Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Drupal: 15 years old

buytaert.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#31

Post by thinnerlizzy »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
Jgrubb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get how you feel about Drupal, but can you please name a better CMS offering? I've been working with Drupal for 7 years now and have worked with lots of other frameworks and langs in that time. I've had a hot/cold relationship with Drupal for the whole time, and have lately (since D8) had a substantial thaw with my attitude toward Drupal. It's nice because in the last several years of hating it but getting to know…

Drupal is not really a CMS, it is more of a framework to build a CMS with. I agree it has gotten better on many fronts since the old days but plenty of my old reservations against drupal still (surprisingly, I expected those would be major focal points for improvement) hold today. > It's got to be something that a non programmer can build their project with. That's a huge restriction, and in fact, if a non-programmer…

Not getting into the for/against Drupal thing, but I wonder what percentage of Drupal admin users are non programmers. I've built a lot of Drupal sites and exactly zero non programmers have ever done anything more than use pre-existing fields.

I will say that I think it's a noble goal to allow non programmers to build something powerful, but in my experience it translates to programmers being able to build features insanely quickly rather than handing that power over to non programmers. Maybe it's different in other sectors.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#32

Post by jacquesm »

Jgrubb wrote: post #29
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drupal is not really a CMS, it is more of a framework to build a CMS with. I agree it has gotten better on many fronts since the old days but plenty of my old reservations against drupal still (surprisingly, I expected those would be major focal points for improvement) hold today. > It's got to be something that a non programmer can build their project with. That's a huge restriction, and in fact, if a non-programmer…

> It's like asking for a car that can be constructed by a non-mechanic. I think that's a good analogy actually, but that's the market. Honestly, I think to try and move into the market that WP has so tidily sewn up would be a waste of time and energy so Drupal has aimed for the higher end of the market - large institutions and companies with content mgmt needs. Also, in my (admittedly biased) perspective, Drupal prov…

I know plenty of valid alternatives but your 'non programmer' restriction is kind of severe. That said, I'm not actually familiar with any non-programmers that do manage to install drupal to the point that it works but can not program enough to add some functionality (and usually in a dangerous way...).

An extremely customizable cms for non-programmers as far as I know does not exist, including drupal, so we don't actually agree, it's just that you've limited the scope to the point where there is only the one alternative left and that alternative suits your particular use case.

Agreed that drupal is a more interesting environment than wordpress, many of the same restrictions and gripes apply to both platforms and drupal seems to attract the occasional wordpress user because of increased flexibility.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#33

Post by jacquesm »

thinnerlizzy wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drupal is not really a CMS, it is more of a framework to build a CMS with. I agree it has gotten better on many fronts since the old days but plenty of my old reservations against drupal still (surprisingly, I expected those would be major focal points for improvement) hold today. > It's got to be something that a non programmer can build their project with. That's a huge restriction, and in fact, if a non-programmer…

Not getting into the for/against Drupal thing, but I wonder what percentage of Drupal admin users are non programmers. I've built a lot of Drupal sites and exactly zero non programmers have ever done anything more than use pre-existing fields. I will say that I think it's a noble goal to allow non programmers to build something powerful, but in my experience it translates to programmers being able to build features i…

I haven't seen any non-programmers do this either. What I have seen is the programmers for certain drupal systems ending up cleaning up vast messes made with drupals extensive customization abilities because the people making the changes did not foresee the effect these changes would have on the application as a whole.

There is a whole eco-system around drupal of consultants who know just a little bit more than their clients to get them back out of the trouble they're in.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#34

Post by epimetheus »

jacquesm wrote: post #25
Luyt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your opinion of WordPress?

I don't really have an opinion on wordpress because I haven't used it more than playing around with it for a little bit and fixing some minor performance issues for a website of a friend. I don't see it used much for larger projects though I know there are some pretty large wordpress installations. Better ask someone that really knows the platform.

I've used both WordPress and Drupal, but like Drupal, WordPress has issues of it's own. In regards to the database, WordPress stores all Post metadata in a single table as a Key Value store. They also don't even typically use InnoDB and zero constraints. Also, the very cult like atmosphere is very strict in not creating your own tables (whatever) and use the tables as they have created them.

That said, I hate Drupal with a passion (I don't get to make the choices at my current place and it's D.O.D Government work) and would rather work with WordPress if a CMS based on PHP is absolutely necessary, their user interface is much, much more friendly - and as a programmer I hate views, panels and all that other cruft I'm forced to work with because "that's the Drupal way."

Edit: Oh yeah, unless they've recently changed it, they store PHP serialized data in the databases, and full urls for the website, so moving domains is quite the fun times and you need a special plugin to do so (even as simple as going from dev.example.com to example.com breaks the serialized strings if you just run some queries on the database). The fact that they store whole urls with domain and everything in the database like that has always skeeved me out.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#35

Post by mb_72 »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
audessuscest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. > I don't think drupal had any actual design goals You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Actually Drupal is very good (the best framework I know) for migration and interoperating with other software. But you don't do that by connecting DBs directly like you seems to want to do... (which is wrong with any framework/cms)

> Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. I ran a drupal based business for years and I know the platform - and it's shortcomings - very well. >> I don't think drupal had any actual design goals > You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Well, I could have used stronger language there but I see no need. Because whatever I would have said you'd have found fault wit…

Your criticism seems to be well-founded in past experience, however as a casual developer and supported of Drupal sites for my own businesses and some charities, it 'just works', looks good, and is reasonably easy to look after. All my clients, are happy with the results. I have not ever bothered to examine performance nor work on it beyond enabling caching because there hasn't been a need to.

