5 ms·

Ask HN: Is Drupal a good choice for apllication that wants to reli on AJAX?

I am developing an application which is going to help students locate a course around the world. It will contains stuff such as Given a country we will present the list of universities there, when he selects a university we will show him the course available there<p>And many such combinations.<p>I was wondering if drupal will be a good choice in such case mainly because of other things its provides such as ad banner management, theming support and user access management.<p>IF I go with drupal i will be investing significant amount of time in learning it, I dont want that time to be wasted. I should prove to be an investment.

jacquesm 17y ago
hi Rajesh, I've got about 1500 drupal sites running right now on a free hosting site. Not sure if that qualifies me to make this statement: stay the hell away from drupal. Drupal is a great concept executed poorly. There is no upgrade path between major versions and the 'modular' approach is taken to such an extreme that you'll depend on some cranky maintainer somewhere (who more often than not can't be bothered to fix all the known bugs in his/her module even if you send them a patch) for basic functionality. read this if you have the time: http://drupal.org/node/327225 http://drupal.org/node/327225 From version to version modules are not supported or changed so much that you end up rewriting your stuff completely. Databases do not port from one major release to another. There is no strong policy of maintaining backwards compatibility. This is a major reason why plenty of sites are still running on older versions of drupal. Not that they wouldn't like to make the switch to the newer version, they simply can't. My personal website still runs on drupal but at the first opportunity it will switch away from that. good luck.
- rajesh_thunder 17y ago
  I had found many critiques of drupal's u are probably the first one who has used drupal and to give a negative comment. With whatever initial forays I had in drupal, I agree with you on all the points. I dont see how drupal saves my time. But then I strongly need a CMS instead of writing everything from scratch. Drupal seems to be a strong contender in that case.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    That is true, but the gain does not outweigh the pain in my opinion. Drupal is really a fantastic idea, I just wished they got their act together. It's a real pity because something very much like drupal is badly needed. Their lack of an upgrade path is killing their ability to keep users. People will try it, invest in it and then the problems start. Maybe you'll find that the theme you are using is not actively maintained, maybe the module that you used and now depend on has a bug in it that you are not experienced enough to fix and so on. Slowly the rot sets in. Then a new version of drupal comes out and you try to upgrade. If you do go with drupal be sure you subscribe to their security alerts list, security bugs are found almost daily, if you have a module that has a fault in it and you're not aware of this then you can bet your life you'll be owned. Just like you I'm still searching for that 'perfect CMS', I've definitely learned the hard way that drupal is not it. It could be though, and maybe at some point there will be a change of attitude there. have you looked at this ? http://pinaxproject.com/ http://pinaxproject.com/
yannis 17y ago
I thought everyone here on HN, somewhere, somehow, has written his own CMS! I have used Drupal and went through the pain to understand it (took about twenty days to become proficient). It can do what you want, but got a lot of other limitations. If PHP is your way, I would go with a framework, either Kohana, CodeIgniter or CakePHP in that order and hack the rest.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  No experience with Kohana or CodeIgniter, CakePHP looks pretty good to me, very clean code and an extremely active community to go with it.
  - rajesh_thunder 17y ago
    Yes, Community support is very important when one thinks selecting a framework.
  - yannis 17y ago
    All three of them are very good with active communities. Kohana is a fork of CodeIgniter. I personally use mostly CodeIgniter as CakePHP has just too much 'magic'! I always prefer something lighter that I can extensively add to it rather than the other way round.
- narendranag 17y ago
  Codeigniter is easily one of the better PHP frameworks, with a very easy learning curve. The documentation is fantastic and will help you get off the ground very quickly. If you're comfortable with PHP and MVC coding, then you could also check out Yii.

jacquesm 17y ago

hi Rajesh, I've got about 1500 drupal sites running right now on a free hosting site. Not sure if that qualifies me to make this statement: stay the hell away from drupal. Drupal is a great concept executed poorly. There is no upgrade path between major versions and the 'modular' approach is taken to such an extreme that you'll depend on some cranky maintainer somewhere (who more often than not can't be bothered to fix all the known bugs in his/her module even if you send them a patch) for basic functionality. read this if you have the time: http://drupal.org/node/327225 http://drupal.org/node/327225 From version to version modules are not supported or changed so much that you end up rewriting your stuff completely. Databases do not port from one major release to another. There is no strong policy of maintaining backwards compatibility. This is a major reason why plenty of sites are still running on older versions of drupal. Not that they wouldn't like to make the switch to the newer version, they simply can't. My personal website still runs on drupal but at the first opportunity it will switch away from that. good luck.

rajesh_thunder 17y ago
I had found many critiques of drupal's u are probably the first one who has used drupal and to give a negative comment. With whatever initial forays I had in drupal, I agree with you on all the points. I dont see how drupal saves my time. But then I strongly need a CMS instead of writing everything from scratch. Drupal seems to be a strong contender in that case.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  That is true, but the gain does not outweigh the pain in my opinion. Drupal is really a fantastic idea, I just wished they got their act together. It's a real pity because something very much like drupal is badly needed. Their lack of an upgrade path is killing their ability to keep users. People will try it, invest in it and then the problems start. Maybe you'll find that the theme you are using is not actively maintained, maybe the module that you used and now depend on has a bug in it that you are not experienced enough to fix and so on. Slowly the rot sets in. Then a new version of drupal comes out and you try to upgrade. If you do go with drupal be sure you subscribe to their security alerts list, security bugs are found almost daily, if you have a module that has a fault in it and you're not aware of this then you can bet your life you'll be owned. Just like you I'm still searching for that 'perfect CMS', I've definitely learned the hard way that drupal is not it. It could be though, and maybe at some point there will be a change of attitude there. have you looked at this ? http://pinaxproject.com/ http://pinaxproject.com/

yannis 17y ago

I thought everyone here on HN, somewhere, somehow, has written his own CMS! I have used Drupal and went through the pain to understand it (took about twenty days to become proficient). It can do what you want, but got a lot of other limitations. If PHP is your way, I would go with a framework, either Kohana, CodeIgniter or CakePHP in that order and hack the rest.

jacquesm 17y ago
No experience with Kohana or CodeIgniter, CakePHP looks pretty good to me, very clean code and an extremely active community to go with it.
- rajesh_thunder 17y ago
  Yes, Community support is very important when one thinks selecting a framework.
- yannis 17y ago
  All three of them are very good with active communities. Kohana is a fork of CodeIgniter. I personally use mostly CodeIgniter as CakePHP has just too much 'magic'! I always prefer something lighter that I can extensively add to it rather than the other way round.
narendranag 17y ago
Codeigniter is easily one of the better PHP frameworks, with a very easy learning curve. The documentation is fantastic and will help you get off the ground very quickly. If you're comfortable with PHP and MVC coding, then you could also check out Yii.