Hi all, I'm happy to weigh in on the Drupal discussion (slightly heavier after today's sushi).
I can echo some of the points Mark made earlier. Drupal is a lot looser than some other MVC type frameworks and the earlier versions were buggy as well (this was early version OSS we're talking about). I didn't have much to do with it until the start of this year. The organisation I work for uses Drupal almost exclusively. ( These are Drupal sites: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/ , http://vietnamwar.govt.nz/ ) I was heavily involved of the build of this one: http://www.28maoribattalion.org.nz/ This one recently went from MS CMS to Drupal: http://www.teara.govt.nz/ These are (mostly) large, content heavy sites with some community functions - all of which leverage off Drupal's extensibility and out of the box functionality. When we built the Maori Battalion site I was blown away by how much bang we got out of the box - we literally built one or two extra small modules and the rest was either there or available as a stable module someone else had built. This site went from visual design to a going concern in around 2 months while two developers still got to do our business-as-usual alongside. This simply wouldn't be possible in the same timeframe by hand-rolled code - no matter what quality of developer you were. We may understand outr own code more, but all we get is one persons' way of doing things. Projects like Drupal allow you to leverage the work and brains of tens or hundreds of people all smarter than you or I - it doesn't really make business sense to NOT do this. Drupal has reached a bit of a critical mass (IMO) because: - It's become more stable and the install process is far, far better - the community (especially the available modules) are huge - extensibility is built in and dead easy - you can do a massive amount with absolutely zero programming experience - the admin interface for content editors is pretty simple to use - the node-based content model lets you mix and match content of any type with a massive amount of flexibility Caveats - There is more than one "way" to do things in Drupal, which often leaves you hunting through views, panels, templatres and modules to find out 'just where the hell is that piece of code' - The learning curve is steep (similar to "getting" OOP in my opinion - once the penny drops, it drops) - Drupal is DB heavy for logged in users. Built in caching for anonymous users is good (maybe not as good as SilverStripe though?) but if you're looking at building in a lot of registered user action on a high traffic site, expect to do some optimisation (or see your db server throw up its hands in despair). Just my 2c, Paul --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