Now admittedly these are not sites with millions of visitors, however several run on a single 2GB RAM VPS. And, yes, there is the problem with version upgrades, which in the past I've handled by a site redesign every several years, and paying someone to handle the data migration / mapping.

From my point of view Drupal 'just works' for me (and several other web guys I know), clients are happy, hosting is cheap, and site performance is fine. In a world where there is always something to do, I still don't intend to look into it further than this, or fret over changing CMS because there is no need to.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#36

Post by audessuscest »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
audessuscest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. > I don't think drupal had any actual design goals You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Actually Drupal is very good (the best framework I know) for migration and interoperating with other software. But you don't do that by connecting DBs directly like you seems to want to do... (which is wrong with any framework/cms)

> Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. I ran a drupal based business for years and I know the platform - and it's shortcomings - very well. >> I don't think drupal had any actual design goals > You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Well, I could have used stronger language there but I see no need. Because whatever I would have said you'd have found fault wit…

Quantity is not quality... You could perfectly dont understand the Drupal core and still build billion Drupal site.

And after reading your critics, you seem to really don't understand how Drupal entities work.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#37

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
Jgrubb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get how you feel about Drupal, but can you please name a better CMS offering? I've been working with Drupal for 7 years now and have worked with lots of other frameworks and langs in that time. I've had a hot/cold relationship with Drupal for the whole time, and have lately (since D8) had a substantial thaw with my attitude toward Drupal. It's nice because in the last several years of hating it but getting to know…

Drupal is not really a CMS, it is more of a framework to build a CMS with. I agree it has gotten better on many fronts since the old days but plenty of my old reservations against drupal still (surprisingly, I expected those would be major focal points for improvement) hold today. > It's got to be something that a non programmer can build their project with. That's a huge restriction, and in fact, if a non-programmer…

[deleted]

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#38

Post by jacquesm »

mb_72 wrote: post #35
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. I ran a drupal based business for years and I know the platform - and it's shortcomings - very well. >> I don't think drupal had any actual design goals > You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Well, I could have used stronger language there but I see no need. Because whatever I would have said you'd have found fault wit…

Your criticism seems to be well-founded in past experience, however as a casual developer and supported of Drupal sites for my own businesses and some charities, it 'just works', looks good, and is reasonably easy to look after. All my clients, are happy with the results. I have not ever bothered to examine performance nor work on it beyond enabling caching because there hasn't been a need to. Now admittedly these ar…

I'm happy it works for you. Personally, drupal would need to do some very serious non-sexy re-factoring before I would consider it for any future project.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#39

Post by jacquesm »

audessuscest wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. I ran a drupal based business for years and I know the platform - and it's shortcomings - very well. >> I don't think drupal had any actual design goals > You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Well, I could have used stronger language there but I see no need. Because whatever I would have said you'd have found fault wit…

Quantity is not quality... You could perfectly dont understand the Drupal core and still build billion Drupal site. And after reading your critics, you seem to really don't understand how Drupal entities work.

You keep making sweeping statements about both drupal and about me without providing a single bit of information to the discussion, if you have factual information to contribute about why what I say is inaccurate I'm all ears.

I've provided that (1) drupal is inefficient, (2) drupal sucks when it comes to backwards compatibility, (3) that drupal has a totally broken approach when it comes to data base schema design and finally (4) that other CMS's (such as Symfony2 and Laravel, and Yii as well) in the PHP ecosystem show that it is entirely possible to avoid most of these pitfalls.

You say that 'drupal is how CMS's should be done, that's why all others fail' when in fact most of these others are succeeding where drupal is losing ground to all of the above and to the likes of wordpress and joomla (though those have less functionality).

If you feel that drupal is how a CMS should be done then I'm perfectly ok with that but don't make it seem as if that is anything more than your personal view with which I disagree for the above reasons.

And even if you're limited to the PHP eco-system, there are lots of alternatives.

One thing I did not mention, but which I'll be more than happy to comment on now is that another thing that bugged me about the drupal ecosystem is that it seems as if it is altogether too much self-centered, unwilling to absorb best practices from the rest of the industry and a fairly toxic community which tends to be openly hostile to anything and everything that is not 'drupal'. I don't like that particular aspect of drupal one bit and it is this kind of attitude that is the reason why drupal to this date sees such a huge level of abandonment when it comes to modules, past version and large numbers of sites marooned on that code.

It shows a total lack of respect, care and understanding of the kind of issues that the users of these systems have to deal with.

I understand perfectly well how drupal maps its external interface to it's data model and when I tell you that this approach is broken beyond repair it is not my understanding that is deficient, it is drupal, when seen against the backdrop of properly designed software, of which we -fortunately- have plenty of examples.

If you wish to ignore all that that is entirely your freedom, but recognize that this is akin to a religious point of view, you support it because you are invested in it rather than because you are aware of the alternatives.

A good data model and the cruft that drupal produces are not even on the same scale when it comes to maintainability and efficiency, if you feel like arguing that point with actual facts and data to back it up I'd be most interested but I fear you'll end up coming short or having to admit that maybe the drupal way isn't all that good after all.

Re: Drupal: 15 years old

#40

Post by dang »

audessuscest wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. I ran a drupal based business for years and I know the platform - and it's shortcomings - very well. >> I don't think drupal had any actual design goals > You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW. Well, I could have used stronger language there but I see no need. Because whatever I would have said you'd have found fault wit…

Quantity is not quality... You could perfectly dont understand the Drupal core and still build billion Drupal site. And after reading your critics, you seem to really don't understand how Drupal entities work.

Comments like this, as well as "you sound like you don't know what you're talking about", break the HN guidelines. Please edit incivility out of your comments here, and keep them substantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Post reply on HN