Drupal is a great concept, but the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
A few things stand out in my opinion:
- no good upgrade path across major versions (automated!)
- modules tend to disappear between versions, stop being maintained or get redone without any regard for backwards compatibility.
(this thread http://drupal.org/node/327225 was quite an eye opener for me)
- the database model - I don't know of a better way to say this - sucks. Using 5.x it makes a table per cck field, which makes drupal sites much heavier on the machine than they should be.
If they fix those three issues it will be a world of a difference.
We host about 3,000 drupal sites, and the potential to increase that 100 fold is there but the above issues are holding that back.
I'd love to upgrade from D5 to D6, but I can't because I had to install a dozen modules and make a few changes to the core code to fix the litany of UI problems in D5 so it could be used by consumers. These modules aren't all supported in D6. Short of dropping 3-5k to hire someone to come in and do it for you or devoting a solid month to mapping it out and carefully upgrading, I don't see how it's possible to ever upgrade a substantial (50+ modules) Drupal site.
That said, nothing else out there compares to Drupal + Views + CCK. I just wish it performed better.
Comments
Drupal is a great concept, but the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
A few things stand out in my opinion:
- no good upgrade path across major versions (automated!)
- modules tend to disappear between versions, stop being maintained or get redone without any regard for backwards compatibility.
- the database model - I don't know of a better way to say this - sucks. Using 5.x it makes a table per cck field, which makes drupal sites much heavier on the machine than they should be.If they fix those three issues it will be a world of a difference.
We host about 3,000 drupal sites, and the potential to increase that 100 fold is there but the above issues are holding that back.
I'd love to upgrade from D5 to D6, but I can't because I had to install a dozen modules and make a few changes to the core code to fix the litany of UI problems in D5 so it could be used by consumers. These modules aren't all supported in D6. Short of dropping 3-5k to hire someone to come in and do it for you or devoting a solid month to mapping it out and carefully upgrading, I don't see how it's possible to ever upgrade a substantial (50+ modules) Drupal site.
That said, nothing else out there compares to Drupal + Views + CCK. I just wish it performed better.
Yep, that's my experience too...
The funny thing is that I don't understand why they don't get it together more. A bit more direction and less of a 'let's code fest' would help a lot.
Bugs that I've fixed (sent in patches to the relevant maintainers) are still in the templates more than a year later.
It's really weird because they could go sky high.