You have just demonstrated the need for the phrase "anecdote is not evidence."
Hurrah for you. Your laptop was fine. Dell didn't do anything stupid-- like, say, fail to support certain SigmaTel devices properly, rendering them incompatible with Skype 5.x .
Change the example to a wide variety of situations, such as many a two-year-old Sony laptop, and you're in another world of pain installing Windows from MS media instead of the manufacturer's.
Managing Windows updates on these beasts is at best "a pain," because you have to go back to the outdated and insecure manufacter's release, and install updates in order. Getting Sony's special OS widgets and things like keyboard controls (audio, media, brightness) to work again, is more of an arcane art, as it requires installing drivers and control files in the right order, at the right time-- that order only having been revealed by a 12-year-old virgin boy in Bangalori, who spent three weeks figuring it out, and posted the solution in Hindi on a porn site dedicated to having sex with goats in the middle of the Ganges.
You got Windows running on a single laptop with no problems? Fine. Plenty of people get Ubuntu running on their laptop, with no problem. You've said nothing.
Why the HELL do people mod this crap up?
Oh-- I forgot. A higher percentage of UIDs over 500K, are using Windoze than Linux!
[insert ascii art that/. won't let me use because o fthe 'junk characters' filter]
[//end html comment code]
And gets worse. Good bloody grief. Who the hell built this and who gave them the time machine from 1995 and no wonder it cost $200M, they evidently had to contribute to the time machine project.
Oh crap. Now/. (-- junk characters) wants me to use fewer 'junk characters.' Great. Let's just cut&paste from the OP:
I was trying to keep it simple, silly. KISS-- it's V-Day, after all!
Roles in Drupal are not quite UNIX groups, true... and modules do have a bit too much access / ability to ignore roless, as some people point out above; data insulation (or whatever you want to call it) is not hard enforced at all.
Sorry-- alas, I do have to convert and manage WP sites. In order:
1) Your idea of a central repository is not my idea of a central repository. Drupal Modules are on Drupal.org, and where issues and code are tracked and tested via both a community model, and an automated check to assure code integrity (etc). WordPress now has a central folder for modules, which is used by some plug-in developers at this point, ignored by many others -- and playing catch up. This folder is not central to the WP model; there are no coding standards etc etc.
2) The levels of WP users is hardly a user permissions system. WP has userlevels. It does not have a groups/permissions system. There's a difference. Plugins can test those userlevels, you can build a permissions system or use a random third-party system, but there's a difference from this and a fine-grained permissions system. And who would enforce those permissions in WP, anyway?
3) I know what permalinks are-- big deal. Drupal has them too, and Drupal's work-- WP's are a good way to create loops in ReWrite rules. Recently, I converted a WordPress site with 200K plus pages to Drupal, putting the converted site on a new domain. Within two weeks the converted site, displaying the same content, was ranking higher in Google than the WordPress site. Why? Because the right Drupal theme displays content correctly for SEO "out of the box," because a team of people have gone over the problem and found the best solution, or at least a darn good one. Why? Because WP's SEO stuff is not bad, but there a bit too much smoke and mirrors and guesswork going on, and too little searching for best practices and distributing them.
4) Admin etc: Again, big deal. The WP admin GUI is nice for some things, but big deal. I'd install an appropriate admin theme for the client, after doing needs assessment, which might show they need something quite different than the WP default. But if I want to give them something WP-admin-like, I can. Drupal has custom content types (CCK) and it's about 10 times easier to use them than WP, and you're not making a custom kitchen sink solution, which loses portability. Can I deploy a simple WP like site from an installation profile if I want, with custom content and views and taxonomy working so much better than in WP? I can. Is that kind of simple site the only place I want to be putting my attention, and do I want my clients to be locked into a solution which assumes they JUST "want a simple site" and makes it a lot harder for them to get much more? Darn sure "NO" to that question.
End user (unless, Mr. Tron, you work for IBM and don't believe in them). Content Management Professional. Site Owner. Journalist. Board of a Professional Organization.
Maintainability. Long-Term Development Cost. Management Cost. Etc.
Any view except "I'm the grunt who has to build it, and I'd like to do it my way because I'm comfortable with my way."
