I have been developing for Drupal for 5 years, with a portfolio of many large scale projects. I am also the author of some popular Drupal modules.
With all that said, in my experience, Drupal offers zero TCO or ETA advantage over Django or Symfony on any medium to large project. A lot of the great things you may hear about Drupal are coming from either (a) Non-developers or (b) People who have staked their careers on Drupal.
A few reasons why Drupal cannot be taken seriously include...
I won't comment on the ORM, Views and CCK stuff beyond agreeing that it could be a lot better (though what we have now is much better than where we were). I'm not sure what would constitute solid deployment procedures for you, so without an example I can't comment.
4) Using native PHP as the templating language. This causes more headaches than one you can possibly believe. A proper templating language should be used instead which will prevent lazy or incompetant developers from adding business logic into templates.
I can't say that I agree with you on that--most of the template engines I've seen end up replicating a high percentage of core PHP--but in any case, it's a problem that has been fixed already by theme engines. Don't like phptemplate? Use Smarty: h [drupal.org]
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Monday May 18, 2009 @05:45PM (#28003645)
I still don't understand why so few PHP developers still don't know about PHPTAL, or the Midgard CMS(which is propbably one of the most sexiest PHP CMS's for developers).
Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously (Score:5, Informative)
I have been developing for Drupal for 5 years, with a portfolio of many large scale projects. I am also the author of some popular Drupal modules.
With all that said, in my experience, Drupal offers zero TCO or ETA advantage over Django or Symfony on any medium to large project. A lot of the great things you may hear about Drupal are coming from either (a) Non-developers or (b) People who have staked their careers on Drupal.
A few reasons why Drupal cannot be taken seriously include...
1) Lack of unified model
Re: (Score:4, Interesting)
I won't comment on the ORM, Views and CCK stuff beyond agreeing that it could be a lot better (though what we have now is much better than where we were). I'm not sure what would constitute solid deployment procedures for you, so without an example I can't comment.
4) Using native PHP as the templating language. This causes more headaches than one you can possibly believe. A proper templating language should be used instead which will prevent lazy or incompetant developers from adding business logic into templates.
I can't say that I agree with you on that--most of the template engines I've seen end up replicating a high percentage of core PHP--but in any case, it's a problem that has been fixed already by theme engines. Don't like phptemplate? Use Smarty: h [drupal.org]
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously (Score:0)
I still don't understand why so few PHP developers still don't know about PHPTAL, or the Midgard CMS(which is propbably one of the most sexiest PHP CMS's for developers).