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The CMS Is Broken.

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Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#21

Post by ams6110 »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #19
crikli wrote: post #4

"Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla use PHP. — the plugin model aches at scale: popular plugins become abandoned plugins, energies move elsewhere. Plugin A works great, plugin B too. However, they weren’t designed to know about each other, thus leading you down a rabbit hole of forking and mending. A few years of use later, you are left with an unmaintainable tangle of ad hoc code written by an all-but-unknown cast of prog…

Drupal achieved this by requiring modules that get hosted on Drupal.org (the most popular site to find modules) be reviewed before they're published. Part of the review process requires verifying that the module (a) doesn't duplicate other modules and (b) doesn't belong as extra features added to another module. If your module doesn't work with the other modules on drupal.org, it will never be published. You're requi…

I don't disagree with any of this, but would like to add that just because a module get published on drupal.org does not mean that (a) it works or (b) it's well-written.

The mainstream modules... the common ones used on thousands of sites, tend to be solid. There's a lot of half-baked crud once you get into the smaller or lesser-used ones.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#22

Post by crikli »

beck5 wrote: post #9
crikli wrote: post #4

"Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla use PHP. — the plugin model aches at scale: popular plugins become abandoned plugins, energies move elsewhere. Plugin A works great, plugin B too. However, they weren’t designed to know about each other, thus leading you down a rabbit hole of forking and mending. A few years of use later, you are left with an unmaintainable tangle of ad hoc code written by an all-but-unknown cast of prog…

"FWIW, I'm not a core contributor or anything like that, I'm just a guy who's made a hell of a nice living using Drupal. " Would you mind expanding on that. Do you offer a plethora of services or focus on one or two things? A friend of mine set up shop building small sites for local business with drupal and is always tell me how great it is.

Sure. Our niche is working with ad/marketing/traditional media agencies, SEO firms, and design groups to provide the technical muscle they don't have to get beyond "five pages and a contact form." So what we do is pretty focused: we don't do design, we don't do marketing, we don't do offer SEO (we build very SE friendly sites, but we're not doing keyword research or running PPC campaigns). We're just engineers/developers (if you can call anyone that works with PHP for a living an engineer). :)

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#23

Post by hippich »

crikli wrote: post #4

"Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla use PHP. — the plugin model aches at scale: popular plugins become abandoned plugins, energies move elsewhere. Plugin A works great, plugin B too. However, they weren’t designed to know about each other, thus leading you down a rabbit hole of forking and mending. A few years of use later, you are left with an unmaintainable tangle of ad hoc code written by an all-but-unknown cast of prog…

I am actively contribute to Drupal and I will say just what you said - OP did not invest enough time to claim what he claimed regarding Drupal.

+ Community which is not just open source, but just open. Which tends to make their modules to work with others. And it is pleasure to contribute to community like this.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#24

Post by lux »

ams6110 wrote: post #21
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drupal achieved this by requiring modules that get hosted on Drupal.org (the most popular site to find modules) be reviewed before they're published. Part of the review process requires verifying that the module (a) doesn't duplicate other modules and (b) doesn't belong as extra features added to another module. If your module doesn't work with the other modules on drupal.org, it will never be published. You're requi…

I don't disagree with any of this, but would like to add that just because a module get published on drupal.org does not mean that (a) it works or (b) it's well-written. The mainstream modules... the common ones used on thousands of sites, tend to be solid. There's a lot of half-baked crud once you get into the smaller or lesser-used ones.

This is true of any software library or framework that allows plugins, but it doesn't mean that the core idea itself is wrong.

For example, jQuery has dozens of gallery/slideshow and lightbox clones of widely varying quality, but jQuery itself is a brilliant foundation for Javascript development, including its plugin structure.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#26

Post by capnrefsmmat »

ams6110 wrote: post #21
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drupal achieved this by requiring modules that get hosted on Drupal.org (the most popular site to find modules) be reviewed before they're published. Part of the review process requires verifying that the module (a) doesn't duplicate other modules and (b) doesn't belong as extra features added to another module. If your module doesn't work with the other modules on drupal.org, it will never be published. You're requi…

I don't disagree with any of this, but would like to add that just because a module get published on drupal.org does not mean that (a) it works or (b) it's well-written. The mainstream modules... the common ones used on thousands of sites, tend to be solid. There's a lot of half-baked crud once you get into the smaller or lesser-used ones.

Indeed. I try to do rigorous reviews of modules (too much spare time at work), but I don't have enough time to install them and test every feature. I just check for obvious security holes and API abuses. And of course, once you've published one module you can make more without any review at all.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#27

Post by JoelSutherland »

Wow -- this really stuck a chord with me. My startup's product is a CMS. Before we build the CMS, we built the API:

http://www.gethifi.com/blog/first-we-built-an-api-then-we-bu...

That said, I didn't buy everything he said. We've built a farily agnostic API, very much like he described. That said, it's not Mongo, it's not MySQL and it's not CouchDB. It's impossible to build something that is 100% free from constraint and trade-offs.

Blog Engine CMSs are restrictive because they are Blog Engines! You can see that his system has its restrictions too as he enters a pixel based headline size in the demo video.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#28

Post by noibl »

JoelSutherland wrote: post #27

Wow -- this really stuck a chord with me. My startup's product is a CMS. Before we build the CMS, we built the API: http://www.gethifi.com/blog/first-we-built-an-api-then-we-bu... That said, I didn't buy everything he said. We've built a farily agnostic API, very much like he described. That said, it's not Mongo, it's not MySQL and it's not CouchDB. It's impossible to build something that is 100% free from constraint…

> You can see that his system has its restrictions too as he enters a pixel based headline size in the demo video.

The fact that he specifies the size unit actually suggests that the system would accept others. It's basically CSS after all.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#30

Post by eropple »

lukeschlather wrote: post #15
dasil003 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Look, I hate PHP as much as the next passionate software developer. I did PHP full-time from 2000-2005 until I couldn't take it anymore. I spent a fair amount of time with Drupal and it was technically very impressive even though ultimately it was not for me because the tradeoffs were not where I wanted to be as a developer. The thing is, what a CMS does is cater to a site which does not have the budget for cust…

I don't know about Drupal - I would tend to agree it's a little too cumbersome to the point where I would rather write something with a good framework like Django. But WordPress is really nice, aside from PHP, and my once-off design-a-simple-website projects that use it would be a lot simpler if there were something similar that had a better language. PHP does add a significant amount of gymnastics that make plugin d…

The problem you see with these applications is that they are bad PHP, not that they are PHP.

If you would, go take a peek at the Symfony2 framework. It's positively brilliant code, and it's PHP--Fabian Potencier and friends are excellent programmers, and they write excellent code in PHP.

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