You point out a lot of realistic, real problems. Plus you're not an AC!
There is a lot of amateur code. There are a lot of developers who don't understand the framework, or its reasons. There are some Byzantine elements. All of this, needs to be reviewed, and IMHO, the community needs to establish better review practices-- which is going to be hard in a community that has focused on "do it," "do-ocracy." These are real issues.
Self-interview: do I doubt that you could replicate the CCK / Panels more quickly yourself, if you're skilled-- at least, any particular implementation. I don't. And Panels hath its issues -- not least of all, in terms of nomenclature. But the point is, it's an overall framework.
I can deploy Panels / CCK implementations, faster than they could be written -- because I accumulate them, if nothing else. And all these things, inter-operate with each other, relatively. You get a series of websites, written in the same way, working in the same way -- in place of five-hundred kitchen sinks, each built differently, to manage. You get an overall, relatively consistent user experience. You get things such as the Baltimore Usability group looking at the Admin UI with eye-tracking studies, and then improving it.
Is Drupal the best choice in every situation? No, it isn't-- you'll have to evaluate that yourself. But it didn't take Drupal, to get us the clueless boss stuffing a technology he doesn't understand well enough, down the team's throat.
Could your team cook up something on their own, faster? Probably again. Maybe that will be fine. I can't predict that-- you have to look at specifics, details-- but I think it is quite arguable, that in the kind of situation you describe, it might make more sense to work with an experienced "consultant" (darn it, that word must be evil) to find the best Drupal way to do what you wish.
And documentation? Yes, there's a problem there too. The current community prefers "codeslingers" to documented, and that can only go so far. It needs to be addressed. But it's a large FOSS community-- there's time for that to happen.
Bet he avoids wide tables by serializing the data-- ROT13ing it first.
I personally just drop in custom code when there are performance issues-- and the client is paying. But hey, that's me. Other people like to make kitchen sinks.
Ah... the other end of the spectrum, heard from. We have the uber-geeks above, arguing that you need to operate your own knife factory. And we have the AC idiot here, arguing for the "just a pocket knife" WordPress option.
He're the thing. WordPress is dreck. It relies on a series of modules, (plug-ins), published all over the internet-- no central repository, no security review, no consistency, *truly* spagetti code in the sense hated above.
It has no user permissions system, whereas Drupal follows the *nix perms model-- a model, even a small three-person auto parts shop, may very quickly find they need.
When is just a pocket knife bad? When you find you're locked into a pocket knife, that your metaphor sucks, and because you're never used anything else, or paid to much for the pocket knife in the first place, you don't know you need the swiss army knife, that you can't afford it, or that you're just plain stuck.
Oh, by-the-way: SEO sucks in WordPress. The whizbang affects are a lot of flashy, and not much usability. Social network integration? You're kidding, right?
Cake? Ancient MVC? you've got to be kidding me. You're evidently looking at matters from a developer's perspective, and a very limited one at that.
In the real world, real people producing actual applications that are used by others, produce relative dreck with those "frameworks." Cake sites tend to be a bunch of random UIX nighmares, with boxes here and there for input.
Nothing comes very close to Drupal's overall UI/UIX consistency, which is the result of the FOSS community management model, and review, not a bunch of "hotshot" programmer cowboys thinking they're writing optimized, awesome code.
I doubt your "in house Drupal guy" is an expert of any kind, especially if he's telling you that. You can *of course* do anything, and the idea that "Drupal makes it impossibly difficult or painful" is just silly. It's a resource question.
You evidently have some negative experiences that you're projecting on Drupal. Fine. Since you're a AC, I'm going to assume for now, you don't have enough experience to really make the judgments you're making. Drupal's architecture is, somewhat intentionally, parallel to an OS architecture. You might as well call Linux an "insane architecture"-- you'd have as much validity.
Eight? I've never seen that. Maybe there's an example, maybe you're pulling it out of your rear end.
A botched Drupal install by a non-pro is, of course, a botched install. I've seen plenty-- they range from beginners who didn't really know what they were doing (just like with PHP sites), to so-called "pros" who don't realize that the framework is very different and keep trying to do things "the old way."
