Drupal's Golden Handcuffs

In my experience, Drupal is a pristine example of the way modern software should not be made. With one or two notable exceptions, there is a distinct lack of computer science type knowledge in the drupal world. The result is kludgey, over-complicated, and inefficient code.

Drupal's "success" is only because it's community consists of people who don't know any better. The author himself points this out by making laborious points about how much money there is to be made propagating bad, wasteful practices.

That is both untrue and dishonest. Drupal's success is directly attributable to all of the following:

1. a very large, growing, and passionate pool of contributing developers and designers.

2. aggressive community involvement a la issue queues, forums, IRC, local user's groups and 30+ regional camps and conferences in North America alone.

3. Did you read the part where the op wrote about the ridiculous amount of shit you can get done without opening a text editor? Office staff with minimal technical background can be trained to implement/manage most of it.

4. It. Just. Works. On commodity hosting no less. Or on expensive enterprise hosting. With little or no assing around with server configuration. There are hosts that have push-button site installation.

In short, Drupal is popular for all of the same reasons that PHP still hasn't gone away after almost a decade of developers whinging that it sucks.

Is it fun to code for? Nope, not even a little bit. By the time you've written your fourth or fifth custom module 99% of it is the same tired slog through boilerplate code and hook_$N_alter() groveling. Dull, dull, dull shit. And yet I suspect Drupal and Wordpress (which is arguably even worse to deal with) are running way more websites than django, rails, and symphony put together. Look on the bright side, at least it wasn't written in Perl. :)

I'd say, 90% of the time, if you're using Drupal and you're in a code editor instead of the admin UI, you're making a mistake, either because there's an easier way to do what you're doing, or because you shouldn't be using Drupal. The real trick is knowing which.

Drupal lets you get a ton of shit accomplished without making you understand a single line of code, have a reasonable Dev-Stage-Prod workflow, QA, even version control or backups, etc., but it's completely possible to do all of that. That means that it can scale from anywhere from something like a 16 year-old's shared-host fanfiction site to say Whitehouse.gov.

Of course that means that there will be tons of fuckups live-coding (or live-configuring) on production, or people that don't export and version things in environments when they should, and that people will construct fragile combinations of modules and configuration where a tiny bit of code would have sufficed, or write tons of fragile custom code with no tests or security review when there was already a module for that.

But allowing people to be fuckups doesn't force them to be, and they can be trained.