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Drupal's Creator Aims For World Domination

angry tapir writes "Open-source content management system Drupal has come a long way since it was initially released in 2001. Drupal now runs 2% of the world's websites — but Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert thinks that this could easily grow to 10%. I caught up with Dries to talk about Drupal's evolution from a pure CMS to a Web platform, cracking the enterprise market, and the upcoming release of Drupal 8, which features significant architectural changes — incorporating elements of the Symfony2 Web framework to replace Drupal's aging architecture."

4 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PHP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A bloated CMS is bloated no matter what language it's written in. That's like blaming the hammer for the house being crooked. :)

  2. Re:Navigation by narcc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No. Both to your question and any other "Does it have a sane ______ yet?" questions.

    As far as I can tell, the only reason to use Drupal is that it's easy to find and hire people who are familiar with it.

  3. Re:Navigation by Rhaban · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it's easy to find and hire people who are familiar with it.

    who *think they* are familiar with it.

    Drupal looks easy to extend for a beginner developper because, like php, you don't have to do something right to have it work.
    So it's really quick to have a mess of a codebase that leads to an unstable site that's a nightmare to maintain.

    But if you really know the insides of it, you can craft a something beautiful that runs smoothly and is easy to work with. It's not perfect, and "real" coders will look at its non-use of OOP with contempt, but it's pretty good at what it can do.

    And, let's be honest for a second: it's one of the least horrible open source CMSs out there (at least in the php world, I don't really know about Java or python or other CMSs).
    If you want a good pphp cms, you have Drupal or Ezpublish. There's wordpress that wants to be a cms but isn't quite there, Joomla is a joke, Typo3 is from another time... The perfect software doesn't exist.

  4. Why the Drupal hate? by howlinmonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have been using Drupal to do site development for 5 years now. I have developed small and medium sized sites for everyone from restaurants to professional membership organizations. I use it for sites of all sizes because eventually someone asks for a feature that isn't available or is painful to implement in WP. I have written custom modules and complex themes in relatively short timeframes because of the flexibility of the platform.

    You don't like Drupal - that's great, don't use it. I am not a big RoR fan. I tried it out for a new project at work and it just didn't "feel" right. I was able to get the Symfony2 framework up and running pretty quickly and we are developing a multi tiered app in house with it. I don't hate RoR and I don't need to bash it. Plenty of intelligent developers who know more than me are using it and developing kick-ass software. It just didn't fit for me.

    Nah - we can't have that kind of adult response. Quit liking what I don't like!