I'd probably say that it is modular and expandable.
As a developer, though, and someone who often (very often!) needs to add complex features to sites that don't fit the 'blog' or 'community site' or 'wiki' templates, I have a different set of criteria in my mind. I think things like, 'How easy is it for me to conditionally override the standard behaviors of the ui?' 'How hard is it for me to plug in custom authentication schemes?' 'Do I have to alter the core system files for the software in order to implement new features?' 'Are core features exposed in easy to use APIs, or will I have to roll my own?' 'How easy is it to add new content types to the system, with different data fields, different validation rules, different editing and browsing UIs?' 'If I customize those portions of the system, will I break compatability with the plugins everyone ELSE has written?' And so on and so forth.
These aren't more legitimate questions. They're just very different. Both Nucleus and Drupal are 'modular' and 'expandable' from the perspective of someone who wants to set things up and go. Nucleus is probably BETTER for that, because its tight focus on multi-user blogging makes it less ambitious. As a developer, though, I've found drupal to be the best CMS to work with from a code perspective. The tough choices made by the core development team over the years have added up to a lean architecture with lots of hooks for expansion, and very few 'evil snafus' to trip me up. When I go to add new functionality in code, I don't have to hack out loads of old stuff, and chances are my new functionality won't break other peoples' work when they go to add their own.
I don't know if that's at all helpful, just trying to share what I've found beneficial about it.
--
Jeff Eaton | Click Here To Find Out Why Drupal "Sucks"
--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram
Do Drupal's developers look beyond the core?
I'm not 100% sure Nucleus can't do the things you mention. I can't judge that.
Drupal's base architecture may be strong, but it's probably weaknesses build on top of that that get me in trouble. See my list here.
That's what I meant with my 'Do Drupal developers even know CSS?' comment that got me in trouble last week. I get the impression the developers don't care about what happens beyond the core, explaining the weaknesses in basic stuff compared to other CMS.
Drupal has this attitude that it's "not an ordinary CMS" and so doesn't have to provide functionality that non-hardcore coders have come to expect from CMS.
The point about Open Source
The point about Open Source is that we don't _have_ to do anything. :p
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
confused
PeterLucas, your comments stump me.
To me, the hook system is the ultimate testament to the fact that the core developers look beyond the core. The Forms API does the grunt work for new module development, and I would guess it actually created more work for the core. Then add to that the fact that I can re-theme core output.
So, I'm not quite with you on this one.
Beginners View.
All very good arguments. Let me give you the view of a newcomer. To tell the most important thing upfront: I stuck with Drupal and I still love it, it lets me be creative and customize things to my liking.
So here is the actual story:
I would like to consider myself as one of those guys, but that is an idealistic view of myself. I have virtually no php css mysql experience. That does not prevent me from looking through some code and changing things. Worst thing that happened so far, I had to use a backup that was one hour old. I do all development locally anyways so there is no harm in messing up my site.
Thats not the main point though.
Often times I found that I played myself into a corner I can not get out by myself. After searching for a while, I post in the forum, hoping someone else ran into the same problem before and can give me a useful advice. I never expect anyone to do development for me but often times the features I ask for require development. Well I did not know that the thing I was asking for would be that hard to implement.
You did one thing in your post I have always complained about.
Posts like "Drupal " get the most attention, while many of the posts I wrote in "How do I ..." style never got a reply.
Some of them were simple fixes that I found out the hard way.
Yes I am sometimes looking for an easy way out, but I also try to use the little knowledge I gained so far to help others out.
As I said the reason to choose Drupal was to do things no other CMS could do. So far I have not been disappointed and I have managed to pull things off I never thought possible a couple of month back.
In case someone cares this is how I came to Drupal:
I had a site in mind that I wanted to implement.
My first contact with CMS was phpNuke.
I was fascinated by the idea of CMS as I never tried something like it before.
It did not take me long to find out its limitations. rm -rf nuke it went.
Browsing around for more features got me to Mambo.
2 weeks later: >rm -rf mambo
I used cmsmatrix and narrowed my choices to:
Typo3
Drupal
Xoops
Xaraya
Of those Typo3 and Drupal fit the profile and Drupal struck me as the better choice (its slim and easier, yes easier, I still believe that).
Conclusion:
Keep up the good work, but take your time to help out some poor guy/gal once in a while. Not everyone is a developer. Mostly I am very happy with the forum.
