Do I like Drupal ?

Caution: The title might be somewhat misleading but kind of relevant. For the next few para I’m going to rant about drupal. (so all the drupal lovers please dont read beyond this point. Also this is my personal biased POV. I don’t gain or loose anything for or against drupal).

Being said that : Here it goes:

Do I like Drupal: Hell No (so far)

Why ?

1. It’s shit. I think it’s an abomination of anything called CMS.

2. It’s a VB (visula basic) in PHP. And as a developer I’ve never liked visual basic. And drupal is similar in extra that it is in PHP. So yes .. figure the rest out.

3. It works well for the people who think “installing/upgrading their mobile OS makes them like developers hence Mr. KnowItAll.”. Guess what ? it doesn’t and that’s not what developers do. So, you installed few modules in drupal and made it work for the purpose - this doesnt qualify you as a developer nor makes drupal *really easy and nice CMS*. Eventually this *install module and get things done in few clicks* runs out of it’s charm when a specific requirement comes through that doesn’t fit with it’s out of the box criteria. From this point on the PAIN of drupal begins.

4. I dont like the idea of *you have this magic function and here’re few lines of code* that you will put in this specific file and the desired text will appear on the site. I like to know how it’s working .. is it creating lots of sessions or lots of garbage .. is it process heavy and all that crap. Unfortunately that’s exactly what drupal does (hooks and theme functions that you’d write all over the site). Even more messy example: functions defined in one module/file is accessible in another file/module. That means it perhaps is declaring them as global. This is good and bad both at the same time. I’d like to have control over this functionality but do I have ? So far I dont think I have.

5. One of the biggest + point / brag about drupal is that it has a large community. But what about the fact that a lot of them are *asshole programmers* (definition of *asshole programmer* : Just so you know how to do a for loop does not make you a programmer/developer. There’re a lot more involved in it such as complexity..planning .. whether the for loop actually is needed or not .. efficient use of functions etc etc. So posting something like “Oo I wrote this for loop but it’s not terminating” on the blog is absolutely stupid and asshole like specially if the solution for that is, you forgot to give it a proper terminating condition because you are an asshole. You are just polluting the blog. programming is not in your capability. so stay out of it. But they dont cause they are assholes). I’m sure majority will agree that quantity on shit quality is actually crap. I felt the drupal blogs/forums are somewhat like that. (Ofcourse there’re some brilliants there. Not denying that fact).

6. it doesnt follow traditional CMS structure or some structure that is better than the traditional.

7. Since when it looked easy (from a CMS’ POV) having all the content on a flat list instead of some sort of folder or tree based structure. Yes, if it were the age when people communicated with a walky talky I would have gladly accepted this but we have smart phones now. And CMSes the a lot better than 5 years ago. I still can’t figured out how drupal has managed to survive all these years like a cockroach.

O wait .. I know : cause of the assholes, who are afraid of adapting new better changes and like to stuck with the old crappy cause the’re too lazy to keep up with the technologies. (probably still using walky talky to call their moms from their basement where they live).

So Why Am I Working on Drupal ?

Cause the client specifically asked for drupal. I guess this is quite common scenario why many developers (good or bad[like me]) who don’t like drupal but working on/with it. Some guy(Mr KnowItAll cause he, in dinosor’s age did some sort of programming [possibly wrote a hello world following Delphi for Dummies step by step]) in the decision making committee thought drupal is awesome without (i dont know) no particular valid reason or deluded by drupal’s misleading advantages (larger community, lots of plugins, broad support etc etc).

Why I wrote all these crap ?

I am so annoyed by drupal architecture and “drupal’s way of doing things” that I was almost blew up in anger. Some shrink somewhere said writing helps dealing with frustration. So I’m testing whether it actually works.

Also it could be because I’m a crappy developer. Or I don’t know drupal enough to appreciate it.

So far all I have felt about it is it’s a “pain in the ass”.

Maybe someday when I will know enough about it (after doing 5/6 projects according to the experts) I will probably say like the experts “I kinda dont hate it now”.

BTW this is what came up when I searched learning drupal:

UPDATE (16/11/2015): I kinda dont hate it now. I will write another post soonish explaining the good, bad and ugly in drupal.

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