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Dries Buytaert wrote the first version of Drupal circa 2000, with the almost brand new language PHP whose first real version as we know it (PHP 3.0) was release

by yannis 17y ago

Dries Buytaert wrote the first version of Drupal circa 2000, with the almost brand new language PHP whose first real version as we know it (PHP 3.0) was released in 1998. In 2003, Brendan Eich (JavaScript) author helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. Take your hat and salute these pioneer programmers, who actually enabled millions of websites to be established at Z E R O cost! Their code has become legacy in the correct meaning of the world and as any legacy_code has limitations and problems. If the author was around at the time, he could by now be able to modify Drupal within minutes than days and would have used the sexiest language of the day PHP! A challenge for the article author, release your two day RoR CMS as an open source project and if it can offer 50% of the functionality of Drupal and its various popular modules I will donate $ 2000 to the non-profit you establish to promote it!

jacquesm 17y ago
Hey Yannis, Awesome idea. I've had a look at the basics in drupal, here is a minimum I think to be able to be functional and get to the 50% mark: A framework-and-module loader. Template hooks. Url parser and dispatcher. Database abstraction layer allowing for at least postgres and mysql. The following modules: aggregator block blog blogapi book cck comment i18n locale menu node path path_redirect profile taxonomy upload user If, after 1.5 days there is still time left over maybe some documentation ? Please understand, I'm no great fan of drupal, having seen altogether too much of it, but to say out loud that you can duplicate this in a couple of days is really ballsy, and I for one would very much like to see this succeed or be put to rest. (I really doubt it can be done, even in a multiple of that time, but hey, maybe miracles do happen and maybe a true guru is able to do such a thing on such a timescale). Edit: I dropped search, calendar and contact, search can be done outside of the 'core', calendar is optional and contact can be done with a simple 'node'.
- yannis 17y ago
  Thanks jacquesm, I would be happy with that :)
polynomial 17y ago
This is an awesome challenge and I would love to see a list of what you would consider basic OOB functionality as provided by Drupal. If the CMS he builds in RoR in 2 days has checks for half the items on the list, his non-profit gets the $2K. This also reminds me of the SXSW shootout this year, where none of the already built CMS's could meet the site requirements in less than 2 days, and Joomla was the only team that did it in less than 3. And that was just to construct a site with a pre-existing CMS, not build the entire CMS.
- yannis 17y ago
  Thanks polynomial. I threw the challenge as an answer to the 'SUCKS', I found it arrogant and disrespectful and I hate arrogance. If the author takes the challenge I will provide a list of basic OOB functionality and deposit the money with whoever they consider neutral enough and will agree the adjudication. As I mentioned as a reply to the post below, I am neither a PHP or a DRUPAL evangelist, they are tools that I have used in the past and still using, although currently most of my own work is based on frameworks and they got their limits and issues. What the heck for $ 2000 to get a : RoR_CMS_FRAMEWORK = 0.5 Drupal is a good bargain! :)
- aasarava 17y ago
  I took an in-depth look at what Drupal provides out of the box recently. (A lot of my clients use Drupal.) Here's my writeup: http://returncontrol.com/what-does-drupal-provide-out-of-the-box http://returncontrol.com/what-does-drupal-provide-out-of-the...
tptacek 17y ago
PHP wasn't "almost brand new" in 2000. It's practically as old as Apache. And not in the way that Ruby existed for a long time before anyone noticed it; PHP has been popular for almost that long, too. I remember having to support it in the 90's.
- yannis 17y ago
  The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP). "Mozilla" is sometimes used to refer to the free and open source software project that was founded in order to create the next-generation Internet suite for Netscape. The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998 to create the new suite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla Apache is a bit older about 1996. My contention and my challenge is in respect to the "SUCKS". I found it totally disrespectful and arrogant. These programmers were hackers and they still are. They were pioneers they were 'real engineers' that used the available tools to the maximum, pretty much like what people are doing together with whatever product is at the forefront. I am not an evangelist for either PHP or DRUPAL, I have used both many times over with success, even if the process was painful. For web applications the way most HN users would understand them, they are not the greatest of tools especially DRUPAL, however if one is proficient in PHP they can use one of the frameworks (CAKEPHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana) to pretty do any development within a reasonable time period.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]

by yannis 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Hey Yannis, Awesome idea. I've had a look at the basics in drupal, here is a minimum I think to be able to be functional and get to the 50% mark: A framework-and-module loader. Template hooks. Url parser and dispatcher. Database abstraction layer allowing for at least postgres and mysql. The following modules: aggregator block blog blogapi book cck comment i18n locale menu node path path_redirect profile taxonomy upload user If, after 1.5 days there is still time left over maybe some documentation ? Please understand, I'm no great fan of drupal, having seen altogether too much of it, but to say out loud that you can duplicate this in a couple of days is really ballsy, and I for one would very much like to see this succeed or be put to rest. (I really doubt it can be done, even in a multiple of that time, but hey, maybe miracles do happen and maybe a true guru is able to do such a thing on such a timescale). Edit: I dropped search, calendar and contact, search can be done outside of the 'core', calendar is optional and contact can be done with a simple 'node'.

yannis 17y ago
Thanks jacquesm, I would be happy with that :)

polynomial 17y ago

This is an awesome challenge and I would love to see a list of what you would consider basic OOB functionality as provided by Drupal. If the CMS he builds in RoR in 2 days has checks for half the items on the list, his non-profit gets the $2K. This also reminds me of the SXSW shootout this year, where none of the already built CMS's could meet the site requirements in less than 2 days, and Joomla was the only team that did it in less than 3. And that was just to construct a site with a pre-existing CMS, not build the entire CMS.

yannis 17y ago
Thanks polynomial. I threw the challenge as an answer to the 'SUCKS', I found it arrogant and disrespectful and I hate arrogance. If the author takes the challenge I will provide a list of basic OOB functionality and deposit the money with whoever they consider neutral enough and will agree the adjudication. As I mentioned as a reply to the post below, I am neither a PHP or a DRUPAL evangelist, they are tools that I have used in the past and still using, although currently most of my own work is based on frameworks and they got their limits and issues. What the heck for $ 2000 to get a : RoR_CMS_FRAMEWORK = 0.5 Drupal is a good bargain! :)
aasarava 17y ago
I took an in-depth look at what Drupal provides out of the box recently. (A lot of my clients use Drupal.) Here's my writeup: http://returncontrol.com/what-does-drupal-provide-out-of-the-box http://returncontrol.com/what-does-drupal-provide-out-of-the...

tptacek 17y ago

PHP wasn't "almost brand new" in 2000. It's practically as old as Apache. And not in the way that Ruby existed for a long time before anyone noticed it; PHP has been popular for almost that long, too. I remember having to support it in the 90's.

yannis 17y ago
The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP). "Mozilla" is sometimes used to refer to the free and open source software project that was founded in order to create the next-generation Internet suite for Netscape. The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998 to create the new suite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla Apache is a bit older about 1996. My contention and my challenge is in respect to the "SUCKS". I found it totally disrespectful and arrogant. These programmers were hackers and they still are. They were pioneers they were 'real engineers' that used the available tools to the maximum, pretty much like what people are doing together with whatever product is at the forefront. I am not an evangelist for either PHP or DRUPAL, I have used both many times over with success, even if the process was painful. For web applications the way most HN users would understand them, they are not the greatest of tools especially DRUPAL, however if one is proficient in PHP they can use one of the frameworks (CAKEPHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana) to pretty do any development within a reasonable time period.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]