Here are the guys who helped me most:
-ramdak5000
-sepeck
-merlinofchaos
-styro
-vwX
Thanks guys and all the other who helped me!
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
important
Well said. For all my comments above, this IS very very important.
--
Jeff Eaton | Click Here To Find Out Why Drupal "Sucks"
--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram
Thanks
;-)
helping others out
"Yes I am sometimes looking for an easy way out, but I also try to use the little knowledge I gained so far to help others out."
This is very important. I'm not a developer either (and rarely mess with the code), although I have installed 100+ Drupal sites. Anyone, once they have done an installation and created a site, can begin helping in the forums. And everyone should. This is the only way to raise the quality and quantity of support. To assume that only those with the most expertise should be making sure that support questions are answered is impractical. And when those with less expertise address the easier questions, then those with more expertise can devote the time they have to spend on the more difficult ones. Plus, I will add that I have learned a lot by reading various questions and solutions.
So, everybody wins when everybody helps out. This is the secret to open source. :-)
Put you on the list
Hey, I remember you. I forgot you on my list :-)
Thanks for mentioning me,
Thanks for mentioning me, Andre:-)
Nice post.
I find people tend (no matter what their level of experience is in development of sites) to focus too much on the tool. They forget what they are doing it all for.
People forget, at the end of the day, all it means is a way to put "stuff" on the 'net.
-
Shane Birley
Vicious Bunny Creative
http://www.vbcreative.com
---
Shane Birley
Left Right Minds
https://www.leftrightminds.com
What about the fun
And having fun in the process. I do my sites as a hobby. That is I never expect to make money of them nor do I need to. For me its all about the fun ;-)
I guess many people come here with the wrong expectation. If you think you can get a CMS to match what Yahoo! does with thousands of payed developers, well dream on.
I find that lots of people are not willing to work but make big money. Noone seems to be interested in providing good content but wants to steal it, slap google adsense on and have the big bucks rolling in.
Something like this takes time and effort. If you ever make money with your site you will be able to hire people to do the neat stuff.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Yes!
Creating content is so much FUN! Creating web sites isn't as much fun.
"Oooo, new CMS tool. What can it do? Wow, it can do A through W! That's awesome! Oh, wait. Why can't it do X, Y, and Z!? This tool sucks!"
Sigh.
-
Shane Birley
Vicious Bunny Creative
http://www.vbcreative.com
---
Shane Birley
Left Right Minds
https://www.leftrightminds.com
Sure
Or you could say
Wow, it can do A through W! That's awesome! Oh, wait. Why can't it do X, Y, and Z!? Wow, this means I am already 88% there. I should be able to get the other 12% going myself and let the nice people who gave me the 88% know what I did.
;-)
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Another newcomer view
I guess I'm in the middle between the old-hand developers who expect to have to do it all themselves, and the newbies described in the original post that want it all done for them.
I'm glad I discovered Drupal. I was playing with a concept site to prototype an idea of mine. But I was getting severely bogged down in the basics, like user authentication, role-based security, theming - all the foundational things you have to have before you can start to build application functionality.
Now in just a couple of hours after install, I have a help/documents system (book), a very flexible user roles system (user), a nice 2- or 3-column web layout, search (fulltext, user profile, and location around zip code), custom content types (flexinode), and an acceptable, consistent theme that's "good enough" for now.
And I haven't even started to play with taxonomy yet!
I fully expect that I'll be coding a couple of new modules to implement the advanced features I want the site to have. But the great thing about Drupal is -- I can customize it in that way. Some of them may even be useful enough to give back to the community, though I may need help cleaning them up for contribution.
Great post: one highlight
I'm a non-coder who's pretty smart at grokking other people's code. I work for a very large company. We had some immediate needs to do some website prototyping, so I was charged with looking at Open Source CMS utilities.
I went through a dozen. Some quickly, some not quickly. I latched onto Drupal for two main reasons:
1) Native multi-user support
2) Extensibility
After a year of in-the-field testing and in-house R&D, however, I just want to reiterate one point that Eaton makes:
We're beginning to look at Drupal as a tool for creating, managing, and displaying content that is created by a host of services (including our own software, other sites via RSS, and natively in Drupal).
As a _framework_ newbies will discover (as I did), that getting Drupal "just right" can be a long process.
But, I'd say (and have said before), that Drupal does about 80% of what I need. And that frees me up to concentrate on the little details, not the larger framework.
