A Programming Question.

Question

For about a year and a half I used Codeigniter to build my sites. Then a client begged me to build theirs in Wordpress. I soon found the joy of using a CMS (if Wordpress can be called that). So for about the last 8 months I have been using Wordpress as much as possible to buld my sites - I made the content fit the design.

Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So... I have recently started using Drupal 7 (not 6.x - I really like the admin panel).

After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment.

So my question is: does Drupal get any better?? Do you REALLY have to use Views to display your content?? Asking for help on the forums is just a shake better than asking a wall. I feel like to do anything requires a module. Why?? Is one better off sticking to a framework??

Answer 1

You're just coming out from WordPress, which has great support and is relatively easy to extend to overcome what you call its limitations, if you know basic PHP, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Every framework has its own potential/limitations.

As a user of WordPress my humble opinion is that you should have stayed with it.

As of you last question, It depends, to stick with one and only one framework has its advantages and disadvantages, the best of all is that you get to know it very well and eventually learn how to extended it. The bad part is that very often frameworks lose popularity and you are left to you own without an active user community and support.

Regards.

Answer 2

Firstly, you can install the Admin module to pretty up Drupal 6 admin. You don't have to use 7. 7 is still in alpha, by the way. Garland sucks, but, Garland is just a theme- its not 'the' admin itself. The Drupal admin can take the form of any Drupal theme, which is useful in its own right, depending on the use-case.

In Drupal, you can create content types clicking through the interface in Drupal 6 or 7. As far as I can see in WP3, you have to script it. A few clicks vs scripting, the choice for me is not hard there. The first way is a lot more efficient, and a task you can hand off to a non coder to get done.

You don't HAVE to use Views to display content.

You -can- use Views to make the display of content easier, by telling Drupal to gather data and provide a Page, Block, or Feed to display . This lets you create specific sections of content for areas of the site. Otherwise, you would have to create a node, and hijack its template, run a direct sql query yourself AND write the pager functions just to show something easy like the latest 10 "Press Releases" content type. Then, if someone added a new field to that content type, you have to update all that SQL code and display code. Views makes your life easier in that respect. In minutes you can flesh out site sections and arrange content in a myriad of ways. In Wordpress, this method of arranging content without functionality of Views is/was a modern nightmare and a reason I do not want to use it at all unless its a blog and nothing more.

The Drupal Support Forum is tricky. Not all modules are as active as say, Views or Pathauto (being two of the most popular modules). However, SO is also at your disposal. I answer a lot of Drupal questions here. The trick to the Forum there is you have to ask it in the right spot. True, sometimes you may have to wait a few days to get an answer, then again no one -owes- you an answer for a free product. Thats the nature of open source.

Every developer has their favorite modules to use with Drupal, and more often than not, its the same 20 or so modules. It depends on what you are doing, what you are trying to implement. It's not that 'everything needs a module' its that Drupal is such a vanilla install because Drupal does not want to assume your purpose nor overwhelm with options. The UX is something they are trying to improve anyway, and popular modules are making their way into core.

Answer 3

All of the popular CMS products (I'd maybe add Expression Engine to the mix) are great for 80% of what you want to accomplish and a huge pain to handle the other 20%.

That's just the nature of the beast.

On the plus side, it's OS so there's lots of people hacking away at it just like you which opens up the potential for someone else already having invented the wheel.

And with bulky enterprise CM solutions like SharePoint I find that you have to reverse the equation to 20/80 (ugh!).

Answer 4

If you're discouraged with Drupal and prefer to stick with WP, WordPress has many thousands of plugins, including ones that can overcome the limitations you're running into and make WP behave more like a normal CMS.

Just do a Google search for "top Wordpress CMS plugins." There's a lot of articles out there that can recommend ways to get WP to do exactly what you want.

Answer 5

"After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment."

Well, my intiial reaction is that this is what you're going to feel like you're doing when you're working with Drupal 7, which isn't out of alpha yet. A good number of the folks who maintain modules haven't started upgrading to 7 yet, and that means that you're missing out on one of the great features of Drupal, which is it's wide and deep space of premade modules.

Try 6.

Do you need to use views to display all content? No, not at all. You can go in, create a new module, and write the sql and presentation that you want. Or you can find a module that will display things for you. Or, depending, you might be able to get the effect you want just by adjusting the theme you're using.

(As a side note, using an admin theme really pretties up the Drupal experience. I'm fond of rootcandy, although Rubik is nice too. Problem with Rubik is that it's not on drupal.org.)

The strength of Drupal is that by using modules, you don't have to re-write code that someone else has written - you can instead take that code and modify it (with hooks) to do what you want. This means you don't have to write an authentication/autherization system again - it's there in core. You don't need to write up openid handlers - it's in core. You don't need to write code to integrate with twitter directly - there's a module that contains an api that helps out. You don't have to write an xmlrpc server from scratch - you can use the services module.

You don't need to write a website from scratch. Instead, you can start with Drupal, add most of the functionality you need, and then spend your time making it fit what your client wants.

Answer 6

Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So... I have recently started using Drupal 7

Why not go back to CI? Drupal certainly has it's strengths, but I don't think Drupal will give you any more "control and flexibility" than Wordpress.

If the standard modules/plugins, themes/templates, from WP, Drupal, or Joomla, fill your needs, then using a CMS can be a lot faster than building a site from scratch. But, if those CMSs do not fill your needs, you could find yourself "fighting the framework" and never really getting what you want.