Drupal 7.14

Forget these old Drupal and Joomla.
The web has changed and so did the CMS world.

What's the need to debate whether Drupal has or has not this or that feature. Do you compare web 1.0 and web 2.0?

Drupal, despite its many modules, is in the old world. It is slow (bad performance), heavy (because of the many modules you are obliged to install to have a decent site), unflexible (template is awful), not ergonomic (it is not intuitive and user need many actions for the simplest task).

In this it does not differ from all the other old timers: Joomla, e107, Etomite, etc. There are plenty of them.

If you look for modern, powerful and fast CMS have a look to: CMS Made Simple, Silverstripe, Modx or Expression Engine.

I read a lot of "carefully misinformed" posts on this forum.

Somebody starts a post writing "Drupal is like Joomla".
This is not knowing what you are talking about.

Somebody else writes: "I would not use Drupal if you're planning on scaling to hundreds of thousands of users or more." Well, my first comment is: please thank Drupal in the first place that you reached hundred thousands Users! Second point is: I would not use ModX as well as any other PHP based CMS: a website with that huge success needs to be ported to a different stack of technologies that scale better, I would not recommend a PHP stack for sure.

Anyway if you want to see a very huge but speedy website supported by Drupal, go to drupal.org itself. It has several thousands of users, tons of pages (if you google "site:drupal.org" you get the current amount of indexed pages: 5.870.000).

These are simple facts.

Again: beware about the "carefully misinformed" posts by some people you find here.

I do not see many Drupal evangelists here. Just well in the know people and misinformed people.

Preaching about the "new generation" of cms is just like that: preaching. It is rather easy to deliver performance if the only thing you do is publising some pages.

For example take a look to ModX. On the surface it delivers a very good "new" interface. Then take the time to dig a little bit. It has around 10 plug-in modules. It lacks even basic functions like e-commerce. The documentation is a bunch of pages lacking entire sections.

No e-commerce? good, then if the customer asks you for this feature... try to write your own e-commrce module for MODX... with no documentation. LOL

End of the line: this new generation of CMS has a long long long and let me say it another time... long way to become mature enough to be used in today demanding web development world.

Drupal 6 is mature and boasts thousands of ready to use modules and functionalities. Need e-commerce? Check. Need newsletter? Check. Need googlemaps? check. Need semantic web? check. Need good SEO? Check. The list goes long till the end of times.

Maybe in 3 or 4 years Modx will have the same.

Catch us if you can, dudes.

Drupal does not compare with the new generation of CMS. Drupal has its root in the old way of doing and therefore will never deliver excellent performance.

Yes, speed is a big issue (I tried this CMS on shared and dedicated server). Cache is a big issue, but also these endless queries do the DB that slow down the full site.

On the other hand, the more you add modules, the more the DB gets queries though impacting negatively the site speed.
Problem is, you have to add modules as Drupal core is almost empty.

It is a never ending issue that made many people to simply leave Drupal.
OK, if you have something small to build you can use it without to many damages.
But forget it for massive traffic site, or highly populated member sites.

Drupal is like Joomla. Both CMS had their glory time. Both CMS were at high level a few years ago.

I know them both quite well for having used them several years. But I do not use them anymore, or only if a customer insists to have them (but this happens very seldom).

I do not use them anymore because today you find much better CMS: Modx, Silverstripe, Expression Engine to name just a few.
This new generation of CMS have little to compare with the 'old CMS': Drupal, Joomla, e107, etc.
Their whole philosophy is different.

Here are a few examples:
- Excellent caching (site performance and speed). Drupal and Joomla are both slow. Drupal becomes very slow once you have added a bunch of midules.
- Easy and flexible template system (you build whatever you want) with easy and full support of web standards (XHTML, CSS and Javascript). Forget Drupal and Joomla here. You will waste a lot of time and never be satisfied with the results.
- Well tested and bug-free (not like Drupal that has always security issues, Konny is right in underlying it. Joomla is much better here.)
- Well documented: Drupal has a lot of information, but is it rather incomplete and not structured. Often it is outdated.
- Ressource (or asset) management. Drupal has never be able have one. That means you can not manage the site pictures, or any other files properly.
Almost unbelievable, but Drupal has no file management.
This is due to the fact that ALL ressources (pictures, any files) are owned by a 'node' and not by the user. It will be a hard work for Drupal to change that, and I don't believe they ever will be able to do such a change.

