Engwar

Chintana Wilamuna's weblog

Compromises

October 5, 2009 by Chintana

Lack of a coherent essay these days can partly be blamed to the rise of the tablogging. Then again, striking a balance between a tech, utterly abstract mumbo jumbo or something explicit as a Tucker Max story is challenging ;-) There’s no better way to start a Monday morning with a hilarious rant about Drupal. Despite the mild headache, tis gonna be a good day!

I agree with some of the comments by the author. Yes, it’s not the easiest to configure and maintain. If you ignore some best practices you’re really screwed. If this configuration problem refers to specific module configurations, yes, I’ve seen numerous people gripe about that.

3rd party modules are there so that the core can be clean and simple. This extensibility, IMO a very good thing. Coding a custom CMS in Rails doesn’t seem sexy to me. It’s a really boring thing to code a CMS these days regardless of the language. There are enough free CMSes out there that work 95% of the time. The remaining 5% is not worth coding a new CMS from scratch.

Yes, Drupal views are stored in the database. For me, that’s the easiest and logical place to store this. I think if the file system was used, this feature would’ve been much slower given its dynamic nature.

Again, I agree with that the usability sucks. It can be improved.

The comment about the use of structured programming instead of OOP is nonsense. Drupal framework implement a hooks system that you can hook up a user defined function practically anywhere. For the programmer that’s sufficient to get the job done. Dissing the whole framework because of OOP fanboyism is stupid.

A particular software tool might not be able to do everything that we dream of doing. However, compared with a proprietary program, the user has a choice of choosing something which matches closely with his requirements. As Paul puts it, it’s like an arranged marriage vs. dating. Cool thing is, if you need a particular feature so badly you can pay someone and get it done the way you want it. Reality has it, even if it’s arranged vs. dated for couple of years, after getting married you can’t live together if you’re not able to make compromises. So I’ve been told.

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  • http://www.soundofcode.com Lahiru

    Nice post. agree that there has to be compromises. referring to CMSs dunno about married life though. ;)

  • fred

    The biggest problem with Drupal is its performance, with Drupal it is fairly common for a single web page to require several hundred (even over a thousand) database queries, even bog standard pages with virtually nothing on them require 50 or so, as a developer I find this astounding.

    And as for the huge amounts of memory Drupal manages to eat up…

    Why anyone who is a halfway decent programmer would want to carry on with Drupal after “dating” it, is a mystery.

  • http://engwar.com/ Chintana

    Fred, true that. Agreed. But when it comes to implementing a solution very quickly I find Drupal/Wordpress a good enough choice. I’ve been involved with couple of sites running Drupal and WordPress having a moderate amount of traffic and haven’t had any problems.

    One other aspect of Drupal/Wordpress is that the code-base is actively tested by a large user community. True, someone can probably do better in terms of optimizing SQL queries. For people having not enough time to write AND test all aspects of a CMS just to get a website up and running, those are good choices, IMO.

  • http://findmesomeone.org/ Cythia Bamber

    Hi – It’s good to read such topical stuff on the Web as I have been able to discover here. I agree with most of what is written here and I’ll be returning to this website again. Thanks again for publishing such great reading material!!