For a little more ranting on this topic, you can read the following two posts:
Our primary competitor follows us to Drupal
Why I blog in WordPress but work in Drupal.
--
http://ken.blufftontoday.com/
Totally
Thanks for your post. It was very helpful to those (like me) who always gets a bit desperate ...
And I concord with Andre75 also... not all of us are developers :-)
Anyway, Drupal IS one of the best CMS in town... and have a great community too!
Rosamunda
Buenos Aires | Argentina
Thanks for this post...
I am a long time PHP developer and web designer going back to the beginning. As both a software engineer AND a serious standards-based web designer, I've been looking for a good "platform" (for lack of a better term) to easily meet common needs while providing a disciplined codebase for expandability. I've been into Ruby on Rails for a while, but it's not right for everything, and PHP is often a safer choice for various types of projects.
I found this post by googling "Drupal Sucks", because reading criticism of a tool is much more informative than reading its evangelism. My experience with open-source PHP has been that it largely sucks. When I needed to manage complexity at my own job I couldn't find anything that did the job without being overly complex or overly brittle. I ended up creating and releasing Templation as a web designer's CMS (as opposed to an end-users CMS).
However, I am excited about the possibilities of using Drupal for a certain class of contract work that's been coming my way recently: user-manageable, low-budget, standardized-functionality websites. I can't stand most CMS' because they tend to sacrifice programmability for ease-of-use. This post leads me to believe that the Drupal team shares many of my standards, and that Drupal will provide another awesome tool in my arsenal.
Good luck. I am a non-coder
Good luck. I am a non-coder and while Drupal has been a steep learning curve for me, I have never regretted it. You will love Drupal's extensibility if you are a programmer.
I suggest you set up the feed for http://drupal.org/planet in your newsreader. Many top drupal developers blog regularly these days and through their posts, you will very quickly get an idea of the inner workings of Drupal.
Content Management or Blog Management?
I've been looking at Drupal off and on for a while now. I have a real job, and other obligations, so I was looking for something I didn't have to spend much time figuring out. Drupal is not that.
I want some way of making a website for people that allows them to easily add content themselves. In this regard, the best thing I've gotten out of Drupal is TinyMCE, which has little to do with Drupal except that I didn't know about it before. So I stuck TinyMCE into one of my existing LAMP sites and it does a good job for just that one thing, which is a major part of what I want.
I've read what people have written about using Drupal to make a brochure site, but I guess I'm just thick, because no matter what I do, it always comes out looking like a blog site. That's why I get frustrated and end up saying that Drupal sucks. That's how I found this article, because I'm at it again trying to figure out how to make Drupal do what I want, and I wanted to see what other people's comments who also have exclaimed "Drupal sucks!" in frustration.
Anyway, what I want is a Content Management System, not a Blog Management System, and I still don't see how to do this with Drupal. People say "RTFM!" But reading Drupal documentation is like trying to learn how to ride a bike by reading the instructions on how to assemble it.
LOL
Whatever dude. Go and yell at your cat and come back when you are feeling better.
I just did a new site for someone, that absolutely does not look like a blog (the two sites in my sig do, so bad example).
Anyways, I simply redirected the front-page to a custom frontpage and that was that. All other pages are simply nodes of the content type page and can be done just like any other static page.
So why did I use drupal? Sortable tables is what I needed and what I got. Otherwise it looks like a static company website. No blog-like feeling. And the best thing is, it only took me hours (spent on customizing the theme, just as you would have to do with any other software). Everything else worked right out of the box (except the theming on flexinode).
But suit yourself.
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Drupal is not perfect but it
Drupal is not perfect but it does have a lot going for it - see this thread: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,1676.0.html
www.Drupalancers.com. Custom-Made Themes, Modules, Blocks and Websites.
It's all about the
It's all about the theming.
1) Learn PHPTemplate.
2) Learn how to use node.tpl.php with different node types to manage your content.
3) Understand that what makes a blog look like a blog is a combination of layout and the typical bits that appear. Change the layout. Don't feel locked into center content + sidebars + header + footer. Don't feel locked into the front page is teasers which links to posts.
The trick to doing something is to first understand what it is you want to do.
The second trick is to understand how the tool both helps and prevents you from doing that. Understanding the the latter can be the trickiest part of all.
