Drupal Sucks

The author is entitled to his opinion, but it is seriously misinformed. In haste he’s drawn up a huge variety of assumptions about Drupal and its operation that could easily be put to rest with a little bit of time with the system and it’s fantastic community of developers and other professionals working with it every day.

I think it’s equal to argue that you can do anything useful with Rails without downloading additional code to assist, whether it’s more gems, code snippets, and other things. Try doing anything but the 10 minute blog tutorial without knowing anything about Rails and see how productive you are. At the end of that exercise, someone who hasn’t spent the time to learn the framework could very well argue that Rails sucks. But that would be an equally ill-formed opinion.

My point is that these frameworks help with productivity because you invest the time to become familiar with them. Such a framework will always have shortcomings and bugaboos. The truth is tens of thousands of people are doing incredible things with Drupal every day, both as a framework and a CMS, and have found the ways around the things you list as limitations.

You should try Concrete5. Both user-friendly AND powerful.

I agree Drupal is not a good choice for a large website project, it isn’t even a good choice for a small website project.

I would recommend any developer to stop wasting time with Drupal, its terribly designed and not user friendly.

Sure it’s possible to make a user friendly interface for anyone to manage content with Drupal, but in order to do that you have to spend way more time modifying the ridiculously long code in Drupal, rather than starting with a more simple CMS that gives you more flexibility.

Yeah, that statement about themes is absolutely false. They are not stored in the template.

I’m about to blow ur mind

function node_views_default_views() {
$view = new stdClass();
$view->name = 'frontpage';
$view->description = t('The basic front page view.');
$view->page = true;
$view->url = 'frontpage';
$view->page_title = '';
$view->page_type = 'teaser';
$view->use_pager = true;
$view->nodes_per_page = variable_get('default_nodes_main', 10);
$view->block = false;
$view->menu = false;
$view->breadcrumb_no_home = true;
$view->sort = array (
array (
'tablename' => 'node',
'field' => 'sticky',
'sortorder' => 'DESC',
'options' => '',
),
array (
'tablename' => 'node',
'field' => 'created',
'sortorder' => 'DESC',
'options' => '',
),
);
$view->argument = array (
array (
'type' => 'node_feed',
'argdefault' => '2',
'title' => '',
'options' => '',
'wildcard' => '',
'wildcard_substitution' => '',
),
);
$view->field = array (
);
$view->filter = array (
array (
'tablename' => 'node',
'field' => 'promote',
'operator' => '=',
'options' => '',
'value' => '1',
),
array (
'tablename' => 'node',
'field' => 'status',
'operator' => '=',
'options' => '',
'value' => '1',
),
);
$views[$view->name] = $view;
return $views;
}


omagawd, a view in code

do you even try to google anything before starting a rant?

In fact, Drupal doesn’t suck, which is better than you could say for this author, who puts his byline to such brazenly misinformed piffle.

The author obviously didn’t research the topic at all before writing this idiotic screed! e.g. Drupal “views” are certainly not “templates” by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact, Drupal templates are stored in the file system. I’ll stop there, and leave this idiot to check his facts.

Thanks for your post, it has really opened up a great discussion. However, many of your criticisms of Drupal can be said of Ruby on Rails as well. It is very easy in Rails to have very inefficient queries if you don’t use memoization or if you use model relationships without thinking such as HABTM, etc.

Drupal may not use PHP OOP constructs per se, but it demonstrates OOP concepts. The Node is one of the best examples as it uses the concept of Polymorphism to tailor the Node into things such as Polls, articles, forums, etc (A big advantage over Joomla in my opinion and allows for better ACL & makes things like Organic Groups so powerful). The use of hooks demonstrates Encapsulation, and allows for clean Module writing.

I program in Rails, raw PHP, and within Drupal. The thing about coding your CMS or your own App from scratch is that you are your own support. Coding around a CMS such as Drupal, is that your problems are probably problems that have been solved or there is already an awesome module that handles the work for you. This drastically increases productivity, and when you have a client breathing down your neck, delivery time is crucial.

The argument of “why not just code your own CMS” is weak. It reminds me of the people who say, “why not write your own framework” or even “why not just write your own programming language”. No need to reinvent the wheel, unless there is strong reason to do so. The creation of Rails is a great example of how DHH popularized how a web app should be written, with MVC, metaprogramming, and now RESTful architecture. Unless you are offering a new philosophy & new architecture that offers something of value, I wouldn’t waste my time. The Ruby language is awesome because it offered new philosophies and compiled some cool features from Perl, Lisp, etc. But coding something just to do what something else already does, doesn’t really support Object Oriented Programming philosophy anyways (reusable code, etc.)

But believe me, Rails has a TON of horrible points too (and you complain about Drupal’s backwards compatibility??? Rails is notorious for not being backwards compatible with old code & gems. I’ve had so much code break because of a new Rails version). There are teams writing CMS’s in Ruby and I have yet to see anything on par with Drupal in terms of community and extensions, so I doubt writing something on my own in Rails, DJango, or CakePHP to do content management would be at all useful.

Keep in mind Drupal is a CMS. So for doing Content Management, it is one of the best. Rails is a general web framework, so I would use that to code something like Digg, Twitter, or a Facebook App. Two totally different things in my opinion.

If you want barebones effective Drupal. Drupal Core + Views + CCK. Very powerful stuff. Then throw on top custom PHP in Blocks or Pages and you can do some crazy stuff.

Anyways, thanks for the discussion!

I was just interviewed for Drupal position, the employer wanted me to show him some code, which I’ll happily agree too. Also this isn’t the first time I’ve toyed with Drupal, but after seeing CODE BLOCKs, I feel pretty horrid about Drupal. Managing code in a database is retarded.

Also, if you look at some of their functions it gets more retarded, for example:


4.6 – 5 -user_authenticate($name, $pass)
6 - user_authenticate($form_values = array())
7 -user_authenticate($name, $password)


It gets pretty retarded between versions, somebody thought it would be a good idea to change the function parameters in 6 and 7, and change it back to the normal usage. This simple example screams bad development all over.

I’ll stick with Ruby on Rails and not Drupal with seven cups of coffee.