I'm using Drupal as a back-end, and doing the fun stuff in the front-end on the client. No boring days here.
Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
21–30 of 148 posts
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#22I am puzzled by this: "Good Drupal developers are making a lot of money right now, much more than I'm seeing for Django or Rails or Node devs in general." I am curious where this is? This is not true in New York City, where I am. Developers who are good with a given PHP framework (Drupal, Symfony, etc) will make something like $60 to $70 an hour. The top Rails devs will make at least the same amount, and usually a li…
I know developers (including myself on a rare occasion - i tend towards custom development) who are doing far better than $70/hour for Drupal development in NYC.
Although I don't know many successful developers who explicitly sell themselves as "[Framework] Developers". More often than not, when shooting for a higher rate, it seems to sell better as someone who provides a full solution, which May include specific frameworks if necessary.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#23If you're using Drupal the way the author describes here - building in the interface rather than writing code - then yes, you're pretty much doomed. You're producing a very fragile thing that is very hard to maintain and adjust later on, and heaven help you if you actually want to do something in a different way than the modules you're working with allow out of the box. Drupal development is very divided between (a)…
This comment confuses me. If you're going to use Drupal as a framework and ignore the rest, then why not just use Django or Rails, both of which are cleaner and more sophisticated frameworks? I don't think it's fair to look down on people who use Drupal as it's meant to be used.
I don't think it is fair to throw all Drupal developers into a bucket that has them rarely writing code and mostly just clicking around. We have a Drupal Role for people that only do what you describe. We call it Site Admin. They get access to all the clicky parts but don't do any actual programming. I'm never bored with Drupal. Frustrated yes... but never bored.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and amen. All people who are afraid to write code need to stop using drupal.
There's a difference between beinf afraid to write code and avoiding reinventing the wheel. If there's a Drupal module that gives you what you need, why would you not use it?
it all depends. Example, if you want to assign a role to a new user when he signs up you can install http://drupal.org/project/autoassignrole module which does about 10 more things or just write one hook_user function.
If you install a module for every piece of functionality soon you'll end up with a huge codebase and the hell the author is describing.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#25I would add this to the complaints:
- NOT AMENABLE TO SOURCE CONTROL
Half the code lives in the database, configuration is all mixed up with content, and there's no reliable programmatic way to extract it. It makes doing deployment a nightmare.
And the worst part? Drupal developers by and large have such a narrow range of experience that they don't even know what they are missing. They have no idea what good coding standards look like, a lot of them don't even have a development/production separation: they just hack away on the live site with no source control or backup. And no one writes tests, or sees why they would be useful.
Some of the big professional drupal shops appear to have basically written their own cms on top of drupal, with a bunch of terrible hacks to try to make source control kind of work, and just use the drupal name basically as a marketing technique.
So glad I don't have to deal with any of that insanity any more.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#26Developing via a GUI is good for rapid prototyping or CMS applications, but I prefer traditional coding for web applications. It's easy to change something in a GUI and not notice it. You can't "grep" a GUI to find the screen you need to access to change something (as you may need to click through several screens to get to where you want to go). Version control becomes more complicated as well: when development is de…
you can use the features module in drupal and have the best of both worlds. You click to get a prototype quickly, then you export the functionality to a module with drupal and keep track of changes with git.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#27Interesting article, perhaps if a few of those "I'm bored"s were changed to "I'm helping make Drupal suck less by writing some documentation" or "I'm learning cool new stuff cos Drupal does the generic boring stuff for me" the author would have a more fulfilling life. If everyone blows a little more energy back into the Drupal project, it'll suck a lot less ;)
I agree 100%. That makes it a lot less boring because you feel you are doing something useful not only for yourself.
That's also why Drupal has huge amounts of contributed modules and developers. Lots of people who do just that. Drupal is the Linux of the CMSs.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#28Interesting article, perhaps if a few of those "I'm bored"s were changed to "I'm helping make Drupal suck less by writing some documentation" or "I'm learning cool new stuff cos Drupal does the generic boring stuff for me" the author would have a more fulfilling life. If everyone blows a little more energy back into the Drupal project, it'll suck a lot less ;)
It depends on your work environment. If your boss asks for 40 billable hours a week and you have a family to keep you busy in off hours then there's not much time for writing docs or contributing modules.
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#29I would add this to the complaints: - NOT AMENABLE TO SOURCE CONTROL Half the code lives in the database, configuration is all mixed up with content, and there's no reliable programmatic way to extract it. It makes doing deployment a nightmare. And the worst part? Drupal developers by and large have such a narrow range of experience that they don't even know what they are missing. They have no idea what good coding s…
This is the main reason I chucked my Drupal 'cuffs in 2008, no longer taking on new Drupal projects and helping my clients move over to other Drupal service providers: It was very, very difficult to scale up my business because bringing on extra developers, and having consistent local/dev/staging/production environments was at least an order of magnitude more difficult that it would be with other tools.
In Drupal 6, the only way to reproduce an environment was with a massive install profile for the project, and the average Drupal developer was entirely clueless to matters of testing and version control when compared to the average Django/Rails/CakePHP developer. This made for many painful projects and unhappy clients, usually beginning 6-8 weeks into the project when the issues of database drift became inevitable.
And like you said, everything lives in the database. So the chances that some production issue (or new issue only seen in dev) was caused by an errant user action in the Drupal UI was pretty high, and this made debugging a nightmare -- where is my issue really coming from?
I'd just about forgotten about my Drupal days of yore, and between the "click monkey" analogy and the "clear the cache" nostalgia, the author sure conjured up some bad memories!
Re: Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
#30If you're using Drupal the way the author describes here - building in the interface rather than writing code - then yes, you're pretty much doomed. You're producing a very fragile thing that is very hard to maintain and adjust later on, and heaven help you if you actually want to do something in a different way than the modules you're working with allow out of the box. Drupal development is very divided between (a)…
What would you recommend an experienced developer coming into Drupal do to land in group A?