My Drupal Disappointment

I recently posted about an article on Linux.com that posed the question: which is better, Drupal or WordPress? I have spent the time since testing Drupal out, and decided to share my thoughts with you.

What? You don’t think I just suggest software and not try it out, do you? Rest assured, if I suggest software, I am going to be kicking around under the hood!

Drupal is a good solution for certain things. Not so good for others. If you are not a web developer, you might prefer to find a different Content Management System(s) (CMS) unless you won’t mind putting in several weeks or even months to learn it.

After many nights and many more days of trying to get Drupal to work the way I want a CMS to work rather than the way its developers think I should, I decided to scrap it as the CMS of choice for the project I had in mind for it. It was just way too much hassle and headache for what are normally simple things.

I Want To Work How I Like To Work

Too many CMS are still trapped in outdated notions of pre-formatted code blocks right out of the box, which are often sloppily coded. Drupal is not sloppily coded, but the defaults in most templates and in the code blocks themselves have way too much nested DIV tags to meet my personal criteria. You could spend days just eliminating bloat from most CMS and Drupal is—sadly—no exception.

One day, CMS developers will create a default administration panel and settings that make sense to those they supposedly are targeting—non-technical users. The fact that many CMS don’t just goes to show the failure of information architecture and usability that plague so many such projects. Drupal is powerful, and versatile, but expect many weeks or months learning its inner workings.

Most irritating of all, disconcerting really, is administering your site and then having it launch the website’s template for what task you’re doing in what should be the back-end administration panel of the CMS. That actually pissed me off quite regularly.

I used it once way back and left it alone for the same reason I leave most CMS behind. I don’t want to insert dynamic variables into my template and then have to reverse engineer a half dozen style declarations to work with MY design. Give me raw data. Not someone else’s idea of how things should be coded (which is always far too sloppy and uncomfortable in almost every CMS for my tastes).

Difficulty Looms For All But Developers And Programmers

But hey, I’m not a programmer or I would do it myself. I consider myself a pretty good usability judge, having reviewed software and authored an IT column and having a formal ebusiness education. I can script in PHP a bit and fiddle around with REBOL code, can do good things with CSS and a graphics editor and I can design, cable and set up a network (or wireless one). I also have patience and often spend 12 to 16 hours at a time fooling with code or putting some application through its paces. I’ve tried out two dozen or more different CMS to date.

If I have trouble making use of a CMS or find myself frustrated at the way one works, I know that pretty much everyone else who is a non-programmer will be as well. It is not that I couldn’t figure it out. I was doing a good job of it and had a site up and running. It was just a pain in the rear and way more effort than I wanted to put out to get it doing things I wanted.

For one, it limited the navigation scheme I had in mind for the site. Not good.

Smart ebusiness says don’t re-invent the wheel. If good, stable and usable code already exists, make use of it. Still, I have been slowly piecing together some code for my own CMS out of frustration. It will never see light of day in public, but I will use it if I can find no suitable alternative. Who knows, I may just polish up on programming and fork a CMS myself.

Still Searching For A Great CMS

I wouldn’t mind hooking up with a few coders if I could take the reins of the project and direct the user-interface and just have them work on getting the functionality down. That’s unlikely to happen, and just as well. I have more than enough to do as it is. Last thing I need is another project.

I intend to go back for another try of the MODx CMS, as it is one of the better ones I have tried in the past. It was pleasant to work with compared with Drupal, but it was not easy to get a blog working in previous versions. Maybe that’s changed.

I also intend to take the Campsite CMS out for a spin. Currently, I’m trying out sNews which is an interesting little CMS. It consists of “one file” according to the website but there are actually two files involved—index.php and snews.php. That’s right, that’s it. A style sheet and your images round it all out.

If you have used a CMS consisting of 20 directories and hundreds of files, you can appreciate the elegance of simplicity. Check out sNews and let me know what you think. I’ve already installed it and am testing it out. There is a growing community supporting it and lots of mods and add-ons are already available. Best of all, if your good with XHTML and CSS, you won’t spend weeks getting it to work.

In fact, I used phpMyAdmin to empty out the MySQL database previously occupied by Drupal, tweaked an .htaccess file and had it installed with a site template up and running in about 15 minutes.

Drupal is powerful, don’t get me wrong. If you’re building an ecommerce or other complicated site and need an industrial strength CMS, check it out. If you are considering moving from WordPress to Drupal just for blogging, forget it. It will eat up valuable time, frustrate, and not offer much in the way of advantages.