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Except that Drupal is, interface-wise, even worse than Wordpress; and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. It's hard to r

Except that Drupal is, interface-wise, even worse than Wordpress; and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. It's hard to recommend it when you know clients/users will struggle with it.

saltcod 15y ago
Handing a Drupal website over to a client was always hard. No wysiwyg, no automatic updating, built-in dependency hell (that the client can see in /modules), _constant_ warnings about module updates and security updates and core updates and updates of every other kind, make Drupal an extremely tough sell.
- krondor 15y ago
  Just a few nitpicks; Drupal does have wysiwyg implemented as a module http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg (actually several competing editors are possible), Drupal also can do automated updates, though I wouldn't advise it. Drush works for it, http://drupal.org/project/drush http://drupal.org/project/drush and a lot of people use it with great success. You would want a carefully vetted rollback plan though. The better road is to forgo updates other than security until scheduled maintenance or a MUST have feature is present. The GUI /update process is actually quite nice if you've set everything up properly. The thing about Drupal is doing everything doesn't have to be painful, but if you've approached it in a "non-Drupal" way it can get bad quickly. Drupal is complex and the hand off to a customer is never easy with complex software. Have you tried the same with Plone?
zecho 15y ago
>and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. Understatement of the year so far. I love Drupal, but since there's no bright line separating configuration and content, rolling features up from a dev environment to staging to live can sometimes be a nightmare, particularly if the Features and Strongarm modules don't have you covered.
- darksaga 15y ago
  Agreed. Drupal has an incredibly steep learning curve. I was told to learn PHP BEFORE using Drupal and it's been a huge advantage. I can't imagine a non-developer trying to change some content or add a feature themselves. Drupal is extremely powerful, but would be a nightmare for users used to the WP platform.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chc 15y ago
I have been presented with relatively straightforward CMS site concepts and come to the conclusion that they would be better done in Rails or Django than Drupal because a) it would be easier to present a usable interface, and b) those would actually be less likely turn out looking like a tower of paperclips and bubblegum. This may just be my lack of experience in Drupal talking (I've got plenty of experience in PHP, just not Drupal), but I put a pretty decent amount of thought into the matter and even mocked up simple prototypes just to see if there was something I was missing.
- TylerE 15y ago
  The big difference is that in Drupal it's possible to get pretty far without ever writing a single line of code, even templates. For some use cases that's very powerful, especially an environment where you have trainable, reasonably technical people who aren't programmers.
  - FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
    But for the talented developers and/or programmers on the team, it's a complete productivity and sanity drain. Moreso if you're, say, part of HN's target audience, because you'll know all the modern web development techniques, and you'll be able to use none of them. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with it, which sadly isn't unique amongst these big PHP projects.
    - TylerE 15y ago
      It's not bad once you get your head around it. Sure, it's not buzzword compliant (MVC, TDD, ORM OH MY!) but for what it is, it can be pretty compelling. My primary job for the last 2 years has been developing a Drupal site for a group of daily newspapers with monthly page views in the low 8 figures. We were in a situation where we had to get a site up quickly (Our small group was bought off from a much larger conglomerate, so the huge $$$$ Java system we had been using went away). Drupal allows us to get a tolerable site up in about 3 months, and a much better site up about 6 months later. Have there been pain points? Sure. But if we'd used anything else there's no way we would have been on our feet nearly as quickly. Are we investigating other options? Of course, if I wasn't I wouldn't be doing my job. There's a part of me that would love to rewrite the whole thing in Rails or Django. That would be a huge undertaking though.
mjwalshe 15y ago
Yep when we had to do work on drupal sites all the junior staff where frightened to even change add a small piece of content as the interface was so bad an the sites where prone to breaking if you made innocuous changes.
ten7 15y ago
When was the last time you tried Drupal?

saltcod 15y ago

Handing a Drupal website over to a client was always hard. No wysiwyg, no automatic updating, built-in dependency hell (that the client can see in /modules), _constant_ warnings about module updates and security updates and core updates and updates of every other kind, make Drupal an extremely tough sell.

krondor 15y ago
Just a few nitpicks; Drupal does have wysiwyg implemented as a module http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg (actually several competing editors are possible), Drupal also can do automated updates, though I wouldn't advise it. Drush works for it, http://drupal.org/project/drush http://drupal.org/project/drush and a lot of people use it with great success. You would want a carefully vetted rollback plan though. The better road is to forgo updates other than security until scheduled maintenance or a MUST have feature is present. The GUI /update process is actually quite nice if you've set everything up properly. The thing about Drupal is doing everything doesn't have to be painful, but if you've approached it in a "non-Drupal" way it can get bad quickly. Drupal is complex and the hand off to a customer is never easy with complex software. Have you tried the same with Plone?

zecho 15y ago

>and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. Understatement of the year so far. I love Drupal, but since there's no bright line separating configuration and content, rolling features up from a dev environment to staging to live can sometimes be a nightmare, particularly if the Features and Strongarm modules don't have you covered.

darksaga 15y ago
Agreed. Drupal has an incredibly steep learning curve. I was told to learn PHP BEFORE using Drupal and it's been a huge advantage. I can't imagine a non-developer trying to change some content or add a feature themselves. Drupal is extremely powerful, but would be a nightmare for users used to the WP platform.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chc 15y ago

I have been presented with relatively straightforward CMS site concepts and come to the conclusion that they would be better done in Rails or Django than Drupal because a) it would be easier to present a usable interface, and b) those would actually be less likely turn out looking like a tower of paperclips and bubblegum. This may just be my lack of experience in Drupal talking (I've got plenty of experience in PHP, just not Drupal), but I put a pretty decent amount of thought into the matter and even mocked up simple prototypes just to see if there was something I was missing.

TylerE 15y ago
The big difference is that in Drupal it's possible to get pretty far without ever writing a single line of code, even templates. For some use cases that's very powerful, especially an environment where you have trainable, reasonably technical people who aren't programmers.
- FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
  But for the talented developers and/or programmers on the team, it's a complete productivity and sanity drain. Moreso if you're, say, part of HN's target audience, because you'll know all the modern web development techniques, and you'll be able to use none of them. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with it, which sadly isn't unique amongst these big PHP projects.
  - TylerE 15y ago
    It's not bad once you get your head around it. Sure, it's not buzzword compliant (MVC, TDD, ORM OH MY!) but for what it is, it can be pretty compelling. My primary job for the last 2 years has been developing a Drupal site for a group of daily newspapers with monthly page views in the low 8 figures. We were in a situation where we had to get a site up quickly (Our small group was bought off from a much larger conglomerate, so the huge $$$$ Java system we had been using went away). Drupal allows us to get a tolerable site up in about 3 months, and a much better site up about 6 months later. Have there been pain points? Sure. But if we'd used anything else there's no way we would have been on our feet nearly as quickly. Are we investigating other options? Of course, if I wasn't I wouldn't be doing my job. There's a part of me that would love to rewrite the whole thing in Rails or Django. That would be a huge undertaking though.

mjwalshe 15y ago

Yep when we had to do work on drupal sites all the junior staff where frightened to even change add a small piece of content as the interface was so bad an the sites where prone to breaking if you made innocuous changes.

ten7 15y ago

When was the last time you tried Drupal?