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Drupal core forum combined with the advanced forum will meet your requirements. We used this approach for IFC, see it here.

Drupal core forum combined with the advanced forum will meet your requirements. We used this approach for IFC, see it here.

Actually, I never said their format is bad; just that mine is better; in many ways, mostly for my own purposes. It has virtually nothing to do with K&R indenting, which was actually invented in the early days of C, when file size was a much bigger issue than it is now.

You see, I write plugins for all three of the "big" CMSes (Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla).

I use a common base class, and about 90% of the code is completely cross-coded. It's a sort of "M-V/C" pattern, with the C and V being mixed up a lot. It's an outstanding way to generate extremely robust and high-quality UX across systems. I've been doing it for a long time, and in many different languages.

I won't rewrite all the code used in the other plugins, just to please one set of folks. They have every right to enforce a common style, and I have every right to release mine on GitHub. The Drupal folks are geekier than most, so fetching the plugin from elsewhere isn't a big deal. It would be more of a big deal for the WordPress crowd or the Joomla crowd.

As I said, it really is all about personal style. However, in all my years of coding, one thing that I have learned, is that geeks LOVE to say "you were wrong", so I'm glad I was able to provide that service for you.

Cheers!

I'm an aspie, and I can work with dozens of styles.

However, I do have to fight urges to reformat the code...

I prefer Whitesmiths indenting. In over 30 years of coding, I've never gotten used to K&R indenting.

I have gotten used to long, descriptive method, class and data member names, although I don't believe that a lot of "self documenting" code actually is.

It is important to have consistency; not just for others, but also for ourselves. Come back to your code in six months, and try and make heads or tails of it.

Drupal won't let me add my plugins to their repository because it doesn't use the same coding conventions they prescribe, even though my style basically far exceeds theirs.

<shrug />

Their loss (but they won't roll up the project from it)

Doesn't matter how many times I check my writing, the moment I post, I discover something wrong. :-(

"And there's a huge amount of documentation at " http://drupal.org/documentation.

Drupal has a module to do this to put trolls in their own "cave"

http://drupal.org/project/cave

varnish + expire on drupal 7 (or pressflow 6) integrates with drupal as well as boost does.

Since all the sites run on separate databases, you need to go around to each website & configure modules, change the same settings over & over again, etc.

That's what features is for

If you're not making your photo gallery with Views, you're doing it wrong. And it's been done with Views for a long time.

That looks interesting but incomplete: galleries? access control? only displays single column? Also, it's written for D4, so likely in need of revision.

Create an image gallery using CCK and Views is more promising.

However, I have no interest in converting a couple dozen photo albums to some other format, hence I'm stuck at D6, and may well move to ZenPhoto if I must migrate. The photo site hasn't had new albums created in at least a year, and probably no photos added since last summer; it's gone mostly inactive.

And Misery? You can't seriously be using a module that has only 123 users (at time of posting) and complain about lack of support!

Note that I wasn't complaining. I also probably shouldn't have used "rely" -- they were hobby projects that, once found by spammers, became honey pots -- I make them suffer Misery so they don't spam everyone else.

Finally, Drupal 8 isn't there yet at all, and may be released in August next year.

I'm curious if there will be any API changes between D7 & D8?

Drupal 7 is already more popular than Drupal 6, your personal opinion notwithstanding. http://drupal.org/project/usage/drupal

Well, so it is.

Personally, I mostly rely on Photo Album, which is now abandoned, so cannot upgrade my multi-site installation. I've considered moving to ZenPhoto instead but frankly can't be bothered.

Most of my sites also rely on Misery, which may finally move to D7.

Finally, "And now they're on to Drupal 8".

I've only dabbled with it to date, but I spend a lot of time working as a Drupal developer so my understanding of it is decent. It is Drupal server software; what is called a 'distribution' of Drupal, or a flavor. If Drupal were Lego, then those 'Boeing 747 Lego-thangs' would be like a specialized Lego 'distribution' akin to one derived from Drupal; and released as open-source.

I hadn't really thought about it, but it is probably more like Google Reader than iGoogle when you really think about it. Also, like I read later in the thread NetVibes might make a better, more-close-to-iGoogle replacement. Still, for tinkerers Managing News is kinda neat.

