Thread

Never used Drupal before, but know plenty of people do. Any thoughts on the new version just released?

I saw that but I don’t know much about it until I install it.  The usual issues/questions remain though.

Will the security be better than it has been in the past? Probably not.

No official pro support for those who need it.

If you are comparing, you will have to see how it stacks up against EE 2.x very soon.

A lot of the updates seem to be Ajax fluff which seems to be more of a theme addition than anything.  I really don’t care about that stuff.

Have they really improved the template system?  There are a lot of mentioned changes to theming but I don’t know that it has really become easier to work with.  This has always been my biggest problem with Drupal.  The last I played with it was pre 5.0 and the theme system was horrid.  I hated the blocks system and I see they are still being used in the current version. 

On a side note, Joomla also recently shipped 1.5.x and it is just as crappy as the older version.  I would expect Drupal to be much the same.

Either way, I don’t care.  The web frameworks are so good out there that I would rather build my own system than use a crappy CMS like Drupal or Joomla.  So I use CodeIgniter for mine and ExpressionEngine for everyone else.  Granted, not everyone has the time to roll their own but as a developer it is kind of up my alley.

Well, well, I think you may have strong opinions on the matter! Just wondering if anything “new” was happening over there. So many version numbers, so many seemingly identical screen shots. I’m not planning to convert or anything. Already drank the EE kool-aid. Just wondering. And…

Granted, not everyone has the time to roll their own but as a developer it is kind of up my alley.

You can say that again. For all the players in the CMS space, none have really gotten to the point where they can be flexible and powerful, but offer quick development/a user-friendly backend. Obviously EE does the former really really well, but as a result can struggle with the latter. WordPress has some strong points in the latter, but limitations in the former. NOT that I want to revisist THAT debate, people.

I’m always looking to see if one “killer” CMS develops really strong on both ends… I’m not aware of one. I doubt Drupal could ever be it. In fact, that killer ideal may be a practical impossibility. As a non-programmer, I wouldn’t know. But hey, a guy can dream, right? And wonder if other CMSs have interesting stuff happening, be the overall product weak or not.

Note:  I refer mostly to Joomla in this post but they are very similar and have many of the same problems. 

I only have strong opinions on the matter because of the amount of blood sweat and tears that had gone into it at one time.  I now spend a considerable amount of time working on Joomla for a client and I don’t enjoy the experience.  Actually, the time spent in Drupal was with the same client, so I have been doing development work for this person for quite some time.  We first evaluated Drupal and then moved to Mambo and later to Joomla (Joomla splintered off from Mambo.)  I hate them both but we found Joomla to be better than Drupal at the time.  So I can’t say that I don’t get usage out of these systems just because I don’t like them (my client loves and feels comfortable in Joomla so that is what I must use also.)

One of the things that I really hate about open source CMS’s which rely heavily on community contributions is the security problems.  Joomla is largely just a shell without 3rd party contributions and many of these contributions are built by hobbyists or unexperienced developers.  That means you often get a lot of bugs and security holes.  Joomla itself sees its fair share of security problems, now imagine having these same problems continuously for every major add-on to the system.  Now imagine that your client in turn has many of his own clients and you are tasked with keeping these things up to date because if you don’t they will get exploited (and they have.)

Another problem is that a community developer can create an add-on in any way he/she sees fit.  They don’t always follow best practices or build the things to be easily upgraded.  The closest equivalent for ExpressionEngine is building modules which rely on extensions.  This would be fine for a good developer on a solid system but in the Joomla community these add-ons can get really hairy.  I have worked on systems my client has built with mazes of dependencies, hacks and other trickery that made the app so temperamental that I was afraid to breathe on it.

Because of these problems we have been working on a base CMS in CodeIgniter which we can use for certain sites which do not require the larger community add-ons that would take us forever to recreate.  You might be surprised how many people take this route.  With Django and Rails so popular these days, the in house developed CMS is becoming a quite popular option. 

However, I suppose you could argue that a web framework is close to being a CMS right out of the box.  ExpressionEngine is also a web framework.  There is actually not a lot of ground separating the two.  You just have to evaluate which is the best usage of resources for your needs.  If the app violates the ExpressionEngine license then you have little choice. 

One reason why I prefer EE over Drupal and Joomla is that the developers are accountable for the code they release.  If they were to dirty their security record too often then their customers would lose trust in the Ellislab products and the company would lose sales.  Many of the community additions to Joomla are available in the base EE installation with the same quality as the rest of the system (forums, blogging, etc.)  EE could develop the same sorts of problems from 3rd party additions but because Ellislab already offers so much there is less reliance on the community to solve the most common problems. 

Wow, this turned out kind of long.  😉

John hit a lot of points dead on.

It’s also been my experience that theming Drupal was ridiculously unpleasant, and I consider myself to be an advanced front-end developer.

Aside from being hard for me to theme, the other problem was Drupal’s speed.  If you install just the Drupal core, you’re ok.  But, once you start adding on modules, and those modules require more modules and so on and so on, your database starts taking quite a hit.  Not taking anything away from Drupal developers, but I’ve often thought that module development was more about just doing something cool rather than doing something that both works well, is elegantly put together and is cool.

I abandoned a Drupal project mid-stream to come over to the EE world, and I’ve not looked back.  Actually, if you check my posting history, you can see my first post which was asking about all kinds of EE vs. Drupal things.

I hate Drupal. I got a site developed by a Drupal expert (my pre-CMS days!) and 2 years on, I still can’t figure out how to change the year in the footer.

Yuk.

I probably shouldn’t be dishing out Drupal help here, but if you’ve used the drupal “regions” in your template (and you can change the text for your footer via the admin rather than having to do it via editing code), you should be able to allow php to be used in the footer.  Then, you can do something like this:

<?= date("Y"); ?>

That *should* work, unless things have changed since I last played around with it.

Can’t resist the impulse to add some negativity. 😊

Agree with John on the Drupal end.  Though I haven’t viewed it in depth since version 5 I was not impressed and it made my life as a developer a terrible pain in the neck.  Joomlia I haven’t used myself but I know they have some kinship in regards to how they got their start.

Jamie

I have to agree on the general Drupal consensus.  Both from a developer and a designer end. just getting a basic site up and running with some custom templates can be a royal pain.  My designers prefer to use shrimp forks to poke out their eyes after trying to change something in Drupal ;-}

So far, I haven’t come close to exhausting the capabilities available in EE and with more and more add ons on the horizon it looks like it should be a good long while!

I have some test installs of Joomla too, but have had it crash after installing some add ons.

The only major thing missing from EE at an enterprise level so far is LDAP authentication.

James