I'm guessing you're the latter.
Yes, for some truly enterprise-class apps that require global data synchronizations between multiples points of presence, for instance, one can easily imagine scenarios where Drupal default db / table generation is not good enough-- in which case, anyone implementing it, should consider that and modify that layer. Yes, anyone can probably do better, if they architect that by hand.
The point is, it's a framework. The framework needs to generate data structures, on it's own, not manually. The framework needs to be relatively universal and portable and understandable, not a super-optimized, custom and thus harder-to-understand (if not obfuscated) solution.
For that, Drupal is pretty good. As in "the great is the enemy of the good." As in, perfection is something else, and searching for perfection, often blocks getting things "good" done in an effective, efficient manner.
You know, I hear this again and again. Mostly from people who don't seem to have invested much time in Drupal, or who seem stuck on older models for managing web content.
Drupal is a FOSS project. Is it perfect? No. Does it have many advantages over a "PHP framework" such as Symfony? Yes, primarily in the scale and size of the contributing community, and the ability of that community to work along roadmaps to better solutions.
Is most of the code "contributed" by volunteers, often working under practical goals and limitations? Yes. Are there challenges with managing code quality control and practicality vs. "perfection" in such a community project? Yes, of course.
Are there a lot of naysayers in this room? Probably.
Seriously. Tell me where to post. I want to get "sued" by these jackasses. Just tell me what to do. What do I have to post, where? Let's rumble, Righthaven.
I think you're probably working with outdated information. Neither the Iran-Iraq conflict nor the Gulf War provide useful examples, because by the time of the US operation against Iraq, Iraq's armed forces were substantively less prepared in terms of both training and equipment.
In addition-- they simply caved, showing little resistance and no cohesion behind Hussein. The regime toppled. I don't think that's going to happen in Iran.
And in contrast, Iran is now spending roughly a quarter of it's GDP on military expenditures. A lot of that is indeed the nuclear program-- but a lot more is weapons programs of all sorts. The Revolutionary Guard and the military are spread throughout -- and generally control -- most areas and most of society.
This isn't the puppet dictatorship of Hussein, it's an aspiring regional superpower, preparing for a regional confrontation in which it might well be willing, as Avner Cohen points out, to use nuclear force and/or to sacrifice large portions of its population. Could it roll over and die? Sure, maybe. But unlikely. More likely its going to take a lot of blood just to prevent absolute disaster.
Iraq feel because it was neither prepared nor ready for war. Iran has been preparing for war for close to a decade, apace. War with Iran will be no walk in the cake, it will be real war, with real consequences, including the likelihood of casualty numbers that the United States has not seen since the Second World War. Don't kid yourself.
P.S. My friends from the 101st assure me that your characterization of the narrow nature of US forces and their training and preparation is also largely a pile of poop; US Armed Forces are also one of the largest and most prepared humanitarian response forces, as well.
Well-- you can't stop everyone, can you? It's equally valid to point out, that a citizen on-site, armed, might have stopped this.
What you can do, is lower the chances by putting barriers in people's way. We don't know the details here yet, whether this guy was highly planned or a nutjob who strolled in and picked up a Glock.
If a nutjob, reasonable restrictions might have made it a lot harder. If instead he's someone who planned this in detail-- well, that's a lot harder to prevent, because someone can always steal a gun in that kind of case-- but it makes the chances, a lot less.
The way I see it, it's a matter of reason. We can and should, put up some reasonable restrictions. But the debate today, is polarized and filled with animosity. Both sides, politically, are extremes and outside the bounds of reason. You don't want a mentally ill 24-year-old walking into WalMart and buying a Glock without anyone blinking an eye, but a total ban on handguns is equally extreme.
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You have just demonstrated the need for the phrase "anecdote is not evidence."
Hurrah for you. Your laptop was fine. Dell didn't do anything stupid-- like, say, fail to support certain SigmaTel devices properly, rendering them incompatible with Skype 5.x .
Change the example to a wide variety of situations, such as many a two-year-old Sony laptop, and you're in another world of pain installing Windows from MS media instead of the manufacturer's.