In short:
Managing content is largely about the classification of content and the navigation of content. The first place to look is the power of taxonomy. Design a completely different front page. Use modules like dashboard, views and node queue to change your front page from a list of posts with teasers into a directory and an introduction. Use taxonomy menus to drive navigation. Use URL aliasing (path.module) and directly add pages into your menu tree using the menu module. In 4.7 these are both available directly from editing the node itself, once you enable both modules (they are not enabled by default).
-- Merlin
[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
-- Merlin
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
thank you drupal!
nice review! i agree, it really takes some time to get to know Drupal but once you get the hang of it, its easy and very flexible.
thank you drupal!
roger :)
http://bagscity.com, http://weddingringshop.info, http://homegyms.be, http://buyshoes.be
Dont scare away newbies :)
Being web builders who have done Drupal sites for commercial as well as organizations, we don't see Drupal as complicated or mysterious, or hard.
You as web developer are responsible to make life easier to them, without them having to know a single HTML.
The title is `provocative' :) No we are not zealots, we are enthusiasts.
As we have to install more Drupal based sites, we make our own packages. That means:
1. Add additional modules' SQL into the drupal mysql
2. Add additional modules (images, weblinks, taxonomy_content, shortcuts)
into /modules
3. Pack em and ZIP em
4. Save them on a USB Flash drive
5. Install manually or use Fantastico
6. Voila! All the useful publishing modules are ready to go
7. Configure settings, slogans, themes
8. Hand over to owners
________________________________________________________________________________
Internet for ISLAM, get to know Islam and Muslims :) May Allah brings you to the Straight Path
http://muslimin.org/Islam
----------------------------
Annoying
How do I delete this thread from my tracker?
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Deja Vu
I'm new to the Drupal community (hi all!) - about a month or so ago, a colleague and I found Drupal during an evauation of open source CMS frameworks in preparation for a rollout of several commercial sites. Drupal appealed to both of us for a variety of reasons.
I've travelled the same path - Drupal appeals to me because it offers what appears to be a simple, clean extensibility model (note that I've not worked with all of the other CMS systems so I am unable offer a comprehensive comparison.)
By way of comparison, I've used DotNetNuke for several sites, and after spending countless hours writing dozens of components trying to add my own custom functionality, Drupal seems like a breath of fresh air. And the DNN project organization and teams have their share of issues.
I've rolled out several small-scale test sites using Drupal, and look forward to running higher-traffic sites soon. With 4.7, I'm able to set up a Drupal site in a matter of minutes, and start creating content. I could do that with DNN, too, but that's not all that appeals to me. (DNN is quite a bandwidth hog, due to the bloated html / session state cruft that comes with the "ASP.Net way" of coding - I'm stuck on very thin wire, and like lightweight html generation).
Guess what? All teams and all projects will have some stresses and friction. It's the nature of the beast. I prefer to look for ways to help smooth things out. I like people who try to do the same.
Does drupal 'do everything'? Is it perfect? No. Can I work with it to create the functionality I want without pulling out my few remaining hairs? So far, yes! I'm sure we'll run into problems along the way, but that is the nature of the beast.
Oh, and of course, thanks to all those who helped build Drupal to its present state - I hope to be able to give something back to the community by contributing some modules along the way. I've already done some debugging of non-core modules, and in my bug reports I have tried to provide details sufficient to help other users correct the problems while we wait for a fix. And, if no fix is forthcoming, I'll start digging into the code and see if I can fix it myself, and submit the fix for review.
The key is that I like Drupal and the community enough that I want to help it succeed, I'm willing to invest in the framework and the community, and I hope that I'm able to be a "net gain" rather than a "net drain".
Here's to a long and mutually rewarding relationship.
Michael Curry
Exodus Development, Inc.
www.exodus-dev.com - www.rubypowered.com
My History of CMS
1. I went for Blogger
(too, simple and not so professional :P)
2. Switched to Joomla
- the installation is simple but when I was in the CMS man, it was too complicated! (maybe I was too nubie!)
3. I switched to XOOP
- it looks like Joomla anyway not my taste.
4.Switched to Drupal
Nice GUI and it is so hard to install and I need to manually go to SQL server for the installation?
5. Switched to BLOG:CMS
- Very hard to install and poor tech support (it's like a brain-washed NUCLEUS:CMS)
6. Switched to NUCLEUS:CMS
Fun and easy to install. Lighter than Wordpress
7. Switched to WordPress
Very cool,nice support and hasmany plugins. But not so proffesional
8. Switched to Drupal
- Why? Because it is really promising with its 4.7.0 version and Leo Laporte the KFI Tech Guy uses this too!
