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Punish Bad Users With Drupal Misery
If you're sick of banning or deleting troublemakers on your Drupal website, you might want to check out Misery, the module designed to give trolls a taste of their own medicine. Creating a random length delay for a user, redirecting them to a random page, presenting them with a 404 error, and crashing their browser if they're using IE6 are just a few of the things you can make users endure with Misery. I'm still waiting patiently for a Punch In the Nose module, but this is a good start.
It's perfectly valid to be in favor of free speech, but not want to hear everything everybody has to say. I think that piece of shit preacher from Florida is perfectly within his rights to do whatever he wants to a book he owns, but I won't watch him do it.
If I called you an asshole, and you walked away, I could hardly claim you don't care about free speech since you're not listening to me any more. You've just decided you have better things to do with your time.
You can claim that somebody is not interested in challenging his own ideas if he ignores everything to the contrary (think birthers); but that's a separate issue. Denying somebody the right to speak in your house is not a First Amendment issue or a free speech issue: he can still speak, but he's not guaranteed an audience.
When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.
Yeah, me too. A couple of years ago, some clients wanted a drupal-based web site, and I thought it looked interesting, so I, uh, "volunteered" to learn to use it. I bought a couple of textbooks, and found online teaching sites. A month later, I'd produced nothing useful. I'd asked a good number of "How do you ...?" questions on the forum, and the people there were very nice -- but they never actually answered my questions. All sorts of things I tried didn't do at all what I expected, and often I couldn't figure out just what they did instead. Finally, the client was getting tired of saying "We need something soon", so I spent a week building their site by hand, mostly by writing a bunch of perl CGI programs that generated the site from their data. They liked it, started asking for more features, and they're still clients (though the site mostly runs itself now).
Since then, I've had occasion to advise others looking at drupal to "Don't bother." Or sometimes "You'll be sorry." And I've read a lot of similar comments from others, so I guess it hasn't gotten much better.
Drupal does have some good PR, though, and they're pretty good at impressing non-techie managers. And they might have some good stuff, if you can figure out how to make it do what you want it to do. I can't tell whether it's good or not, because I seem to be too dumb to understand how to make it work.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Drupal is first and foremost a professional publisher's platform with no compromises or apology. Drupal upgrades between versions are something I'll choose not even to discuss; because the pros know what to do already. Developer's are supposed to learn how to handle the professional tools for the job; it can take years for the pros to do this, and often does.
There's advantages and disadvantages to everything, so why not embrace the advantages while trying to work past any (initial?) disadvantages?
One advantage Drupal offers as opposed to rolling your own is the security of a lot of eyeballs against common SQL injection attacks, which seems ultimately responsible for taking down HBGary and the probably the Sony PSN network too. Hey, the White House uses Drupal publicly, and internally to replace famously-inept emails systems, along with NASA, the congress, the Economist.com...
Also from the owners' point of view, the Drupal framework is going to be easier to support than your system if you're not around, (and you can sell that as a feature, now).