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Aside from the flaws in this, summed up very well by the top comment, I was quite taken aback by his swipe at Drupal. He links it to a tweet from 2009 that's ta

Aside from the flaws in this, summed up very well by the top comment, I was quite taken aback by his swipe at Drupal. He links it to a tweet from 2009 that's taken out of context and references one particular Drupal module. It's a very flexible CMS/framework - if you're building Views it's up to you to customise the output to your liking. He's demonstrating a rather poor and naive understanding of it.

valuegram 14y ago
While I agree that his jab at Drupal is off base, because I don't agree with this article in general. Drupal does make extensive use of classes in its templating system, so I can see why the author would have a problem with it. I see the class functionality in the templating system as a benefit, and makes styling much easier, but for someone who dislikes classes, I can see why the author wouldn't like Drupal.
- rjknight 14y ago
  I think this issue generalizes to other content management systems. Drupal aims to allow users to create sites without needing to understand the underlying HTML, and most general-purpose Drupal modules produce class-heavy HTML because that is, once you understand the class naming conventions, relatively easy to style without needing to change the HTML structure. This represents a trade-off - 'uglier' HTML and extraneous CSS classes in return for a drastic reduction in development effort and the knowledge required to bootstrap a typical project. This trade-off makes sense if an in-depth knowledge of HTML is not your strong point (and even most web devs are not fully-fledged "front end developers" conversant with the finer points of the W3C's latest magnum opus), and if you would benefit from having a lot of boilerplate stuff (user registration, access control, content management, RSS, caching, RDF, email notifications, widgets/blocks, templating engine, etc.) for free. Sure, if you're willing to do all of that stuff yourself, you can ensure that no CSS class is wasted (or, indeed, no CSS class is used at all). But most people can't make that trade-off, and even those who can would struggle to justify it beyond the most trivial or superficial projects. The best solution is probably to take a framework and modify its output to look the way you want it to. That's why the swipe at Drupal is odd, as pretty much everything Drupal does can be modified via hooks (kinda like AOP) and templates.
Jgrubb 14y ago
I've been a Drupal developer for a while now. I've been recently playing with Rails because that's what I wanted to be doing in the first place, but just didn't know enough about enough to be able to really get it. Thanks in no small part to working with Drupal I now know enough about enough to be able to get some stuff done in Rails. And the more I work with Rails, the less I'm interested in working with Drupal in the long-term. So much of working with Drupal is just overriding what Drupal wants to spit out instead - here's this Views markup, or this user registration process, or this database schema, now customize it to your liking. Rails takes the exact opposite approach - here's nothing, now make what you want. As my abilities grow, I'm coming to greatly appreciate the second approach. Perhaps it's the author's experience with other modern development tools rather than a misunderstanding of Drupal that's informing his bias.
JoelSutherland 14y ago
I use Drupal (when required) in exactly in the way you describe, building Views and customizing the output. It's workable, but compared to the alternatives it's a pain in the butt. If you haven't checked out other content management systems, you're missing out. Imagine if the Views workflow were made first class and efficient, instead of being tacked on.

valuegram 14y ago

While I agree that his jab at Drupal is off base, because I don't agree with this article in general. Drupal does make extensive use of classes in its templating system, so I can see why the author would have a problem with it. I see the class functionality in the templating system as a benefit, and makes styling much easier, but for someone who dislikes classes, I can see why the author wouldn't like Drupal.

rjknight 14y ago
I think this issue generalizes to other content management systems. Drupal aims to allow users to create sites without needing to understand the underlying HTML, and most general-purpose Drupal modules produce class-heavy HTML because that is, once you understand the class naming conventions, relatively easy to style without needing to change the HTML structure. This represents a trade-off - 'uglier' HTML and extraneous CSS classes in return for a drastic reduction in development effort and the knowledge required to bootstrap a typical project. This trade-off makes sense if an in-depth knowledge of HTML is not your strong point (and even most web devs are not fully-fledged "front end developers" conversant with the finer points of the W3C's latest magnum opus), and if you would benefit from having a lot of boilerplate stuff (user registration, access control, content management, RSS, caching, RDF, email notifications, widgets/blocks, templating engine, etc.) for free. Sure, if you're willing to do all of that stuff yourself, you can ensure that no CSS class is wasted (or, indeed, no CSS class is used at all). But most people can't make that trade-off, and even those who can would struggle to justify it beyond the most trivial or superficial projects. The best solution is probably to take a framework and modify its output to look the way you want it to. That's why the swipe at Drupal is odd, as pretty much everything Drupal does can be modified via hooks (kinda like AOP) and templates.

Jgrubb 14y ago

I've been a Drupal developer for a while now. I've been recently playing with Rails because that's what I wanted to be doing in the first place, but just didn't know enough about enough to be able to really get it. Thanks in no small part to working with Drupal I now know enough about enough to be able to get some stuff done in Rails. And the more I work with Rails, the less I'm interested in working with Drupal in the long-term. So much of working with Drupal is just overriding what Drupal wants to spit out instead - here's this Views markup, or this user registration process, or this database schema, now customize it to your liking. Rails takes the exact opposite approach - here's nothing, now make what you want. As my abilities grow, I'm coming to greatly appreciate the second approach. Perhaps it's the author's experience with other modern development tools rather than a misunderstanding of Drupal that's informing his bias.

JoelSutherland 14y ago

I use Drupal (when required) in exactly in the way you describe, building Views and customizing the output. It's workable, but compared to the alternatives it's a pain in the butt. If you haven't checked out other content management systems, you're missing out. Imagine if the Views workflow were made first class and efficient, instead of being tacked on.