I'd like to second that!
The advice and knowledge available here if you look for it is excellent. What must it of been like when this didn't exist?
www.dawnofthereplicants.com
I went from many different
I went from many different CMSs until I find drupal. One thing that still amazes me is the small download size of a drupal distribution ~474kb.
I Own 30+ drupal powered sites using multisite configurations on a few different hosts and I manage many other drupal sites for clients.
I took what drupal offers and keep an eye on new features. From my experience maintaining drupal sites requires a lot of effort only when a new major version is rolled out and it's time to upgrade your sites, but this pales compared to create a custom CMS.
Also people involved in drupal development are committed with optimization of the code to enhance drupal's performance.
Drupal might be the future for many of us...
...and I'm currently in the process off transferring of a group of corporate websites built from everything from in-house CMSes via Mambo to plain old HTML-files into a Drupal frame-work. This means we've come to the conbclusion that Drupal is one of the best open-source tools for our corporate work BUT...
...we're only on the brink of starting the real redesign- and implementation work and at times I am wondering if we will actually pull this off without too much hacking outside the bounds of Drupal.
For looks, I'll stick my neck out and say that from what I've seen the are extremely few professional-looking (graphically) real-world examples of corporate websites. All ready-made themes I've ever seen look... uhm.. well.. let's say like "nice tries" by coders who doesn't care as much for a sleek exterior rather than nice sleek code and nifty internal constructs. Looks might be just chrome to some but as few examples I've seen tells me that most people doesn't care to put up the work needed for nice looks and that includes the Drupal team. (Ok, I admit it's functional to a certain extent but only Plone looks worse in it's default incarnation.)
I guess my bottom line in this comment is that Drupal would probably attract more less technically niched corporate users if there were more good examples of polished sites out there using Drupal to check out puls any nice-looking default themes at all would go a long way attracting some people (Wordpress, Mambo/Joomla all leaves Drupal in the dust for polished looks) On the other hand Drupal's default themes (+ the Drupal theme garden) really inspires you to do something nicer. Oh well.. I 'm ranting. Sorry for taking up your bandwidth.
Moving to Drupal is like taking your grand grandma to dinner - you'll get warm-hearted company with lots of wisdom and intelligence built-in but it sure ain't sexy without a SERIOUS make-up. ;)
Being pro-active
I have been involved as an activist online who need to have our voices heard over the Internet.
Remember the FREE Geocities and Tripod sites?
Well, now Drupal is a free software for those who can afford own domain.com and need to have the leverage, especially I am talking here about organizations and grassroot activism and campaigns.
And I am working pro-active like this: find a website that represents a real community or organization, help and support groups such as the websites for the blind, deaf, poor, environmental, etc - who already have own domains but are not educated about CMS and Drupal.
People said that Dries is the antithesis of Bill Gate$ and I agreed on that - Drupal is antithesis to ASP.NET (or whatever crap CFM, JSP, ASP, or bloated PHP-CMS) because it gives the power and leverage to small peoples, you just have to know how to use and maximize.
Drupal `sucks' the energy of an activist like me who believed in achieving via websites what we could not physically. It does not suck my resource monetarily and physically, and the way it looks does not `suck' in negative way.
LOL
Moving to Drupal is like taking your grand grandma to dinner - you'll get warm-hearted company with lots of wisdom and intelligence built-in but it sure ain't sexy without a SERIOUS make-up. ;)
Congratulations!
You've earned first place in this month's "Most Warped Analogy" Contest. :-)
Welcome to the Club
Drupal is awesome until you start wanting to break outside of the typical 3-column forums and blogs boundary. Drupal is an awesome system if you have time to futz around and hack it fit your needs. Drupal is much like a framework in that you take whats there and reproduce you're own incarnation. Not all of us have teams of developers helping with this or the deadlines that allow for such things.
It's not the software, stupid
This is my 3rd go-around with Drupal. I've been watching its development with interest over the past couple years, and it has made great strides. I think that if someone is expecting a free, open source piece of software this complex to be perfect out of the box, then they need a reality check. Free software comes with baggage.
Drupal 5 has come a long way. Like many have said, it has some beautiful features, and some maddening features. One moment I'm smiling, the next moment I'm cursing.
But I think I can stick my finger right on the main sore spot: SUPPORT. It's not the software. Most people that come here are aware of the pros and cons of an open source product. Even newbies get the fact that there is going to be some kind of effort on their part.
