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Crash course: How to make a website with Drupal
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Comments (4)
Great points, Caitlyn. They all have their own special weirdnesses; I have heard from dev friends that looking upon the core code of Joomla causes blindness and insanity. WordPress themes are not just pretty overlays, but so complex they're like second WordPress instances. You're right on about Drupal's weaknesses. Sometimes I wish for the days of static HTML and all you needed to know was don't use blink tags.
I agree about the WordPress themes :) Joomla mostly just works so I guess I haven't dug into the code enough for it to effect me... much. :)
I don't worry about what the code looks like as long as it performs well. If it's like smelly underpants, well I don't think I need to know that!
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Having said that, I support Drupal, Joomla and WordPress for my clients. Drupal is the least popular of the three and it is the biggest pain in the a** to support as businesses and their sites scale upward. You are very right about the learning curve. It's shallow for Joomla and WordPress and steep for Drupal. In addition, as Drupal scales you really need to know how to tweak and optimize PHP and MySQL since it hits both hard and does tons of database queries. Otherwise sites become bogged down in a hurry as traffic builds.
Drupal has other limitations. For example, it doesn't support MySQL clustering. Oh, there is a hack to make it work that I found on the drupal.org website and yes, once you tinker it can work well. It isn't supported natively and it isn't easy. Thankfully, everything else works nicely with Cluster Suite (Red Hat, CentOS, Scientific Linux, PUIAS) and that does make building a large scale, fault tolerant Drupal site possible. Not easy, but definitely doable.
I've also found that Drupal developers don't always play nicely with others. I wrote a while back about making mod_security and Drupal work together on RHEL 5.x. See: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/11/getting-drupal-and-mod-... Prior to that, if you read through the various threads about mod_security on the drupal.org site you'll see that there was little or no concern about compatibility. If a change in Drupal ran afoul of the CRS (Core Rule Set) the attitude was that it was a mod_security issue and that they had no responsibility for making the two play nicely. Ahem... we're talking about the de facto standard for filtering at the web server layer here. This is what protects websites when something nasty gets past the firewall and the load balancer (if you have one and if it has some sort of security plug-in) and the OS security and is effectively the last line of defense, and a good one at that. Of course you have to play nicely with something that is so widely deployed.
Having said that, I agree with Carla in the article where she states that Drupal is far more flexible than Joomla and WordPress and if you need all that functionality Drupal does make sense. Sadly that functionality comes with costs that just shouldn't be there.