Managing Windows updates on these beasts is at best "a pain," because you have to go back to the outdated and insecure manufacter's release, and install updates in order. Getting Sony's special OS widgets and things like keyboard controls (audio, media, brightness) to work again, is more of an arcane art, as it requires installing drivers and control files in the right order, at the right time-- that order only having been revealed by a 12-year-old virgin boy in Bangalori, who spent three weeks figuring it out, and posted the solution in Hindi on a porn site dedicated to having sex with goats in the middle of the Ganges.
You got Windows running on a single laptop with no problems? Fine. Plenty of people get Ubuntu running on their laptop, with no problem. You've said nothing.
Why the HELL do people mod this crap up?
Oh-- I forgot. A higher percentage of UIDs over 500K, are using Windoze than Linux!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_Murray
>Looks like the Deletion Review process did what it was supposed to do.
Result in 3000 people-hours being wasted on an argument between 10-year-old girls?
When in doubt, do not go back to Windoze.
Evidently you missed the 'wannabee' part of the above.
// ok, not that funny, but what can I say? I'm a karma-whore-wannabee.
on home page. It begins:
[html comment code here]
[insert ascii art that /. won't let me use because o fthe 'junk characters' filter]
[//end html comment code]
And gets worse. Good bloody grief. Who the hell built this and who gave them the time machine from 1995 and no wonder it cost $200M, they evidently had to contribute to the time machine project.
Oh crap. Now /. (-- junk characters) wants me to use fewer 'junk characters.' Great. Let's just cut&paste from the OP:
[snip. didn't work.]
I was trying to keep it simple, silly. KISS-- it's V-Day, after all!
Roles in Drupal are not quite UNIX groups, true... and modules do have a bit too much access / ability to ignore roless, as some people point out above; data insulation (or whatever you want to call it) is not hard enforced at all.
Sorry-- alas, I do have to convert and manage WP sites. In order:
1) Your idea of a central repository is not my idea of a central repository. Drupal Modules are on Drupal.org, and where issues and code are tracked and tested via both a community model, and an automated check to assure code integrity (etc). WordPress now has a central folder for modules, which is used by some plug-in developers at this point, ignored by many others -- and playing catch up. This folder is not central to the WP model; there are no coding standards etc etc.
2) The levels of WP users is hardly a user permissions system. WP has userlevels. It does not have a groups/permissions system. There's a difference. Plugins can test those userlevels, you can build a permissions system or use a random third-party system, but there's a difference from this and a fine-grained permissions system. And who would enforce those permissions in WP, anyway?
3) I know what permalinks are-- big deal. Drupal has them too, and Drupal's work-- WP's are a good way to create loops in ReWrite rules.
Recently, I converted a WordPress site with 200K plus pages to Drupal, putting the converted site on a new domain. Within two weeks the converted site, displaying the same content, was ranking higher in Google than the WordPress site. Why? Because the right Drupal theme displays content correctly for SEO "out of the box," because a team of people have gone over the problem and found the best solution, or at least a darn good one.
Why? Because WP's SEO stuff is not bad, but there a bit too much smoke and mirrors and guesswork going on, and too little searching for best practices and distributing them.
4) Admin etc: Again, big deal. The WP admin GUI is nice for some things, but big deal. I'd install an appropriate admin theme for the client, after doing needs assessment, which might show they need something quite different than the WP default. But if I want to give them something WP-admin-like, I can. Drupal has custom content types (CCK) and it's about 10 times easier to use them than WP, and you're not making a custom kitchen sink solution, which loses portability.
Can I deploy a simple WP like site from an installation profile if I want, with custom content and views and taxonomy working so much better than in WP? I can. Is that kind of simple site the only place I want to be putting my attention, and do I want my clients to be locked into a solution which assumes they JUST "want a simple site" and makes it a lot harder for them to get much more? Darn sure "NO" to that question.
End user (unless, Mr. Tron, you work for IBM and don't believe in them). Content Management Professional. Site Owner. Journalist. Board of a Professional Organization.
Maintainability. Long-Term Development Cost. Management Cost. Etc.
