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...
Would you be willing to elaborate a little on your concerns, please?
Some colleagues and I are about to start a major overhaul of a moderately large site (a few dozen pages, a few thousand users, a few hundred visitors per day). It seems like the first choice is basically between "standard framework with some plug-in custom features" (CMSes like Drupal) and "custom architecture with some standard plug-in features" (using things like Django and some common libraries).
I am a LAMP developer who was kind of thrown into doing Drupal development. Maybe I can offer some insight.
If you don't have *Drupal* developers, forget it. Drupal's famous learning curve will prevent your guys from working for a while (its been frustrating for me). Documentation isn't great. There are a few books, but...it's *very* complex.
Drupal is more than a mere MVC. It does some cool things, like Inversion of Control (via its hooks) and it does some things I feel a pretty lamebrained (it's so mod
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights. It sounds like both your background before Drupal and your general views of development are pretty similar to most of our guys.
We've reached the first test you described so far: we've got a test install, and established that much of what we need can be done with the core plus a few modules built around CCK and Views for the custom data. Some of it is indeed not as simple as with just writing a bit of database code, to be sure, but so far it's been close enough in our case.
What sounds like the deal-making feature for us is essentially the inversion of control you mentioned: we are moving from an eclectic system with numerous individual scripts in more than one language, and having a systematic framework where we know exactly where each bit of custom code we've written hooks in has a lot of value in itself. But as a result of your comments, at least we know to look out for the performance, replication and bulk data issues as we start more detailed trials, so thanks again for the contribution.
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, Insightful)
Would you be willing to elaborate a little on your concerns, please?
Some colleagues and I are about to start a major overhaul of a moderately large site (a few dozen pages, a few thousand users, a few hundred visitors per day). It seems like the first choice is basically between "standard framework with some plug-in custom features" (CMSes like Drupal) and "custom architecture with some standard plug-in features" (using things like Django and some common libraries).
So far, we've been forming the opposite vi
Re: (Score:2)
I am a LAMP developer who was kind of thrown into doing Drupal development. Maybe I can offer some insight.
If you don't have *Drupal* developers, forget it. Drupal's famous learning curve will prevent your guys from working for a while (its been frustrating for me). Documentation isn't great. There are a few books, but...it's *very* complex.
Drupal is more than a mere MVC. It does some cool things, like Inversion of Control (via its hooks) and it does some things I feel a pretty lamebrained (it's so mod
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously (Score:2)
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights. It sounds like both your background before Drupal and your general views of development are pretty similar to most of our guys.
We've reached the first test you described so far: we've got a test install, and established that much of what we need can be done with the core plus a few modules built around CCK and Views for the custom data. Some of it is indeed not as simple as with just writing a bit of database code, to be sure, but so far it's been close enough in our case.
What sounds like the deal-making feature for us is essentially the inversion of control you mentioned: we are moving from an eclectic system with numerous individual scripts in more than one language, and having a systematic framework where we know exactly where each bit of custom code we've written hooks in has a lot of value in itself. But as a result of your comments, at least we know to look out for the performance, replication and bulk data issues as we start more detailed trials, so thanks again for the contribution.