Drupal 7.14

I spent six months trying to learn Drupal with the help of three books and tutorials from Linda.com

I can't honestly understand why anyone would use it. It's slow, extremely difficult to learn and demands such a high level of PHP expertise that you might as well code your own CMS.

Drupal works best for me for many reasons :

1) It has an excellent, flexible theming and templating system. I can take my existing HTML/CSS design and port it easily to a Drupal theme with NO change. Instead of creating a theme from scratch or changing other themes, Drupal has many base/starter themes that allow designers to create, customize, adapt, port a theme without coding. My favorite base/starter theme is AdaptiveTheme,

http://drupal.org/project/adaptivetheme

2) Drupal has a huge, friendly community actively developing more than 10,000 modules and 1,000 themes for all types of sites.

3) Flexibility: Create my own CONTENT TYPE and create my own fields for the content type. Flexible theming system. Flexible API for creating own functionalities and integrating with other applications.

4) Commitment and active support for open Web standards, W3C standard compliance, accessibility, usability, etc...

5) Multilanguage and internationalization: I develop site for clients who want international languages along with English. Multilingual site is easy in Drupal. Multilanguage is built-in.

These are just a few reasons why I like Drupal.

Drupal is a publishing platform created by our vibrant community and bursting with potential. Use as-is or snap in any of thousands of free designs and plug-ins for rapid site assembly. Developers love our well-documented APIs. Designers love our flexibility. Site administrators love our limitless scalability.

Seriously this is the most bloated, confusing piece of dog crap you can get. Docs are definately not good enough and many modules dont have docs or good examples for version 7. The interface for each module is crazy. I'm racking my brain against the wall with this over used turd.

Best CMS I ever used
:-)

Unlike a lot of people commenting who likely just install the CMS, a theme and call it a day, I have worked extensively with the primary PHP-based CMS's inside and out - in this case, Drupal and WordPress.

In the Drupal vs WordPress comparison, both of them accomplish very different things. WordPress has been gaining traction very fast as a CMS especially with WordPress 3, and the fact that you can now create content types (although it's not obvious how to do so off the bat) gives WordPress a stronger argument. For sites where the client simply wants to edit pages, content and maybe a blog or news, WordPress will cover this better, IMO.

But Drupal does allow for greater fine tuning of the CMS such as permissions and theming. As friendly as WordPress may appear to be, the backend can still be overwhelming with unnecessary options to clients, so Drupal's structure makes it much better for whittling the admin theme and permissions down to what you want it to be. Drupal is also stronger at creating community driven sites right out of the box, versus WordPress (even with addons like BuddyPress). It is also a better choice for enterprise or intranet, having worked with some clients with those needs.

However, everything is not rosy in Drupal land at all...it is versatile but has a steep development learning curve and high development time / cost. Theming can be painful at times as some things in Drupal that isn't handled by the theme require overriding with custom modules / hooks, which quickly becomes a genuine pain in the rear.

Drupal 7 has come a long ways in improving the backend interface, but there is so much more that they need to do. The initial Drupal 7 release - as well as many contrib modules - is functional but can be kind of buggy. Unfortunately it has been four months since Drupal 7 was released and we haven't seen so much as a .01 update yet, and it sort of concerns me that judging by Twitter comments, Dries and other Drupal people at least appear to be more focused on Drupal 8 right now.

As for myself, I have since moved on from Drupal and even WordPress to Ruby on Rails. While that is NOT a CMS but rather a programming framework, on a major project I was able to build my own CMS the way *I* needed it, and in much less time than trying to override, strip out or fight what CMS's like WordPress or Drupal already assume I want to do.

In the end though, Drupal has it's place as WordPress isn't the best option for everything. It's used by a lot of major companies and businesses for a reason. But it's arguable that you may want to stick with Drupal 6 right now until D7 matures.

RE: GoldPath on April 10 2011 01:34 pm

"... For a personal site go ahead with Drupal. For a professionnal: choose another one. "
You obviously have no background to make such a statement.

Some links for you to start out:
- http://www.drupalsites.net/
- http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
- http://drupal.org/success-stories
- http://drupal.org/forum/25

Many of these comments are soooooo familiar from the linux-windows debate. "oh mama! Linux ain't Windows, so therefore linux sucks right?".

Hey you know what kids...
WordPress and Drupal ain't competitors and they will never aim at being identical or similiar (still they can learn from eachother, and openly do), they aim at two very different markets. I.E. Drupal does not try to be a plug-and-play solution but the architectures best friend, where WP tries to be a set-and-go blogplatform. If you were expecting Drupal to BE Wordpress then im sorry, you have been terribly misled. It will never happen, so please stop your childish crying and go and enjoy what you was really were looking for - WordPress.

WordPress is much better than Drupal 7 on many levels - user interface, development, customization, updating, etc.

Wait! To all those Drupal fans - I know what you are going to say - Drupal is much more than WP ever could be - Drupal has CCK and Views and WP don't - well that is no longer true - do a Google on Wordpress CCK and you will be very surprised.

There are at least 3 projects that allow WP to create custom content....

If you need to create a huge, complex website for a corporation and you're a nerd that studied IT, this CMS might be useful.

If you need to do a standard website, take any CMS over this illogic, bloated thing.

Not convinced by Drupal at all. First I get the same functionlities with quite a few other CMS. Second, for a professional Drupal is a no go.

Nevertheless I found it simple to install (I tried Drupal 6.x and 7.x) and not difficult to use. I do not understand why people mention a steep learning curve: Drupal is easy to use.

What I did not like in Drupal is the lack of flexibility for design. OK you have modules and all that stuff to help. But nothing at the level of CMS like Typo3, Silverstripe, ModX, CMS made simple, and a few others.

The other negative point is what Julia mentionned: the modules. A lot of modules but a big lack of consistency with the core, anarchical development that lead to security and maintenance issues.
Good CMS have their main features in core, not in modules, because this allow them to ensure the overall code quality.

But this said, Drupal is certainly not a bad CMS. Please do not exagerate. I recommand it for beginners, people that want to build their own site.
For people working with customer I would not recommand it due to the issue on modules.
There si a function to "automatically" upgrade modules on Drupal. But Drupal as a new release (due maily to security issues) every 2 months.
Would you have 100 customers with Drupal installed on several servers, forget the upgrade: it is a nightmare.

And as the modules do not follow the same release rythm than the core, you can get stuck quite fast.

For a personal site go ahead with Drupal. For a professionnal: choose another one.

Drupal is the dream of php developers. Its not just a cms. You get a very well structured and documented framework. Very extendable due to it's complete hook system and centralized node/field logic. It's not joomla. Drupal made for skilled users. If you aren't, go for other CMS instead complaining. You will wonder how many successful sites using it.

Drupal 7 is significantly better than previous versions and works wonderfully. Also changed for the better structure of the database. I find for myself Drupal 7 is better cms in the present.

I've used Drupal for a couple of years now and find it fantastic. You need to install a few extra modules in order to benefit from it fully, such as:

CK Editor (gives you a Word like interface).
Backup and Migrate (creates safe backups)
IMCE or Image Assist (for images)

Overall it's a brilliant CMS. It's also ideally suited to more complex sites like discussion forums, or ones where different users need different permissions.

Notepad works probably faster when making a simple personal homepage. But for making big/nice/complicated webapplications there is no (free) alternative. Drupal is hard to learn, but when you have discovered all the possibilities (cck and views are the minimum required modules for that) it gets very addictive.

Question,

Any other cms' with features like cck and views? I honestly haven't tried that many other cms'.