I recently came across this blog post talking about someone’s decision to “dump” Drupal as a platform for a site idea they had. As I read the short post, I quickly found that I was shouting “don’t dump Drupal” in the back of my mind.
The author describes three reasons why Drupal didn’t work out for their use.
- The look and feel of the site was inconsistent between the homepage and forum which made it feel like two separate sites.
- The homepage, using drupal (sic) plugins for columns was a nightmare to configure – massively overcomplicated! Drupal is simple, but these plugins aren’t!
- Drupal is too restrictive on styling and based on the complexity of the multi column plugins the idea of customising (sic) it filled be with a horror akin to being told I would have to listen to a Steps album!
Hmmmm….this got me thinking. Drupal can be easily setup and used “out of the box”. Having said that, I still find the available, User centric manuals, tutorials severely lacking for the complete newbie user/contributor (not administrator).
Now, if you really want to use the super powerful platform features of Drupal to provide a more complex solution, as it appears this person want to scratch the surface of, there is a fairly steep learning curve. But, the key is that the framework is VERY powerful and flexible. Unfortunately it sounds like the post author was unable or unwilling to find the time and materials to learn more about the platform.
All three of the reasons given by the author seem to be about look, feel and styling (mostly). Oh my. This is where Drupal theming absolutely shines. With the knowledge of Drupal theming combined with the necessary design skills a Drupal site can be made to look virtually any way you want.
On the surface it sounds like the author could have gotten what he wanted with a custom theme, page-front.php, aggregator, cck, views 2 and view theming.
Its too bad that while the Drupal community is fantastic, there really needs to be some more thought and effort to formalize some good introductory materials to ensure that new folks get ample opportunity to quickly see the pros and cons of the Drupal platform. Of course the community response is “if you feel strongly, then do something about it.” Very true!
Just my 2 cents. I’m certainly biased on Drupal but realistic about the user experience. I continue to find organizations we interact with being confused, lost and at times frustrated with the administrative user experience. Some of this is core Drupal, some is on the module developer, and some is on the implementer. Between us all, we have made big improvements but there is plenty of room to grow.
Blessings all.
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Hi, I’m the author of the mentioned blog dumping Drupal. Just to clarify I did say in my post I was sure these things could be done and I can see why it would be useful for people with no programming/html skills. However from what I looked at it was more complex to learn Drupal than php, then I could do everything I wanted on my site with html/css etc.
So I’m not saying Drupal isn’t powerful, and it’s great for people that want something up and running quickly but it appeared to me, with my skillset, to be an over-engineered solution. If you look at my homepage you’ll see it is deeply integrated into my forum software, and after dumping Drupal it only took me about 2 solid daya to setup. Sorry but I’m glad I dropped Drupal in favour of extending the phpBB architecture. In another post I describe the techniques I used: http://dirtmind.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/extending-phpbb3/
Thanks for the comments and welcome to the Tech4Him blog. Definitely understand your thought process. I think this was a great example of how we, as part of the Drupal community, have failed to provide easily accessed, packaged and descriptive documentation. Perhaps the outcome could have been different and perhaps Drupal was not the right choice. Sounds like you did get a solution that works for you.
Blessings to you.