Sure, it was insanely powerful and customizable at it's ground floor, but even before Wordpress figured out how to better handle contributions from multiple users and became as much a website management system as a blogging platform, getting Drupal to do some very simple stuff that was effectively baked in for Wordpress was... onerous.
It's not the power - it's everything you had to set up just to get the most basic things done - nevermind secured, backed up, etc.
Yes, I know, editing the actual site layout in WP has gotten more complicated, and if you want your site secure, and backed up, and cacheing for performance you certainly have several plugins to install, but I had investigated Drupal by attempting to replace a hand-coded CMS and site layout that I had previously done - and had no fancy features beyond one page needing to keep a list of image names and associated images, display them in a gallery, and display a larger version of said image when clicked.
Getting Drupal to create the needed tags and structure to accept all those objects, etc. was painful. As in I ended up hand-coding a new front end and wiring it to the old CMS painful. As in further down the road I looked at it and Joomla for a similar replacement, and ended up going with Wordpress.
Maybe it's gotten better in that regard. I don't care.
Despite that, I'm sorry to hear one of the Drupal developers has gotten canned for less than PC sexual kinks, despite agreeing in every other way with the rabbit crowd.
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert expelled Larry "Crell" Garfield from the Drupal community (archive) for his involvement in the BDSM community. Garfield claims this was done at the demand of Drupal Security team member Klaus "klausi" Purer and unknown others secretly pressuring Drupal leadership to have him removed for his private sex life.
I'm not sorry for the project, but the programmer. I don't see a bright future for a developer more concerned with people being "inclusive" than effective.
UPDATE: In the event anyone thought I was kidding, go read the current (as of March, 2017) instructions for setting up Drupal at Siteground. Under initial setup:
OK, you don't have to install TinyMCE or its ilk, but most people using a CMS are not web coders.
Sure, this gives you flexibility to install a different text handler, but here's a suggestion - how about they choose one as the default! The system's modular, so it's still easily swapped out, but effectively everyone installs it, or something like it.
Ditto images.
UPDATE: In the event anyone thought I was kidding, go read the current (as of March, 2017) instructions for setting up Drupal at Siteground. Under initial setup:
There are few modules for Drupal that provide you with very basic functionality that every website owner needs. This is why, we will install those before we actually start creating the content for our sample website.
Table of contents:That's right. Before picking a theme, creating a home page, defining a static page (hey, it looks like at least you no longer have to install the content creator kit because they finally rolled most of those functions in...) you have to install a GUI text editor and an image uploader/handler. And you have to define where it's used, and which buttons will be available. And you have to make sure you install the right version because the instructions warn that some more recent ones are not compatible.
Add a WYSIWYG editor to Drupal
Enable the Image upload module in Drupal
OK, you don't have to install TinyMCE or its ilk, but most people using a CMS are not web coders.
Sure, this gives you flexibility to install a different text handler, but here's a suggestion - how about they choose one as the default! The system's modular, so it's still easily swapped out, but effectively everyone installs it, or something like it.
Ditto images.
Drupal was reminiscent of the old Red Hat PRM system where you had to figure out the dependencies for yourself. If you wanted to add features or applications to Drupal, you had to play the dependency game almost weekly, and you still were likely to end up with a potentially insecure system.
ReplyDeleteWP can be a pain, but apps load cleanly and update without much fuss.
Hand coding has to be done with both, so why not eliminate all the annoyances you can to focus on needed tasks?
Not happy to see another Open Source app go to the SJW Undead Brigade, but the sooner it dies, the sooner it can be reborn or replaced.
Yeah. When updates break things, but not updating isn't really an option.... forgot about that part. Had three updates hose something in my setup I relied on while I was trying it for that first project.
ReplyDelete