If you don’t mind me ranting a little, because I have been thinking about this a lot, since I heard that announcement. Drupal’s success I believe is due to two things:
1) Drupal is venerable. It pre-dates the "MVC framework era" and Wordpress. When I first started learning about PHP OO and web app architecture in 2002-03, Drupal was establishing itself well in Europe, with the tagline "community plumbing". I never picked it up and ran with it, because the user logins were a nightmare, every install seemed to break in a slightly different way (I am not discounting the fact of my own incompetence here). Yet Drupal did work, even in a broken way. The alternative PHP frameworks at this time did not work at all - they were hellish and pathologically complicated, mostly clones of Java/Jakarta Struts. The only alternative was procedural insanity (Fusebox, anyone?) Drupal was simply easier to hack and butcher to get results out of. 2) Drupal has more structure than Wordpress. In fact, Drupal’s architecture is subtle and quite clever. The concept of hooks is incredibly extensible, and what it lacks in cohesion/separation of concerns and encapsulation, it more than makes up for in flexibility for a huge variety of community website scenarios. For a long time, you could straight-away tell a Drupal website from the generic layout and modules on the page, but eventually people figured out how to really push the HTML and customization side of it, and that's no longer true of Drupal websites today. I don’t doubt that Drupal and Wordpress are the two most successful PHP products/applications out there. Or have I missed something? - Mark --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
