Comment by saltcod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saltcod | Hacker News Reader

After about 10 minutes with Plone, a few months with Joomla, about 2 years with Drupal, and finally 3 years with WordPress, I think WordPress is still a brilliant solution for lots of problems.

The closest competitor, Drupal, is an absolute nightmare. For designers, developers and certainly for the end user. It still doesn't even ship with a wysiwyg editor—hard to disagree that this is precisely what the end user wants.

In Drupal, developing themes is a nightmare, theming Views output is an absolute disaster, and upgrading modules/core will almost certainly result in a whitescreen.

I don't see an alternative to WordPress at the moment. If you want to give you clients a reasonable admin interface I don't see another way around it. And I don't find that clients mind it changing 2-3 times a year—they all say it gets better each time.

Though it certainly is blog-oriented, and you will have to twist and bend it to act as a CMS, having to do this is a lot more fun than trying to wrangle a Views template file.

It's safe to say that you didn't have a great Drupal experience, but did you really spend two years working with it and not see its advantages? I would have moved on long before that.

Drupal does have a steep learning curve, and it is certainly not for everyone. Out of the box, it's extremely easy to install... but you end up with nothing more than Wordpress until you extend it. The goal with any project though should be to find the tool that works best for the situation. For me, Drupal is (or at least can be) the answer the majority of the time.

Once you get Drupal, understand where everything is, comprehend nodes, can appreciate the beauty of blocks, and can recall which module you need for the specific situation - Drupal goes from being a nightmare to a dream. Projects that would normally take days to code in PHP or Rails end up taking hours with Drupal. You never have to think about validation, mobile compliance, or site speed if you know how to customize Drupal. To me, the best part is the community. Time and money is saved thanks to the huge number of modules and themes to choose from.

If you end up giving it another shot, check out the lynda training videos or grab a book from Amazon.

Drupal is halfway between an application framework (like Ruby) and a CMS (like Wordpress). For complex, content-driven sites there's nothing out there that comes close to providing the functionality that it does.

It's definitely overkill for a simple Wordpress style use case, where you have a user who wants to post to a blog. But it provides a lot of the functionality that the OP listed as missing from Wordpress.

There are plenty of cases where you would not need a WYSIWYG editor on a website - for example, when it's simply providing a web services API to another application, when it's just a front-end aggregating content from another source or when it's being used for mobile. All of which you can do with Drupal.

It's certainly not perfect, but it's definitely got it's uses.

Ruby isn't an application framework. You're probably thinking of Rails.

I already posted about this in a different sub-thread, but it's applicable here as well: Take a look at ProcessWire. It might very well cover 80% of Drupal's use cases, it's vastly easier to set up, extend, and maintain, and the admin UI is exquisitely minimal. I've used it on two projects so far, and with its roadmap, it's looking like my go-to CMS for years to come.

Drupal actually has a different paradigm than what most other CMSes atleast pretend at - PAC (http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/mvc-vs-pac)

The fact that modules break, etc. imho is a Good Thing - in following the rule of "failing fast". Since, you dont need to change/hack the drupal core to do anything complex, if a module is breaking it is typically highlighting incompatibilities with other modules (99.99% of the time). Giving a white screen on module install is exactly the right time to have it happen, rather than 1 month later, when it goes live.

I completely agree with you on the admin UI part - I had just two main peeves with Drupal 6: Postgres support, which got fixed in Drupal 7 and admin UI, which is not yet done. I also wish that they provide a couple of starter "installation profiles" - blog, wiki, corporate, etc. - enabling a quick start for 99% of the population.

Agreed. Before Automattic hired an in-house ui/ux person the admin interface was pretty rough and not pleasant to look at and reasonably okay to use. Moving forward from 3.0 the admin interface should still about the same with incremental refinements.

"""After about 10 minutes with Plone, a few months with Joomla, about 2 years with Drupal, and finally 3 years with WordPress, I think WordPress is still a brilliant solution for lots of problems."""

I agree. And I think this says a lot of the sorry state of Open Source (actually, even proprietary) CMS engines.

Wordpress is kinda nice, but it too breaks down.

For sites after a certain level of complexity, instead of CMS like Drupal etc, what would be useful would be a CMS lib, to build your own solution around.

Don't have my work in your idiotic constraints, just give me something like (fake language):

front_page_articles = get("type"=>"article", "limit"=>5, "published"=>true, "order"=>"DESC");

search_results = search("query"=>$query, "limit"=>100, "order"=>"RELEVANCE", "range"=>[10,20]);

add_document("body"=>$body, "title"=>$title, "createdBy"=>getCurrentUser().id. ...);

The thing that Apache Jackrabbit could be, but isn't exactly/yet.

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