The CMS Is Broken.

"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 programmers."

This is true of Joomla, and to some extent Wordpress, but as someone who makes his living using Drupal, this statement is patently false and indicates that the author isn't truly familiar with the systems he's criticizing.

The cast of characters behind most Drupal plugins (modules, in Drupal parlance) is well known and most have been iterating their plugins for four to six years (or more). Drupal.org serves as the sole repository for plugins, providing usages statistics, notifying users of upgrades and patches to modules, serving issue queues, and generally keeping the Drupalverse running quite smoothly.

Drupal plugin A and Drupal plugin B are designed to know about each other, at least indirectly, because they use the same fundamental elements (the menu system, the hook system, common APIs) to manage data.

I'm not going to claim that Drupal is "Wordpress easy" to install, or that you'll just sit down in a day and master the system as it's as much a RAD framework as it is a CMS. It's big, powerful, and flexible, and these traits are the natural enemies of "easy."

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.

This is roughly what Ars Technica was doing before I left, I think moreso now. The Movable Type "post" interface was relegated to "the box people write text in", which was then pushed into the app that handled rendering a site.

It sounds like Separation of Concerns[1] applied on a larger scale. Software is easier to manage and more flexible if each piece does one thing and does it well, with as little overlap with other components as possible. This is what makes OOP a good system for designing large programs. I helps people separate out the various components so that maintenance is of many small pieces with clearly defined boundaries instead of one large piece with none.

Separating out these services into their own "apps" is like splitting up classes. It's a natural and good way to increase maintainability and flexibility.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns

That's what I was thinking, especially when I read this part:

"The CMS has to be everything to everybody. Wordpress has to optimize for both the cat-picture faithful and the ring-bejewled, hair-fisted mogul. Moveable Type has to work whether you are running a lad mag or poetry journal. This is an impossible proposition."

Expecting every (?) CMS to be the end-all solution to every possible content situation is ridiculous. It would be nice/neat but that doesn't seem to be quite how it works—is that idea akin to expecting every vehicle to be able to perform every type of situation available? Expecting your family sedan to also be the workhorse carrying materials and whatnot?

What if you only wanted to ride a simple bicycle down the street and not have to worry about a more intricate/heavy one? I use different CMS for different things though admittedly, that makes it harder to master one in particular.

http://www.thesecretary.org/ - For portflio type sites. http://staceyapp.com/ - For incredibly simple sites. http://textpattern.net/ - For most other things.

I do feel as if CMS have kind of stagnated for a bit and am a little tired of most so I'm thankful for the author bringing Netsta to my attention—it looks interesting.