The big issue with Drupal is once you have installed it you have a skeleton, this means for instance:
- no pictures!!!
- no editors
- a poor administration
- no spam protection
- no SEO
- no query
- no possibity to add no fields in pages
- no pingback / trackback
- no XML sitemaps
- no file browsing
- No communication (sending e-mails, messaging, etc.)
- etc.

In Drupal you can have most of these features in adding modules.
This is a big issue very well analysed by Jean: you would need to add and activate around 80 modules to have a decent website.
Modules are rarely up-to-date and if core has moved to a new version, you are always in conflict between 'old version' modules and 'new version' modules.

Worse, module developement is community driven. Very often, the module owner stops his developement after a few years of work and leave the community without follow up. This is a big issue when you have site in production. It ends often in paying huge amount to get customized developement.

The next issue due to modules is site speed: the more you add modules in Drupal, the slower it becomes. If you build a Drupal site with decent features, site speed will be a big issue.
You can use all caching option, add cache modules, etc. Speed will always be an issue.
I use only dedicated servers. That means Drupal speed problem is not due to hardware. Really, I would not like to have Drupal installed on a shared server.

The new generation of CMS have most of above mentionned features (and much more) in core. This mean by each new release, all these feature are up-to-date: you avoid the Drupal nightmare.

Thanks to their excellent caching system, speed with the new generation of CMS is just not an issue at all.
They are lightweight, literally flying. Highly flexible, performant, of course fully featured.

Drupal is a bloated nightmare, just asked the main developer for Popsugar.com, the most-trafficked Drupal-powered site (and one who received 15 million dollars from Sequoia Capital).

"I would not use Drupal if you're planning on scaling to hundreds of thousands of users or more. I used to work for one of the largest Drupal outfits and trust me: it abuses the database like cookie monster abuses cookies. Sugar, Inc. (neé Sugar Publishing, Inc.) was the company I used to work for. Trust me, getting Drupal to scale to that level is NOT FUN and, frankly, not worth the effort. And yes, IMO, it was more work than starting from scratch."

Jesse Farmer, former Sugar Inc. developer, on Facebook's developer forum:
http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=162&p=1

@Jay August
Ron is fully right in pointing out that your are insuting people. There should be no room here for comments like yours.

If people don't like Drupal that doesn't mean they are not skilled.

.pex says that "you need to do 10+ site with Drupal, then only you can say you've learned Drupal".

I never used Drupal, but if you need to do 10+ sites in order to master this CMS I will NEVER use it.

There are many glorious CMS out there that you control in little time though doing an excellent job.

Instead of ridiculous statements you should tell to people why Drupal would be of interest.
What feature is so exceptional that you can not find it elsewhere.

Te more I read the comments, the more I see that the Drupal fans have nothing special to say about their CMS.

When you make 10+ websites and several different modules, then you can say I learned drupal, and then realize that the best CMS is Drupal. U can do absolutely anything with drupal without.

I agree with you, Jay August

I used a lot of "CMS": e107, Etomite, Joomla, MDpro and phpwcms!

With all the sites where I used these different Systems I turned over to Drupal 6 2 years ago.

OK - All beginning is not easy and the learning curve with Drupal is much more higher than on the other systems (I used before). BUT: Drupal is primary a Content Management Framework where you can do mostly everything and it should be your first choice if you want do your Business seriously.

@Jay August,
I am very surprised that you insult people. Do you really think you are better skilled than all of us?
Is that the way of doing of the Drupal community? Arrogant, intolerant, one is not allowed to discuss, not allowed to ask question, he is anyway an idiot and has to shut up?

