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The CMS Is Broken.

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Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#11

Post by lukeschlather »

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'm not sure the problem is necessarily Drupal, but I tend to agree with the post's authors that a Drupal written in something other than PHP would be a nice thing to have. Specifically Python would be really nice.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#12

Post by mikeocool »

Definitely an interesting perspective from the media industry. Although the pattern described is a relatively common pattern across a lot of "webapps-at-scale." For example, the CTO of Trip Advisor recently talked about how Trip Advisor is a series of distinct services exposing APIs that all run separately and are pulled together for a page render[1]. At some point most growing web apps simply outgrow the ability to be a single monolithic PHP/Rails/Python/whatever app and need start breaking things up.

Although, it seems like TPM is seeing benefits from this that go outside the typical reasons folks start to go this route, like outgrowing a single relational database or wanting teams working on different components to be able to work and deploy independently of each other.

[1]http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/6/27/tripadvisor-archit...

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#13

Post by dasil003 »

lukeschlather wrote: post #11
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'm not sure the problem is necessarily Drupal, but I tend to agree with the post's authors that a Drupal written in something other than PHP would be a nice thing to have. Specifically Python would be really nice.

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 custom software. A system like Drupal gives a tremendous amount of bang for the buck, and of the open source CMSes, it's hook system is definitely the most powerful once you really understand how to drive it. In the end you're hitting the Drupal sweet spot when you write just a bit of glue code here and there to tune the functionality of existing modules to what you need.

In short Drupal and other CMSes let you build sites with a scope of functionality which would be impossible to do custom development for. In this type of market cost is such a factor that anything less ubiquitous than PHP would be a strike against the system. Furthermore, as the number of modules grow, you need a very large community to keep everything working smoothly, so you don't want to go with a language that has lesser adoption.

Personally I can't stand CMSes because I feel like the abstraction is at the wrong level. To me it's mediocrity by 1000 tiny assumption mismatches. Using Rails or Django I feel like I can craft a minimal, excellent and highly tuned UX exactly to my vision with a better language and lower overhead. Making a CMS in Ruby or Python doesn't address the root pain of living within a heavy and immobile scaffolding. There's a reason you don't hear much about the many open-source Rails CMSes that have been floated over the years.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#14

Post by mikx »

Blaming technology isn't going to change the fact that journalism is still broken.

Folks like John Gruber and Matt Drudge make a ton of revenue by serving their readers. They have simpler technology than everything stated in this article.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#15

Post by lukeschlather »

dasil003 wrote: post #13
lukeschlather wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the problem is necessarily Drupal, but I tend to agree with the post's authors that a Drupal written in something other than PHP would be a nice thing to have. Specifically Python would be really nice.

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 development more difficult.

I don't mind living with a heavy and immobile scaffolding for small projects - but using bubblegum, shoestring, and when necessary sauter to put what little additions I need on is a lot more annoying than just having a clean, standard set of screws and brackets. WordPress especially has a decent set of screws and brackets, but at the end of the day it is PHP and I see a lot of stuff that looks suspiciously like bubblegum.

As for Drupal, I'm not saying I have an incredible amount of experience in it, but taking it for granted that it's a useful framework, I imagine it would be more useful if written in Python or Ruby. Also, I don't buy the argument that PHP is easier to find - I think you would actually have to go out of your way these days to find a place that had PHP but not Python or Ruby available. Certainly all the cut-rate behemoths like HostGator support it.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#16

Post by paxswill »

mikx wrote: post #14

Blaming technology isn't going to change the fact that journalism is still broken. Folks like John Gruber and Matt Drudge make a ton of revenue by serving their readers. They have simpler technology than everything stated in this article.

I don't know if he still uses it, but Daring Fireball use[s|d] Moveable Type as of at least 2002.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#17

Post by nougatmachine »

mikx wrote: post #14

Blaming technology isn't going to change the fact that journalism is still broken. Folks like John Gruber and Matt Drudge make a ton of revenue by serving their readers. They have simpler technology than everything stated in this article.

You'd be hard-pressed to find an entity less representative of the 'old media being outflanked by the young hotshots' stereotype than TPM.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#18

Post by Tichy »

"Our new system will simply wrap the MT database in a cached layer and incorporate its content. Our new gallery app — currently active on the site — creates slideshows, writing its changes to central datastore as well."

Also known as "now they've got two problems", or in this case, four. Or I don't understand it - it sounds as if they have introduced another layer between frontend and backend, which probably increases complexity.

The road to hell is plastered with abstractions...

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#19

Post by capnrefsmmat »

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 required to collaborate.

It works fairly well, although the review queue is long and you get people whining about how their module really deserves to be published.

Re: The CMS Is Broken.

#20

Post by esmooov »

Tichy wrote: post #18

"Our new system will simply wrap the MT database in a cached layer and incorporate its content. Our new gallery app — currently active on the site — creates slideshows, writing its changes to central datastore as well." Also known as "now they've got two problems", or in this case, four. Or I don't understand it - it sounds as if they have introduced another layer between frontend and backend, which probably increase…

Well there are certainly tradeoffs. We do have more apps that can fail. Then again, when one does start to choke, as will happen, the others don't die. So if Baroque locks up, or starts to churn, or I do the ol rm -rf / all that is impacted it our ability to press frontpages until Chef can mint us another Baroque.

Also, there's not, so much, another layer between frontend and backend as there is a multiplication of frontends. It certainly may get us into trouble. Luckily, we already were in trouble and, worse case scenario, we all learn a lot from the experience.

The hell-road blacktop is something we are trying to tear us by substituting the abstract relation of CMS to site for a closer isomorphy of app to function. Who knows? Might work.

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