But every level of user, from noob to expert, needs support. The noobs need it to get up to speed and get their first posts running. The experts need it because they are extending the software into new places, trying neat things and fixing bugs. And all of in between need it for a million other reasons.
But this is open source software. The support you get is freely given by volunteers (If there are paid staff, I'm not aware of it). And they can only do so much. Generous users provide support too, but again, they can only do so much. I know I appreciate the efforts of those who help out.
But the problem is that finding answers is painful. In usability we have a saying, "Find the pain, and fix it." I think the Drupal pain point is support.
Problem #1 is this web site. Yes, I know it is being addressed - the slowness is annoying, but it's not the main issue. The main issue is it is very hard to find answers. I use search all the time, and it is next to useless. Why? Well, the usual problems with search: too many results, too many unrelated results, too many similar results with different answers. Then add a slow responding site - and you have pain.
Then there are book pages, "official" pages I guess - that are far too sparse. I'm currently trying to manually place a block created by a view on a page. There's *some* documentation on it - but not enough. On the page with the info, there are similar questions from people like me left unanswered - highly frustrating.
It's like most software - the documentation is the last thing addressed, and it's addressed poorly. New releases come out, the docs suffer the same problem, the pain snowballs.
So what do I do next? Post to the forums. I get a couple scattered answers. In the end, if I am persistent enough with bumping my own thread and asking very specific questions and possibly adding new updated threads (because old ones seem to get ignored) I will get my answer via some generous Drupal user (which I am always thankful for).
That's pain right there. This is why I think many people give up, or consider some users arrogant, or uncaring (which I don't think most are). This is why people say Drupal "sucks." But it isn't the software itself. It's working with it - and those are two different things. Sure drupal has some weak spots, but all in all it's one stellar piece of work.
To me the solution to this is a team that specifically rewrites all the documentation, from scratch, easily searchable in probably wiki form (NOT this website) that is maintained and updated. But how are you going to get that done? Good question. I don't know if you can. And there is so much to cover, it would be a huge task.
That leaves us to this site, to find answers here, and it's tough. But IMO, until it becomes a lot easier to find the answers we all are looking for, there's going to be pain in using this software. Maybe that's the price of free software, I don't know. And there are certainly other issues besides this, but that is my own take on the situation.
Embedding views
I know this was just an example for your post but if you're still stuck:
Michelle
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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com
subscribing
subscribing
Nice article
I always wanted a simple CMS and easy to build modules,themes and blocks. As long as I know how to create these I'm happy.
Today is the 2nd time i tried to create a hello world module .. i spent 2 hours and all i get is page not found :(
Drupal may be good for those people who already know how to use it. Probably Drupal is good for corporate site.
A piece of advice is to pop
A piece of advice is to pop into #drupal-support at Freenode. There's always helpful people over there.
Your problem is probably due to the menu hook not being correctly implemented. You may also need to empty your site's cache. I recommend using the Devel and Coder modules, they save a lot of time when doing development work.
--
Jakob Persson
Drupal developer, web designer and usability consultant
http://www.jakob-persson.com
--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency
Drupal Hello World Module
What a coinkidink! I just spent an hour or two myself today creating a "Hello World" module. I too got page not found for a while, until I got the .info file set up correctly. (complete code at www.drupnewb.com/node/9) You don't need much for a "hello world" Module in Drupal, just a functional .info and .module - I also did a README.txt, but it would work just fine without that.
Come on, Pal. Drupal is not
Come on, Pal. Drupal is not that bad in the sense of open source way. Anyway, buying and reading the Pro. Drupal and Theme Making book might help abit as they are arranged in a nice manners.
one reason
i have one reason why Drupal ______. I wudn't say that word b'cause i use this software. but still....
I can take a backup of mysql within my admin panel and my full site is backed up in wordpress or in phpBB.
whereas i can't take a backup within my admin panel in drupal. also mysql backup is not enough for a drupal site. all the files in site directory need to be backed up for drupal site.
See what a pain.
please note that i am fan of Drupal for its simple and tiny URL format and great SEO friendly title formats.
Will Drupal developers do something for
simple one click backup of mysql database within admin panel (that must be able to backup the whole site)?
reply needed from Drupal developers. Thanks.
Missing the point
You are missing the point of this rather old post and this is not the place for feature requests.
Locking this thread as it is very old and is in danger of turning into just a list of complaints because people are reading the title and not the original post.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.