The Cons

Now, before I list my thoughts about Drupal, please keep in mind that I am currently standing at about 2 weeks of experience working with it. At work, we have been evaluating different systems to broaden our array of tools at our disposal, and Drupal is currently in place for a website project at hand. The main gripe that I currently have with Drupal is that I feel like one thing requires far too many steps to get the end result. I understand that it has a steep learning curve and that at least a moderate understanding of PHP is required, but on the other hand content management systems are intended to make a designer/developer’s life easier when it comes to deploying websites. I feel like this isn’t the case when it comes to Drupal.

Today I found myself repeatedly referring to the manual to do something that, from my CMS experience, tends to be extremely simple. I was basically wanting to create a simple contact form and embed it into a contact page that I had created prior. I found myself lost in a maze of confusion. Drupal comes with a generic contact form out-of-box, but getting that contact form onto a page that you’ve already created was another story. By default, the standard Drupal contact form is placed on a page with the alias “contact” which is disabled. Enabling it allows you to navigate to the form via “/contact” but making your current contact page point to that form was the equivalent of pulling teeth.

Another instance of utter confusion came when I wanted to implement a simple image gallery comprised of clickable thumbnails. I came across various methods, some of which were referred to as “hacks” even, and all of them seemed far too involved to even be remotely labeled as content management of any sort. The entire image gallery concept just seems vague as a whole when it comes to Drupal. One person says to use CCK and avoid Drupal’s built in galleries and images toolkit, and another one says to use the aforementioned toolkit that is bundled with the core installation. Another one says to use Taxonomy, which from my first impression seems really involved and powerful, but on the same note it seems extremely cumbersome for something as simple as a thumbnail gallery.

One of the main things I have an issue with is that the back-end isn’t exactly the most user-friendly interface I’ve come across in the CMS pool. Every web designer out there has dealt with the client that is absolutely the epitome of clueless when it comes to computers, let alone dynamic content driven websites. Expect to charge your client endless hours of consulting when it comes time to deploy and walk them through the content updating portion of their web journey into internet land.

Before even considering Drupal for your next project, keep in mind that there is quite a learning curve and prior PHP knowledge is a must. Without it, you’ll surely find yourself in an endless spiral of modular, taxonomized confusion.

The Pros

Although my views may be somewhat skewed due to my vested love for CMSMS, I know power when I see it. Drupal presents an endless array of possibilities and power, as well as a huge community of programmers and users. One of the things I found to be enticing was the fact that it allows the user to run multiple sites from one admin interface. With a little ingenuity, it’s possible. This is a prime feature that I’ve been looking at for upcoming projects.

Another thing that seemed to be straight-forward and simple enough was templating for the front end UI. Although Drupal uses PHP tags and calls to variables as opposed to the Smarty template that I know and love (because it works well for dummies and it’s quick), the templating is easy to setup and implement.

Final Thoughts

Would I use Drupal for future projects at the moment? Probably not. But that’s not to say I would never consider it in a future project. Drupal offers endless amounts of scalability and is very modular, but deployment is a lot more cumbersome and bloated than I think it should be. Keep in mind, if I were a PHP programmer, I’m sure my mindframe would be entirely different. I would probably have no hurdles when it came to digging into the modules and codebase at hand and having at it.

I really wish I could find more pros to Drupal at this point but I’m really at a loss. This may also be because my frustration level with it before leaving work today was at an alltime peak. I will be working on it for the next month or so and will keep an up-to-date blog on my trials and tribulations.