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Drupal is f*cked

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mouser:
commenting on iphigenie's post, i think one way to view the root of the problem with Drupal is that it is extremely schizophrenic in that a huge part of it is clearly focused on addressing developer's needs, as if it was a development platform, but then another half of it is all about providing these really intricate configuration systems that are designed to bypass the need to do any coding.  It's this part that i find intensely frustrating from a developer's standpoint.

The result of this, at least from this programmer's perspective, is an extremely painful experience where you may set something up and if you come back to it next week you'll have no hope in the world of remembering what exactly you did and why the system is behaving the way it is.

As an example of this, take a look at the Views module, which is seeing widespread adoption and praise.  This is a very very powerful module that is insanely flexible and let's you create all kinds of very intricate configurations all using a very complicated user interface.  Web designers and community maintainers who are not programmers can manage to eventually figure it out, which is fine for a one-time use, but from a developer's standpoint i find it just the completely wrong approach.  This is a case where trying to build something that can be configured to do everything using a user interface that bypasses any coding, results in something totally opaque that becomes unmaintainable.

I feel like there are a lot of things like that in Drupal -- it's like half of the team was/is building drupal for developers to use as a platform, and the other half was/is trying to wrestle control out of the hands of developers and make it something that can be infinitely configured to do a million different things using not just a million options, but options that involve multi-step creation of recursive filter structures using a drag and drop user interface.  Stuff that once you create becomes opaque and undecipherable.

Again, there is much to love about Drupal -- but as a developer wanting to use it as the cms foundation to custom web service creation, i find it frustrating, and likely moving in the wrong direction.  I'd really love to find a more developer-centric cms platform/framework, where the focus was not on making it infinitely configurable through a million options from the online gui configuration dialog, but rather through a programming API.

Carol Haynes:
Have you tried Joomla? The back end is simple but the API is apparently comprehensive for producing new modules and components (I haven't used it myself but it seems to be liked by the people who use it). Version 1.6 is looking to be a big step forward when it is released as it will streamline some of the code, remove all the legacy issues and introduce a proper user access rights module.

Personally I found the multiple layers and vocabulary in Drupal very confusing and poorly explained in the 'documentation' - maybe it is just me but I fimd Joomla to be well thought out and pretty straightforward to use.

mouser:
My impression is that Joomla is less suitable as a development platform than Drupal.  That could just be my lack of experience with it.

There are a LOT of things to be impressed with about Drupal from a coding standpoint -- for example how much effort has gone into the hook system and insuring that Modules can do what they need to do without ever messing with any core files. And there are some excellent books on coding for Drupal, which makes a huge difference for me.

One way to look at my complaints and frustrations about Drupal is simply that Drupal is trying mostly to be a CMS that sites can install and configure and use.  Whereas I am less interested in being able to "configure" it to do custom stuff, but rather interested in writing code to extend and customize it.  I may go back to using a framework like CodeIgniter, CakePhp, etc., I've just been very torn between taking a framework and adding more robust CMS features, versus taking a developer-centric CMS, and building on top of that.  I've not yet found something i'm truly thrilled with.

Carol Haynes:
Joomla functionality seems to be designed to be entirely based on add on modules and components. Even Joomla as installed  is based on replaceable modules and components.

I understand what you are saying about core hacking but it has been my experience in looking for 3rd party modules and components that you don't have to hack the core. There are lots of core hacks out there but many of the problems being solved are cracked by other coders without touching the core so the core hacking brigade are only really doing from laziness, bravado or incompetence. There are loads of coding books on Joomla too and it has the largest 3rd party add on library of any of the CMSes which are mostly free or inexpensive.

mouser:
quick update:

there is just no way to express in a human language how horribly horribly wrong configuring and maintaining drupal is.. i've experienced few things that are as convoluted and guaranteed to end in frustration and anger.

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