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Can you spot the outliers here?: "where PHP has excelled with projects like Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Magento, Moodle, PHPBB, and so many more.". Some projec

by nnq 14y ago

Can you spot the outliers here?: "where PHP has excelled with projects like Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Magento, Moodle, PHPBB, and so many more.". Some projects "swing the PHP-way" and they are "retarded" but easy to use and fix and keep with the "fail fast, fail cheap" philosophy. Otoh, things like Drupal or Magento "swim against the tide", are hypocritically claiming to be newbie/weekend-warrior friendly, and basing your project on them lands you over-time and over-budget 90% of the time, ending up costing more than a custom made Rails app - unless you have the rare mystical creatures called "real Drupal (or Magento) gurus" working for you. It's a very weird jungle the PHP ecosystem nowadays, and lots of the creatures in it byte hard!. If you stick to riding a gentle sloth like WordPress, you're fine... but I'd suggest rapidly switching languages and technologies (something like Django + django-cms is almost as cheap and can be deployed even on dirt-cheap shared hosts) as soon as you grow over WordPress level, otherwise something will end up biting you hard!

ThomPete 14y ago
That can be claimed for many other environments too. Ever tried to go outside the beaten path of Community Server? It's an inherent issue with frameworks not with any particular language IMHO.
dubcanada 14y ago
Not sure where you work, but where I work the entire reason we are able to do websites quickly and efficiently is because of Drupal, Wordpress. We are very very rarely over budget/time. Sure they have problems, but so does Rails, and Django.
bhughes 14y ago
Based on experience, I would agree with you on the Magento front (as my perpetually-in-the-planning-stages blog "I Hate Magento" will attest), but I have yet to find anything more usable (and customizable) for larger scale operations. I know there must be something less bad. Thoughts, anyone?
- meaty 14y ago
  Agreed - its a stinking turd, but at least it's not oscommerce :)
jdavis703 14y ago
I used to work in a Drupal shop, and all our Drupal projects were completed on time and within budget. However we also had good project management, so there weren't any 11th surprises about customizations that would be difficult to implement in the "Drupal way."
- nnq 14y ago
  ...agree, there has to be a way to do Drupal "properly", otherwise it wouldn't be so popular. But you have to agree that Drupal does need quite a lot of "special care", too much for my taste, in the way of planning and doing things its way and knowing that stuff will start randomly falling apart once you start working "against it". Things that are either "just a blog engine / just a CMS" (Wordpress) or "just a framework" (pick your fav here) are much harder to misuse and turn into a total mess. For me the whole point of using PHP is "fail fast, fail cheap, be 80% idiot-proof", and I just use Drupal as an example of outlier PHP project that went very, very far away from this mantra, but then again, maybe going away from this mindset is what you need for your projects.
  - samuellevy 14y ago
    The way to "do drupal properly", which makes it so popular, is to use it almost as a "lego" platform, which is also much the same as how you would use wordpress. Both of them have such powerful plugin/extension frameworks, that most of the effort in building drupal or wordpress sites is finding the right plugins, and skinning. Very little actual programming work is required to get an operation site running for a client in either framework, which makes them ideal for many of these low-yield "corner store" sites.

by nnq 14y ago

ThomPete 14y ago

That can be claimed for many other environments too. Ever tried to go outside the beaten path of Community Server? It's an inherent issue with frameworks not with any particular language IMHO.

dubcanada 14y ago

Not sure where you work, but where I work the entire reason we are able to do websites quickly and efficiently is because of Drupal, Wordpress. We are very very rarely over budget/time. Sure they have problems, but so does Rails, and Django.

bhughes 14y ago

Based on experience, I would agree with you on the Magento front (as my perpetually-in-the-planning-stages blog "I Hate Magento" will attest), but I have yet to find anything more usable (and customizable) for larger scale operations. I know there must be something less bad. Thoughts, anyone?

meaty 14y ago
Agreed - its a stinking turd, but at least it's not oscommerce :)

jdavis703 14y ago

I used to work in a Drupal shop, and all our Drupal projects were completed on time and within budget. However we also had good project management, so there weren't any 11th surprises about customizations that would be difficult to implement in the "Drupal way."

nnq 14y ago
...agree, there has to be a way to do Drupal "properly", otherwise it wouldn't be so popular. But you have to agree that Drupal does need quite a lot of "special care", too much for my taste, in the way of planning and doing things its way and knowing that stuff will start randomly falling apart once you start working "against it". Things that are either "just a blog engine / just a CMS" (Wordpress) or "just a framework" (pick your fav here) are much harder to misuse and turn into a total mess. For me the whole point of using PHP is "fail fast, fail cheap, be 80% idiot-proof", and I just use Drupal as an example of outlier PHP project that went very, very far away from this mantra, but then again, maybe going away from this mindset is what you need for your projects.
- samuellevy 14y ago
  The way to "do drupal properly", which makes it so popular, is to use it almost as a "lego" platform, which is also much the same as how you would use wordpress. Both of them have such powerful plugin/extension frameworks, that most of the effort in building drupal or wordpress sites is finding the right plugins, and skinning. Very little actual programming work is required to get an operation site running for a client in either framework, which makes them ideal for many of these low-yield "corner store" sites.