Any view except "I'm the grunt who has to build it, and I'd like to do it my way because I'm comfortable with my way."
You point out a lot of realistic, real problems. Plus you're not an AC!
There is a lot of amateur code. There are a lot of developers who don't understand the framework, or its reasons. There are some Byzantine elements. All of this, needs to be reviewed, and IMHO, the community needs to establish better review practices-- which is going to be hard in a community that has focused on "do it," "do-ocracy." These are real issues.
Self-interview: do I doubt that you could replicate the CCK / Panels more quickly yourself, if you're skilled-- at least, any particular implementation. I don't. And Panels hath its issues -- not least of all, in terms of nomenclature. But the point is, it's an overall framework.
I can deploy Panels / CCK implementations, faster than they could be written -- because I accumulate them, if nothing else. And all these things, inter-operate with each other, relatively. You get a series of websites, written in the same way, working in the same way -- in place of five-hundred kitchen sinks, each built differently, to manage. You get an overall, relatively consistent user experience. You get things such as the Baltimore Usability group looking at the Admin UI with eye-tracking studies, and then improving it.
Is Drupal the best choice in every situation? No, it isn't-- you'll have to evaluate that yourself. But it didn't take Drupal, to get us the clueless boss stuffing a technology he doesn't understand well enough, down the team's throat.
Could your team cook up something on their own, faster? Probably again. Maybe that will be fine. I can't predict that-- you have to look at specifics, details-- but I think it is quite arguable, that in the kind of situation you describe, it might make more sense to work with an experienced "consultant" (darn it, that word must be evil) to find the best Drupal way to do what you wish.
And documentation? Yes, there's a problem there too. The current community prefers "codeslingers" to documented, and that can only go so far. It needs to be addressed. But it's a large FOSS community-- there's time for that to happen.
Bet he avoids wide tables by serializing the data-- ROT13ing it first.
I personally just drop in custom code when there are performance issues-- and the client is paying. But hey, that's me. Other people like to make kitchen sinks.
Ah... the other end of the spectrum, heard from. We have the uber-geeks above, arguing that you need to operate your own knife factory. And we have the AC idiot here, arguing for the "just a pocket knife" WordPress option.
He're the thing. WordPress is dreck. It relies on a series of modules, (plug-ins), published all over the internet-- no central repository, no security review, no consistency, *truly* spagetti code in the sense hated above.
It has no user permissions system, whereas Drupal follows the *nix perms model-- a model, even a small three-person auto parts shop, may very quickly find they need.
When is just a pocket knife bad? When you find you're locked into a pocket knife, that your metaphor sucks, and because you're never used anything else, or paid to much for the pocket knife in the first place, you don't know you need the swiss army knife, that you can't afford it, or that you're just plain stuck.
Oh, by-the-way: SEO sucks in WordPress. The whizbang affects are a lot of flashy, and not much usability. Social network integration? You're kidding, right?
Cake? Ancient MVC? you've got to be kidding me. You're evidently looking at matters from a developer's perspective, and a very limited one at that.
In the real world, real people producing actual applications that are used by others, produce relative dreck with those "frameworks." Cake sites tend to be a bunch of random UIX nighmares, with boxes here and there for input.
Nothing comes very close to Drupal's overall UI/UIX consistency, which is the result of the FOSS community management model, and review, not a bunch of "hotshot" programmer cowboys thinking they're writing optimized, awesome code.
I doubt your "in house Drupal guy" is an expert of any kind, especially if he's telling you that. You can *of course* do anything, and the idea that "Drupal makes it impossibly difficult or painful" is just silly. It's a resource question.
You evidently have some negative experiences that you're projecting on Drupal. Fine. Since you're a AC, I'm going to assume for now, you don't have enough experience to really make the judgments you're making. Drupal's architecture is, somewhat intentionally, parallel to an OS architecture. You might as well call Linux an "insane architecture"-- you'd have as much validity.
Eight? I've never seen that. Maybe there's an example, maybe you're pulling it out of your rear end.
A botched Drupal install by a non-pro is, of course, a botched install. I've seen plenty-- they range from beginners who didn't really know what they were doing (just like with PHP sites), to so-called "pros" who don't realize that the framework is very different and keep trying to do things "the old way."
