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Reluctant upvote. Drupal's what I learned in high school. It gives you pretty unparalleled control over your site. Conceptually it's a league above any of its c
by unalone 17y ago
Reluctant upvote. Drupal's what I learned in high school. It gives you pretty unparalleled control over your site. Conceptually it's a league above any of its competitors: You can do some incredible things with it without knowing any coding.
It's also ugly and hostile and maintained by some of the least friendly people I've ever had to deal with on a project. There's an insane arrogance in the community.
I wish there was something just as flexible but better. As it is, the choice is between stiff and ugly.
- ique 17y agoI can't agree with you more. I recently finished a pretty big project in Drupal that featured some custom functionality that we had to write ourselves. Not only was it a tremendous hassle to get everything to work nicely with all the other modules but the codebase is just ugly and as the article states has a very high learning-curve. As you say it gives awesome flexibility, but it most definitely comes at a price.
- lux 17y agoSorry to self-promote, but I'm the creator of a Drupal competitor that may be worth looking at for you: http://www.sitellite.org/ http://www.sitellite.org/ It's a mature project (9 years old, so yes there is some cruft, hell PHP 4 was brand new when it started!), but doesn't have the same community size as something like Drupal. It does have a clean UI, decent documentation (manual, courses, API reference, etc), several dozen modules, and while there is a developer learning curve, it's really flexible once you get into it.
- lut4rp 17y agoSince you've already decided we're "ugly and hostile", I'd like you cite certain examples of this hostility. I've been in the community for almost 3 years now, and its by far the most insanely-motivated and awesome community I know.
- xinsight 17y agoI've run into several archetypal "freetards" in the Drupal community - you probably know the type: To any criticism they say, "Well, you were lucky enough to have been given the source for free, and if you don't like it, go write something better!" I've also found a large part of the Drupal community to be non-technical users attempting to help each other with various technical problems such as module or database upgrades. I never saw this amazing community that i've heard people mention - so I assumed there must be an invite-only mailing list somewhere.
- brandnewlow 17y agoYour second point is pretty spot on. Asking for technical help in Drupal forums almost guarantees a response from a well-meaning non-technical person who likely can't help you. Asking in a module's issue queue can be hit or miss. If it's a major project, you'll get a response and it'll be "this has been asked before, here's the link." That's great. More likely you'll never hear a response. #drupal-support can have some very helpful people on it. But once your question gets beyond general use of the major modules, the odds of getting useful help approach zero.
- mcantelon 17y ago>There's an insane arrogance in the community. My experience with the Drupal community has been the opposite. The Drupal community, more than any other project with a similar size I can think of, makes a conscious effort to get people at various skill levels involved (encouraging non-devs to do documentation, etc.). Also, there seems to be more women involved in Drupal than projects of a similar size.
- brandnewlow 17y agoUpvoted for the women observation, which I've noticed, too. It speaks well for them.