Feed sources come from whatever RSS feeds you input. I don't think it comes with any, or if it does, they are *minimal*. As I recall it is super easy to allow it to use Google/ Gmaps to do a little geolocation of the news articles, so you can look at a pinpoint display, to see I don't know, trending airplane crashes or something.

If you wanted to re-publish some of the collected feed-nodes by editing and publishing it yourself, then MN becomes more valuable.

There's a Drupal module (that is not difficult to add), which recreates the little iGoogle squares. Oh wow, I haven't seen this in ages, it looks perfect. It is called HomeBox. https://drupal.org/project/homebox. Now I think you're ready to provide your own cloud solution which competes against both iGoogle and NetVibes. Well, NetVibes *is* pretty slick, so you'll need to pour some elbow grease into, but you've got a good start I think.

Find an awesome framework that a) follows a coding philosophy you believe in, and b) is maintained by a thriving community of good people.

The language that software is written in can change, but the quality of the code will always be based on who is writing it.

This article, Frameworks Round-Up: When To Use, How To Choose..., looks appropriate.
I will honorably mention my own favorite, Drupal.

Find an awesome framework that a) follows a coding philosophy you believe in, and b) is maintained by a thriving community of good people.

The language that software is written in can change, but the quality of the code will always be based on who is writing it.

This article, Frameworks Round-Up: When To Use, How To Choose..., looks appropriate.
I will honorably mention my own favorite, Drupal.

Fixing my last 2 links:
Views
Panels

Fixing my last 2 links:
Views
Panels

Drupal [...] does not follow any form of modern best practices.

No it doesn't. Which is why they enforce security best practices - which are facilitated by api functions like filter_xss, MVC design (even in contrib modules), strict coding standards and a move to OOP, amongst other things I haven't mentioned. No best pratices AT ALL there...

What retard thought "caching" means sticking giant serialized PHP objects into MySQL?

If that was such an issue, why not open an issue about it, like others have done? Had you done that, you would additionally understand why the default caching backend was written like that. You should also know that one can write their own caching backend in D7, because of its OOP design. One could imagine that different database servers (Drupal doesn't just support MySQL) behave differently and can't always be treated the same.

And copying Linux Kernel modules in PHP is the most fucked up thing ever.

Care to explain WTH you're on about here?

Out of the box, it looks like shit from 1998, and it's incredibly difficult to customize in any real way.

Just because you're incredibly incompetent doesn't mean that Drupal is incredibly hard to customize. While it's true that UX hasn't been one of Drupal's primary concerns, recently a dedicated UX team was formed to address this. Take a look at the D7UX and D8UX initiatives for example. Also, there's a whole bunch of third party modules to extend Drupal's functionality, great template frameworks like AT, Omega, Fusion and the older but still progressing Zen. All of it hosted on Drupal.org
And please give me good alternatives to Drupal modules like Fields (core), Views and Panels - to name a few - in any other CMS/CMF. Good luck with that one.

The problem is that people have been working with so long that it has perverted their brains.

The problem is that your short-sightedness is perverting your brain and your blaming someone else.

Drupal [...] does not follow any form of modern best practices.

No it doesn't. Which is why they enforce security best practices - which are facilitated by api functions like filter_xss, MVC design (even in contrib modules), strict coding standards and a move to OOP, amongst other things I haven't mentioned. No best pratices AT ALL there...

What retard thought "caching" means sticking giant serialized PHP objects into MySQL?

If that was such an issue, why not open an issue about it, like others have done? Had you done that, you would additionally understand why the default caching backend was written like that. You should also know that one can write their own caching backend in D7, because of its OOP design. One could imagine that different database servers (Drupal doesn't just support MySQL) behave differently and can't always be treated the same.

And copying Linux Kernel modules in PHP is the most fucked up thing ever.

Care to explain WTH you're on about here?

Out of the box, it looks like shit from 1998, and it's incredibly difficult to customize in any real way.

