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A lot of my designer friends love Drupal, and they wonder why the veins in my neck and forehead start to bulge when they mention it. They love it because it all
by edw 16y ago
A lot of my designer friends love Drupal, and they wonder why the veins in my neck and forehead start to bulge when they mention it. They love it because it allows them do things that they never could have imagined, whereas I despise it because it does badly what any competent Django or ROR developer could do in more quickly and maintainably. (Yes, I know, there's a Drupal module that solves that problem…)
I mention Drupal because I find its "the node is our hammer and all solutions are nails, er content management systems" approach to doing things is a perfect example of the PHP google-then-copy-and-paste programming caricature that is all too often true.
But the author's correct: to the extent that PHP sucks, it sucks not because of PHP itself but the culture that surrounds it. In my experience, everyone's a noob, an advanced noob that is eager to share their bad habits, or callused actual experts who assume that you are one of the aforementioned noobs and assume you have the cognitive capacity of an overripe banana.
I know several PHP developers who I respect—Hi, Sunny and Tom!—but they seem to exist outside the PHP space-time continuum.
- dasil003 16y agoI actually think the Drupal architecture and codebase is amazing for what it is. There is a huge class of middle-tier clients that want a ton of functionality which can only be provided by a prepackaged modular system like Drupal, and the amount of extensibility Drupal affords you is impressive. I don't ever want to touch Drupal again, but not because the code sucks. I just think it's working at the wrong level of abstraction. I understand the need for that level of abstraction, but personally as a UX designer and developer I feel the compromises Drupal forces cheapen my work.
- edw 16y agoI don't disagree with you: the building blocks of Drupal are fine for what they are until you want to think in richer abstractions. When I talk to people who want to create a content-driven site, I walk them through the three types of web sites I see: those simple enough to be comfortably implemented using WordPress, those that are more complicated by still simple enough to play to Drupal's strengths, and those that are more complicated or are expected to be more complicated over in the near to mid term and thus call for a Django (my choice) or Rails or whatever application.