Well, the site that I ported to Drupal recently is coming together really nicely. Everything that I ask of Drupal is easily and quickly setup and configured. As I become more experienced with it the lack of polish compared with my old friend Wordpress is a constant irritant, but it can do so much more that I shouldn’t really complain.
One of the things that is making me write this is that the Drupal community is discussing the path to Drupal 5.0. There is a definate call from the experienced and established user base to slow down development and tidy up what is there. I concur. There are a few main issues that mar Drupal when compared with a product like Wordpress.
First, nothing is quite finished. Configuration options for modules seem very arbitrary, and are clearly those that crossed the mind of the developer as the module was created, and not really explored through a range of real world circumstances. Typically there appears to be an initial build and flurry of bug fixes and then a module seems to go into maintenance. Some commonly used modules are very featured, other less common ones seem to be written to do a job for the developer and then frozen. Take the Ping module – it pings pingomatic. Thats it, no parameters to ping anywhere else – of course its not too hard to change the program, so it seems there there is a consensus that there is no need to make it simpler to use.
Secondly its a little scrapy. The admin interface uses the current theme which is often totally inappropriate for the job in hand. Some tables are too wide for the theme I use, so everything gets a bit jumbled on the screen. The admin interface is all over the place, some items are under settings, some under the main menu, others attached to a configure option within another page. Sometimes I remember there is a feature, but have a bit of hunting to find it.
Too many important (so I think) features are only available as contributor CVS modules, the core is quite light in comparison. A good example here are RSS feeds, a limited support is in core and a contrib module extends it. But the contrib modules are working in an area of rich competition so there can be several alternatives, none of which are at production quality – a good example of this is rich text editors, of which I still haven’t found a satisfactory solution. Wordpress’ is simple but functional, Drupal core doesn’t really have one (you write the html), and there are at least 4 contrib rich text editors. If any of these worked perfectly it would blow Wordpress’ away but they don’t, unfortunately.
I, personally, haven’t been too effected by bugs, but perusing the forums on a daily basis it is apparent that there are still far too many niggling production bugs effecting a lot of people trying to get started. To be fair, Wordpress seems to suffer in this department too, so this is a good oppurtunity to take a lead ;-)
After using Wordpress I was a little dissapointed in the theme availablity of Drupal. A dozen or so, most of which are simple blocky forms. Not very creative (I wish I could contribute here, but I’m not that artistic). Maybe the old theme engines were too tricky, but the php-template engine looks similar to Wordpress so may be we’ll see this change soon. I would imagine that the Drupal community is still too programmer biased, once a large community of users form then maybe the artistic types will join in. Some incentive like a theme competition may help – it certainly did for Wordpress.
It wouldn’t be fair to list the minor gripes without listing some of the great features. The concept of everything being a node, whether is is a story, news article, blog entry, software issue, etc. is fantastic. I can promote a forum entry to the front page, open comments on a story the mix and match is flawless.
The Taxonomy module is slightly confusing at first, but once the penny drops makes it possible to build such comprehensive and interconnected sites that I would vote it the most significant part of Drupal. Everyone else has categories, categories are just the tip of an iceberg which taxonomy shows us the fullness of.
Blocks are a very neat idea, with the ability to make them context sensitive almost genius. This feature allows the web designer to decide what appears in the side bars and dictate the order of them. The modules expose standard blocks, and a programmer can write their own, on the fly in the admin interface. It would be nice to see more modules having a range of available supporting blocks.
My conclusion is still that Drupal is a fantastic piece of software, especially for an integrated web site with several facets such as news, blogs, forums, issue management, etc, etc. But, if the creators want to seriously compete they have to stop worrying about the next new shiny feature and get the core polished and as close to flawless as they can.
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