Drupal Review
Drupal Review
When I first installed Drupal, it seemed like it was the general purpose CMS that would allow me to create both larger CMS sites, and also smaller Web 2.0 types of sites too. It was relatively easy to get up and running, and it came with built in forums, and a blog. The control over users and postings is not as good as Plone and Zope, but it is not bad, and it is also relatively easy to customize with lots of skins available.
Onced I started moving beyond the the main modules, things started to get more complicated. For example, I needed to recompile php to add GD support for images, and I ran into a bunch of issues getting it to generate the .so files that I needed. I also found the ping module for the blogging tool to be not very useful either.
One important note with respect to all of the above comments, is that I have not tried Joomla yet, which seems to be getting pretty good reviews. It is next on my list of packages to try, but from what I have read, it seems to be very similar to Drupal.
Pros:
- More user friendly than Zope.
- It is a decent compromise between a full blown CMS, and smaller Blog only package like Wordpress.
- Lots of themes, and modules available.
- The basic install includes forums, and a blog.
- Easy to change the look and feel of the site.
Cons:
- The Blog ping module that comes with the installation is not very good.
- There is good documentation available, but it is not always easy to find what you need.
- There are lots of modules, but it is hard to find which one is best, or which ones are the most stable.
- The blog module is not as slick as wordpress (which is what I am using for this site).
Background
I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.
Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Everyone says that setting up and installing Drupal is the hard part. I’ve found that to not be the truth. Installing Drupal was not any harder than installing any CMS package. You have to know what you are doing, or it will break. Modules are easy to install and manage. The big problem with Drupal is the Voodoo. Things randomly seem to start and stop working. Permissions issues crop up, and are gone a few minutes later, only to rear up with a death toll finality. Solutions on the community range from effective and logical to total utter flailing around. If you use Drupal be prepared to randomly go into your DB tables and hack things.
Using Drupal has dragged an 8 week project to 16 weeks and counting. About once a week Drupal’s internal workings suddenly decide they want to kick a fit, and we spend between one hour and five days trying to diagnose, replicate ( so it doesn’t happen again ), and fix the problem. 9/10 times there isn’t a way to replicate, you just have to deal with the random factor. Lots of strange bugs, lots of unrecorded bugs, lots of wonky modules that you have to sift through carefully.
I can honestly say that I will never use Drupal again. Unexplained phenomenon are par for the course. Everything is total utter Voodoo, from the way Drupal builds it’s markup and div structure, to theming, to fundamentals like permission controls. If you are at the start of your project and using Drupal, get out now while you still can before you get dragged into the ninth ring of Drupal hell like my team.