Just because you're incredibly incompetent doesn't mean that Drupal is incredibly hard to customize. While it's true that UX hasn't been one of Drupal's primary concerns, recently a dedicated UX team was formed to address this. Take a look at the D7UX and D8UX initiatives for example. Also, there's a whole bunch of third party modules to extend Drupal's functionality, great template frameworks like AT, Omega, Fusion and the older but still progressing Zen. All of it hosted on Drupal.org
And please give me good alternatives to Drupal modules like Fields (core), Views and Panels - to name a few - in any other CMS/CMF. Good luck with that one.

The problem is that people have been working with so long that it has perverted their brains.

The problem is that your short-sightedness is perverting your brain and your blaming someone else.

Drupal [...] does not follow any form of modern best practices.

No it doesn't. Which is why they enforce security best practices - which are facilitated by api functions like filter_xss, MVC design (even in contrib modules), strict coding standards and a move to OOP, amongst other things I haven't mentioned. No best pratices AT ALL there...

What retard thought "caching" means sticking giant serialized PHP objects into MySQL?

If that was such an issue, why not open an issue about it, like others have done? Had you done that, you would additionally understand why the default caching backend was written like that. You should also know that one can write their own caching backend in D7, because of its OOP design. One could imagine that different database servers (Drupal doesn't just support MySQL) behave differently and can't always be treated the same.

And copying Linux Kernel modules in PHP is the most fucked up thing ever.

Care to explain WTH you're on about here?

Out of the box, it looks like shit from 1998, and it's incredibly difficult to customize in any real way.

Just because you're incredibly incompetent doesn't mean that Drupal is incredibly hard to customize. While it's true that UX hasn't been one of Drupal's primary concerns, recently a dedicated UX team was formed to address this. Take a look at the D7UX and D8UX initiatives for example. Also, there's a whole bunch of third party modules to extend Drupal's functionality, great template frameworks like AT, Omega, Fusion and the older but still progressing Zen. All of it hosted on Drupal.org
And please give me good alternatives to Drupal modules like Fields (core), Views and Panels - to name a few - in any other CMS/CMF. Good luck with that one.

The problem is that people have been working with so long that it has perverted their brains.

The problem is that your short-sightedness is perverting your brain and your blaming someone else.

Drupal [...] does not follow any form of modern best practices.

No it doesn't. Which is why they enforce security best practices - which are facilitated by api functions like filter_xss, MVC design (even in contrib modules), strict coding standards and a move to OOP, amongst other things I haven't mentioned. No best pratices AT ALL there...

What retard thought "caching" means sticking giant serialized PHP objects into MySQL?

If that was such an issue, why not open an issue about it, like others have done? Had you done that, you would additionally understand why the default caching backend was written like that. You should also know that one can write their own caching backend in D7, because of its OOP design. One could imagine that different database servers (Drupal doesn't just support MySQL) behave differently and can't always be treated the same.

And copying Linux Kernel modules in PHP is the most fucked up thing ever.

Care to explain WTH you're on about here?

Out of the box, it looks like shit from 1998, and it's incredibly difficult to customize in any real way.

Just because you're incredibly incompetent doesn't mean that Drupal is incredibly hard to customize. While it's true that UX hasn't been one of Drupal's primary concerns, recently a dedicated UX team was formed to address this. Take a look at the D7UX and D8UX initiatives for example. Also, there's a whole bunch of third party modules to extend Drupal's functionality, great template frameworks like AT, Omega, Fusion and the older but still progressing Zen. All of it hosted on Drupal.org
And please give me good alternatives to Drupal modules like Fields (core), Views and Panels - to name a few - in any other CMS/CMF. Good luck with that one.

The problem is that people have been working with so long that it has perverted their brains.

The problem is that your short-sightedness is perverting your brain and your blaming someone else.

Drupal [...] does not follow any form of modern best practices.

No it doesn't. Which is why they enforce security best practices - which are facilitated by api functions like filter_xss, MVC design (even in contrib modules), strict coding standards and a move to OOP, amongst other things I haven't mentioned. No best pratices AT ALL there...

What retard thought "caching" means sticking giant serialized PHP objects into MySQL?

If that was such an issue, why not open an issue about it, like others have done? Had you done that, you would additionally understand why the default caching backend was written like that. You should also know that one can write their own caching backend in D7, because of its OOP design. One could imagine that different database servers (Drupal doesn't just support MySQL) behave differently and can't always be treated the same.

