Plenty of Drupal Jobs for Computer Science Students
collegemogul.com
collegemogul.com
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)
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.
That said, nothing else out there compares to Drupal + Views + CCK. I just wish it performed better.
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.
The point that I think a lot of folks miss about Drupal (and CMS's in general) is that they are REALLY hard to write. If you're a RoR or Django developer, sit down some weekend and try to reproduce the Drupal core functionality. Get back to me in 6 months when you're ready to test.
I'm a Django developer by trade, but when I come across a client that needs a CMS, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Drupal is fantastic and very sophisticated. You can do amazing things with CCK and views.
Granted, almost any of the architecture choices can be questioned or even ridiculed, but that's inevitable when you are trying to be all things to all people. It's all too easy for someone random programmer to come in and pick on one thing and decide the code is crap, but yet the same programmer's ideal solution would only work for maybe 5% of Drupal's userbase.
Also, FWIW, I'm not a Drupal fanboy. I can't stand Drupal and will never work with it again. I think building a career on Drupal will severely limit your skillset, and I think time estimation and client relationship management is made much more difficult for a web developer due to the byzantine constraints it imposes. All that said, Drupal does what it does brilliantly and in much sharper form than any of the other PHP CMSs.
The thing is that I am an end-to-end web developer with 15 years experience with the full stack from back end, DB technology, server side languages, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Usability, etc. I have a very precise idea of what I want, and how to build it. With something like Drupal, you're only using 2-15% of the architecture for any given project, but yet the rest of it imposes assumptions and constraints which end up being performance and conceptual overhead. You can get a lot of mileage out of it, but you're constantly thinking in terms of the Drupal framework. This manifests in terms of lots of little compromises. I much prefer to build the app up from a basic set of web building blocks such as is provided by frameworks like Rails or Django. This typically costs more, but enables a much more polished product in terms of design, performance, and extensibility.
Just what about Drupal is so good for CMS that isn't also trivial in RoR or Django?
Also, I find it poor form to expose the Django admin interface to your users in place of developing your own templates and view logic. Seems like a "srsly" bad idea.
What kind of site did you build where django took too long compared to drupal? Have you come across the Pinax Project?
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal,+joomla,+wordpress&...
edited to add: note the spikes in joomla and wordpress, with subsequent dips. it seems kind of ballsy to say that drupal is definitely not going through or going to go through the same thing.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal%2C+joomla%2C+wordpr...
If you say there are "plenty of drupal jobs" that is more of an absolute measure than, "huge increase in drupal jobs"
Oh, wait, I guess that explains the demand for Drupal coders.
The only Drupal site I've seen which actually did something interesting was a site from the last canadian election:
I know a few web design firms where the "Drupal programmers" really are just the ones who just know enough about Drupal to get the things working the way the graphic designers want them. They just install the right modules and know how to configure things and where to change files to get things to display properly. They really don't know much about PHP at all.