But really Jay August, do you think you are the only one who understands the web? That you had the Revelation and everybody else is in the dark?

Many of us think that Drupal is a bad CMS and we explain it with documented facts (not like you). Why on hell are you insulting us?

Sorry, Drupal sucks and it is not at all due to lack of skills.

Colin as Jean are completely right in highlighting the many drawbacks of Drupal. Actually Jean's analysis is very well documented.

Personnally I stopped using Drupal (after 2 sites) not because I am short of skills, but because this CMS is fully outdated and does not answer some basic requirements a developper need to do his job.

Part of my skills are :
- Ajax : 2 years
- C/C++/Win32SDK : 6 years
- CSS : 4 years
- HTML/DHTML : 6 years
- MS-SQL : 2 years
- MySQL : 5 years
- Perl : 7 Years
- PHP : 6 years
- PostgreSQL : 4 years
- XML : 4 years
- Tomcat : 3 years

Can you tell me what additional skills one would need to be able to use Drupal? What you say is total crap.

In the past Drupal might have been a good CMS when compared to other ones. But today it is absolutely out of race.
You named 2 CMS (Modx and Silverstripe).
I use sometimes Modx and I have to say it is a beauty. Especially Modx 2.0 which is in beta now. A pure Rolls Royce when compared to Drupal. And so much faster...

@Colin
Not an evangelist at all, I just read a lot about a CMS before I make my decisions here and from what I read here, about 90% of the remarks against Drupal just boils down to one simple thing:

LACK OF SKILLS.

Who dares calling Drupal a blogging tool that became a CMS? Drupal is a CMF, with a CMS built ON TOP of it.

"Regarding design, Drupal has no flexibility at all. Compare it to ModX or Silverstripe and you will see that you only loose a lot of time when you try to design Drupal."

Where is Drupal not flexible? you have regions, page templates, node templates, blocks, block templates and all can be thrown in a content template as well, if required.

do you even know you can give every aspect, every node, every block a separate template? Just by obeing the URL structure you can easily add a template for different part of contents.

But hey, keep shouting that Drupal sucks. I know one thing: so does your skill...

Drupal is a huge piece of crap. It is not worth the time you spend on it. Following the advices you get here I did 2 sites for customers...

I should never have done that: I lost them as customers. If users are unhappy, it means not only hat the product is bad but also that despite all the efforts I could do it was not designed to meet their requirements properly.

Administration interface is way below average, template system is awful, documentation is not worth 2 cents, and it's such a slow CMS.

Don't use it!

@ Konny

if you have never seen 14 minor releases in 20 months for other CMSs... well, maybe this is not because they are secure, maybe they do not know the security issues they have... ;)

A release every 6 weeks to me means only that the development is extremely fast and that bugs gets fixed. If you are comfortable with a CMS that has a bug release every year or so... go for it and good luck.

Humm... Drupal 6.0 stable release came out in early 2008. 20 months later we are at Drupal 6.14.
14 security releases within 20 months!
What is so messy about Drupal that they cannot have a stable release that is not full of security issues? I never seen that with other CMS.

By the way 14 releases in 20 months means an upgrade every 6 weeks.
To upgrade Drupal you have to turn your site off, backup the DB, change the template to have the core template working, turn off all modules (can easily be 80 modules on a normal featured site), delete all files on the server, replace them by the new ones, re-activate all modules, change template again, launch upgrade. If everything went well, you can put your site up again.
If not (but generally it does) you have to use your backed up DB and start again.

It is not a long process. And have to do it every 6 weeks is more than time consuming. It is waste of time. Especially when you have several sites running with Drupal and located on different servers.

The issue is even bigger if you have your customers using Drupal. Unless you want to leave your customers with security issues in their release, you have to upgrade them all.
That's where the fun is over, really.

Additional messy problems is when you upgrade from a previous version (let's say from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6). Then yes you have to check whether all your modules are up to day. And Jean is right, there's where the nightmare starts as Drupal is never up to date with its modules.

Drupal is best CMS that i've seen.Tks