And copying Linux Kernel modules in PHP is the most fucked up thing ever.

Care to explain WTH you're on about here?

Out of the box, it looks like shit from 1998, and it's incredibly difficult to customize in any real way.

Just because you're incredibly incompetent doesn't mean that Drupal is incredibly hard to customize. While it's true that UX hasn't been one of Drupal's primary concerns, recently a dedicated UX team was formed to address this. Take a look at the D7UX and D8UX initiatives for example. Also, there's a whole bunch of third party modules to extend Drupal's functionality, great template frameworks like AT, Omega, Fusion and the older but still progressing Zen. All of it hosted on Drupal.org
And please give me good alternatives to Drupal modules like Fields (core), Views and Panels - to name a few - in any other CMS/CMF. Good luck with that one.

The problem is that people have been working with so long that it has perverted their brains.

The problem is that your short-sightedness is perverting your brain and your blaming someone else.

Try this module-group: https://drupal.org/project/support

http://civicrm.org/casestudy/node/1390
"New York State Senate's Bluebird: Managing millions of constituents for 62 New York State Senate offices ... With the backing of CiviCRM's community of developers, Bluebird's increased functional capabilities, streamlined workflows and refined user interface promises to move the State of New York forward and help improve the communication of representative governmentâs ultimately making the Senate more responsive to constituent needs. ... Several open source CRM solutions were evaluated as platforms to help improve the New York State Senate's communication and responsiveness to constituent needs through streamlined workflows, increased functional capabilities and a user interface built on principles of simplicity and efficiency. CiviCRM stood out from the other available platforms due to it's robust feature set, open source license, eager and thriving community of developers and cooperative core team."

The code is here:
https://github.com/nysenate

If CiviCRM/Bluebird can't do what the questioner asks, the feature could be added. It is a web-based PHP/Drupal application. The NYS Senate's technology group (a great group of people, who also run "Capitol Camp" http://blog.capitolcamp.org/ ) sometimes has openings for more open source developers, so for any expert PHP/Drupal developers out there who want to work in public service on open source, you might want to get your resume on file with them.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/179504

This may be too obvious to be helpful, but since the submitter mentioned that they use Drupal on top of their database, why not just use one of the Drupal Google Maps modules as a starting point?

Google Maps Tools provides the very proximity function he's looking for (among other things) and there are many other easy integrations with Google Maps he can use as well.

That said, if he really wants to do the calculations at the DB layer, then switch the installation to Postgres GIS as mentioned elsewhere.

I'm the OP. He changed verbiage on his site after he started getting flack on the drupal forums.

"This whole argument about the works license is, of course, mostly moot since obviously as the Drupal licensing FAQ http://drupal.org/licensing/faq puts it..."

The Drupal project saying so doesn't make it true. The modules and themes would only be derivative works if distributed with Drupal. There is no reason a Drupal compatible API couldn't be made and these independent chunks of code run on that.

http://groups.drupal.org/jobs also, be active in drupal projects and build a name for yourself.

As ever, it depends:

Firstly, the landscape is constantly evolving, and some of what I say below reflects the current situation for Drupal 7. It may not be the same in six months time.

You need to decide:
Do you want very clean, targeted HTML and CSS? Or do you want as many options as possible in the CSS, and don't mind the cost of many wrapping divs and CSS with many overrides?

If it's the latter, then you will likely want to work from one of the starter themes, sculpting the CSS and templates to suit your design. Try the Stark (shipped with Drupal 7), Clean, Boron and Basic themes.

Or if it's the former then you will likely want to either build the theme from scratch or work from one of the minimal themes, and build up to cater for your exact requirements. Omega, Zen, Adaptive, Genesis and Fusion are all good bets.

You need to decide whether your design is grid-based or not. If it is grid-based, then it's easier to use a theme with built-in grid support. (Or you can add grid support to a theme which doesn't have it.) If your design is not gridded, then you are probably best-off not using a gridded theme (though of course you could override the grid classes to remove the grid.)