I'm guessing you're the latter.
Yes, for some truly enterprise-class apps that require global data synchronizations between multiples points of presence, for instance, one can easily imagine scenarios where Drupal default db / table generation is not good enough-- in which case, anyone implementing it, should consider that and modify that layer. Yes, anyone can probably do better, if they architect that by hand.
The point is, it's a framework. The framework needs to generate data structures, on it's own, not manually. The framework needs to be relatively universal and portable and understandable, not a super-optimized, custom and thus harder-to-understand (if not obfuscated) solution.
For that, Drupal is pretty good. As in "the great is the enemy of the good." As in, perfection is something else, and searching for perfection, often blocks getting things "good" done in an effective, efficient manner.
You know, I hear this again and again. Mostly from people who don't seem to have invested much time in Drupal, or who seem stuck on older models for managing web content.
Drupal is a FOSS project. Is it perfect? No. Does it have many advantages over a "PHP framework" such as Symfony? Yes, primarily in the scale and size of the contributing community, and the ability of that community to work along roadmaps to better solutions.
Is most of the code "contributed" by volunteers, often working under practical goals and limitations? Yes. Are there challenges with managing code quality control and practicality vs. "perfection" in such a community project? Yes, of course.
Are there a lot of naysayers in this room? Probably.
Sangria not necessary. Vodka sufficient secure all Kazakh nuclear material under 18 years of age.
>most people don't read a book for hours.
Of course not. Idiot.
Have you, perhaps, taken a glance a Goddard's posthumous patents?
Seriously. Tell me where to post. I want to get "sued" by these jackasses. Just tell me what to do. What do I have to post, where? Let's rumble, Righthaven.
timothy is a Physicist? He's taken trips to the Tevatron? OMG! We've found us a witch! Get out the gas!
I think you're probably working with outdated information. Neither the Iran-Iraq conflict nor the Gulf War provide useful examples, because by the time of the US operation against Iraq, Iraq's armed forces were substantively less prepared in terms of both training and equipment.
In addition-- they simply caved, showing little resistance and no cohesion behind Hussein. The regime toppled. I don't think that's going to happen in Iran.
And in contrast, Iran is now spending roughly a quarter of it's GDP on military expenditures. A lot of that is indeed the nuclear program-- but a lot more is weapons programs of all sorts. The Revolutionary Guard and the military are spread throughout -- and generally control -- most areas and most of society.
This isn't the puppet dictatorship of Hussein, it's an aspiring regional superpower, preparing for a regional confrontation in which it might well be willing, as Avner Cohen points out, to use nuclear force and/or to sacrifice large portions of its population. Could it roll over and die? Sure, maybe. But unlikely. More likely its going to take a lot of blood just to prevent absolute disaster.
You, are unfortunately, incorrect.
Iraq feel because it was neither prepared nor ready for war. Iran has been preparing for war for close to a decade, apace. War with Iran will be no walk in the cake, it will be real war, with real consequences, including the likelihood of casualty numbers that the United States has not seen since the Second World War. Don't kid yourself.
P.S. My friends from the 101st assure me that your characterization of the narrow nature of US forces and their training and preparation is also largely a pile of poop; US Armed Forces are also one of the largest and most prepared humanitarian response forces, as well.
Well-- you can't stop everyone, can you? It's equally valid to point out, that a citizen on-site, armed, might have stopped this.
What you can do, is lower the chances by putting barriers in people's way. We don't know the details here yet, whether this guy was highly planned or a nutjob who strolled in and picked up a Glock.
If a nutjob, reasonable restrictions might have made it a lot harder. If instead he's someone who planned this in detail-- well, that's a lot harder to prevent, because someone can always steal a gun in that kind of case-- but it makes the chances, a lot less.
The way I see it, it's a matter of reason. We can and should, put up some reasonable restrictions. But the debate today, is polarized and filled with animosity. Both sides, politically, are extremes and outside the bounds of reason. You don't want a mentally ill 24-year-old walking into WalMart and buying a Glock without anyone blinking an eye, but a total ban on handguns is equally extreme.