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Drupal needs to decide what it is, do that well. It needs to decide what it wants to be, and optionally also work toward that. I hate to see its evolution as n
by lotyrin 11y ago
Drupal needs to decide what it is, do that well. It needs to decide what it wants to be, and optionally also work toward that.
I hate to see its evolution as never-quite-there toward a never-quite-decided future.
Whatever they do, the years-long release cycle needs to die, allow whatever improvements you'd like on head without worrying much about BC, occasionally cut off a LTS release that never gets anything new without 100% BC. Maintain these long enough that it's economically feasible for people to base projects on (Whatever the benefit of the project is * years that benefit is durable > cost of development). Focus on data migration for when people re-build sites on newer platform instead of continuous upgrades -- nobody does these unless they're painless, they will never be painless.
There's too much coupling between presentation, client-side behavior, server-side behavior and data model for me to see this particular change going anywhere good.
You can't truly decouple client and server while still letting non-developers build web apps unless you build a UI-configurable framework for consuming an API generically and building client-side presentation and behavior. Even then, unless you also go so far as to infer things about my data from its API, it's still twice as much work to describe both my server-side domain model and its presentation instead of letting one be implied by the other.
But in typical Drupal fashion, they probably don't mean "decouple" when they say that word, so it's really just rewriting the current hodge-podgy fully-coupled client-side behaviors in a more structured but still coupled way using a client-side framework -- absorbing it the way they did Symfony for the server, not the best move but definitely with value and very achievable.
- monk_e_boy 11y agoIt needs to become simpler. We've had a team of four doing drupal sites for over a year and we all still feel like n00bs. Very little idea of best practices. Mixing themes and modules together always produces something different, some new way of laying out pages or dealing with data. I think some backwards compatibility breaks are needed in Drupal 9 to just simplify things.
- jefflinwood 11y agoDrupal's a little strange in that every major release (Drupal 5,6,7,8) is incompatible with the previous major release, so all of the contributed modules need to be rewritten or updated. In practice, this means that if you are going to build a Drupal site, it may take several months to a year after the official release before everything's stable enough to build out a new site. Drupal 8 should simplify things a lot, compared to Drupal 6/7, in that they are actively developing Drupal for developers who aren't Drupal developers. The question is whether that's enough to make Drupal a viable CMS/application platform going forward.
- cdnsteve 11y agoThis can't be ignored. If you want to build anything of significance then you are re-writing your entire app every couple years, or less depending on their cycle. Literally nothing between 7 to 8 works. You are starting over. This is not acceptable in the markets Acquia is going after (enterprise).
- jacquesm 11y agoWorse than that. By the time the module eco-system has finally caught up Drupal has already moved on. It's un-workable.
- Domenic_S 11y ago> Drupal's a little strange in that every major release (Drupal 5,6,7,8) is incompatible with the previous major release Is that really strange? Isn't that standard semver "major releases break backwards compatibility/api"?
- gchokov 11y agoit's quite bad from whatever angle you decide to look on it.
- heimatau 11y agoI also think they are falling behind. Drupal 8 is a solid mobile first move but it's a few years behind. I'm not sure Drupal will be keeping up with the web changes as they evolve in the future and (after reading your post) maybe it's because they don't know what they want to be. I like Drupal but as time goes on, it seems that most of the contributors are focused on their businesses and no longer Drupal itself. Acquia and others, maybe it's private interests that are fogging the judgements of people.
- EGreg 11y agoI'm wondering... if you have 2 minutes could you glance at http://qbix.com/platform http://qbix.com/platform and figure out exactly what it's for and what makes it unique? I've been working on it for 4 years for our developers and I want to get some feedback. I feel it's the new drupal, in many ways.
- porker 11y agoIt might be, but the website does nothing to sell it to us, demonstrate its benefits etc. If this little care is put into the website, first impression says the interest in welcoming people into the community isn't there.
- EGreg 11y agoWhat do you mean by does nothing to sell it? You expect a large banner or something? What do you mean so little care? It took months to write all that documentation and record the tutorials for how to get started and all the architecture diagrams etc.