If it's grid-based, then the best is probably Omega, but 960 is worth a look. For non-gridded, Stark, Clean, Basic, Zen, Adaptive, Genesis and Fusion are all still ok.

You need to decide whether mobile support, HTML5, and adaptive theming are critical or not. Of course you can override the templates a theme provides, to include any of these, but starting off with a theme with them built-in will be easier for most people.

If any of these are critical, and you aren't interested in building in support yourself, then Omega, Adaptive, Genesis, Boron and Fusion have support for some or all of these features.

At the moment, if a maximal theme, with grid support is what interests you most, Omega is the best imo. The cost is that it's big, and complex.

There are several good resources:
http://drupal.org/node/323993 contains a list of starter themes.
http://www.chapterthree.com/blog/squiggy_rubio/review_drupal_6_starter_themes - is about Drupal 6, but much of it remains relevant for Drupal 7.
And in some blatant promotion, sometime in the next week we'll post an article at http://www.tanasity.com/ comparing and contrasting the best starter themes for Drupal 7, the work on which this note is based.

I think we will see the "increase the cost of attack" model be one of two solutions going forward. It will work well for highly organized organizations as well as small individuals. However, a large portion of the entire population will not take the necessary steps and will still be "low cost to attack" ultimately succeptable to anonymous-type attacks.

The second 'solution' will be a more active defense. Right now, people attack computers because the chance an unsuccessful attack will have a negative impact on them is basically zero. And the impact of a successful attack is much more likely to be positive (for the attacker) than negative. This also makes it very easy to practice attacking, particularly for people in other countries without the laws or will to deal with it. What we need is an active approach to our defenses. If you catch someone attacking, profile them and deny them access to services, wall them off to only access useless data, and deny them attack opportunities the next time they come knocking. This could be done by major organizations for themselves. Also, companies like Google or ISPs could provide this service for all hosts within their sphere of control. Some parts of it could even be automated and placed on servers and network gateways, (similiar to project honey pot or bad behavior.)

Three years ago, I used to recieve endless "Come Join Us on LinkedIn" e-mails to several e-mail accounts. Because at some point an old boss had somehow gave LinkedIn access to his Hotmail or Outlook book or something and created a place holder for me with my first and last name (and also my e-mail address) because my boss had that and only that information in his address book for me. Creeped me right the %*#@ out.

It wasn't hard to get the e-mails to stop but I'd wager that shell of a profile is out there floating around linking my old coworkers in a web -- for any of them that added that profile or had one of the e-mail addresses in their book. At the time, no one seemed to find this alarming but me so whatever. And now Facebook and a lot of sites will harvest your address book for you from Hotmail or whatever and then it will aggressively market that person to come to said social networking site on your behalf. Each site wants to boast fifty billion users (or some factor higher than living human beings), right?

But LinkedIn is really outpacing those sites: an outlook plugin/hijacker, drupal integration, actually a plugin for virtually anything and of course APIs to put it in your site.

So I was wondering what had gone wrong when I heard about its IPO the other day. After all, it's one of the creepiest spammiest social networking sites I've encountered. But that's just it, its methods are effective and so it is rewarded. If privacy abuser Facebook is "worth" the yearly GDP of a small nation, surely a website implementing the same APIs and plugins while experimenting with creepin' it up a notch is going to drive investors crazy. I think it's more a sign of overvaluation of a privacy abuse bubble--one I've been hoping to see pop for quite sometime now.

Looks like this was fixed a year ago.

There are ways... You can for example get a Yubi Key: http://www.yubico.com/yubikey, then get your own Drupal based OpenID provider: http://drupal.org/project/openid_provider and use http://drupal.org/project/yubikey module. Result? You host your own OpenID provider and everytime you want to use it, you need to have the Yubi Key - no one can steal your identity unless he steals your USB Key and your OTP

There are ways... You can for example get a Yubi Key: http://www.yubico.com/yubikey, then get your own Drupal based OpenID provider: http://drupal.org/project/openid_provider and use http://drupal.org/project/yubikey module. Result? You host your own OpenID provider and everytime you want to use it, you need to have the Yubi Key - no one can steal your identity unless he steals your USB Key and your OTP

Except for the fake replies, that already exists too. I'm afraid it doesn't do the "trollnet" part mentioned around here, though.

That would be the Cave module: http://drupal.org/project/cave

I always thought the most effective way to combat trolls would be to silently flag their account, allowing them to post and continue viewing the forums as normal, but everything they do is completely invisible. The system could also generate fake replies to their replies and threads, also completely invisible.

That sounds like what Cave does.

So that would be...

If you want to give your trolls the silent treatment try the Cave module.

It is because Drupal is module oriented, it has a very tight core built upon modules. One module to hadle users, one to handle paths, one to handlt translation of text string one to handle logs and so on. It is kind of like most *NIX systems where ls, sed, more, wget, ln, mkdir, grep and so on work together to form a coherent operating system. You need a programming language? Install a module. You need an audio encoder? Install it.

Granted, Drupal is developer-oriented, it is its weakness and strength. For end users who are understandably less willing to muck around with modules there are installation profiles that works kind of like Linux distributions.

You may want to checkout installation profiles, this might be a good fit for you.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.

Trying to answer my own question, I also found this interesting take: http://drupal.org/node/34421

• 3 years: Nobody thought to just "revert" the introduction of a feature and maintain the release schedule? Isn't this what project managers are around for?
• Bloat, bloat, and more bloat: Rather than elaborate on this, I'll just list the compressed size of the last three major releases: Drupal 5 (750KB), Drupal 6 (1.06MB), Drupal 7 (2.6MB).
• Most of the contributed modules still haven't seen a Drupal 7 release. Many of them seem to have been party to a "pledge" to time their release along with the Drupal 7 release and have reneged on it.
• The most important module outside Drupal's core release is Views which is supposedly used by at least 300000 sites. The vast majority of sites - beyond simple brochure sites - rely on Views and it has still not seen a Drupal 7 release. In other words, even with Drupal 7 being released, nobody is really using it as most developers are waiting for Views to see the light of day. Furthermore, this module, I'm told, was deemed important enough slated to be included in the core Drupal release ...
• A few years ago, when Drupal was small and flexible and touting slogans similar to we eat our own dogfood, the primary Drupal site would always run "the latest and greatest". Now, however, it's been 2 months since the release and drupal.org is still running Drupal 6 (and an outdated version at that). An integral community site, groups.drupal.org is still running Drupal 6.16 and has been pending a security update for months.

I think that I'll stop there :/ But I believe that all these issues are symptomatic of an inefficiency and backslap-happy community complacency that has crept into Drupal thanks to its recent success. The people behind Drupal seem to be busy chasing the almighty dollar and losing sight of what made the project interesting in the first place.

• 3 years: Nobody thought to just "revert" the introduction of a feature and maintain the release schedule? Isn't this what project managers are around for?
• Bloat, bloat, and more bloat: Rather than elaborate on this, I'll just list the compressed size of the last three major releases: Drupal 5 (750KB), Drupal 6 (1.06MB), Drupal 7 (2.6MB).
• Most of the contributed modules still haven't seen a Drupal 7 release. Many of them seem to have been party to a "pledge" to time their release along with the Drupal 7 release and have reneged on it.
• The most important module outside Drupal's core release is Views which is supposedly used by at least 300000 sites. The vast majority of sites - beyond simple brochure sites - rely on Views and it has still not seen a Drupal 7 release. In other words, even with Drupal 7 being released, nobody is really using it as most developers are waiting for Views to see the light of day. Furthermore, this module, I'm told, was deemed important enough slated to be included in the core Drupal release ...
• A few years ago, when Drupal was small and flexible and touting slogans similar to we eat our own dogfood, the primary Drupal site would always run "the latest and greatest". Now, however, it's been 2 months since the release and drupal.org is still running Drupal 6 (and an outdated version at that). An integral community site, groups.drupal.org is still running Drupal 6.16 and has been pending a security update for months.

I think that I'll stop there :/ But I believe that all these issues are symptomatic of an inefficiency and backslap-happy community complacency that has crept into Drupal thanks to its recent success. The people behind Drupal seem to be busy chasing the almighty dollar and losing sight of what made the project interesting in the first place.