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Tech Republic Review Doesn't Like Drupal Very Much

So, I just read the Tech Republic critique of Drupal and he has some fair points. Basically that Drupal needs an installer and needs some polish to make it easier to grok for first time users. Fair enough. The funny thing is that this article made me realize that Drupal is the Debian of the CMS world. And if you get that reference, then you're the kind of person who is reading my website. Anyway, to explain "the Debian of CMS" it's something like this.

Drupal - the Debian of CMS

Drupal may not be the prettiest thing. It may be hard to use right out of the box. It may have certain religious ideas that it sticks to and which piss off the user community (ahem...backwards compatability). It has instructions which don't always make sense (page vs. story vs...)

Drupal is the system, if you use it long enough to get to understand it, that is an interesting and encouraging system to use as a developer. It gets developers excited to work within its framework. This makes for a virtuous circle where more and more and more and more interesting things are written that make Drupal better. Further it also means that when someone is looking for a system to use to build their website it is used by luminaries and cool projects and fancy social borkmarking community things.

So when someone says Debian is clearly unsuitable because it's number 7 on DistroWatch just remember that Ubuntu, based on Debian, is number 1. When someone says "Linux will never be more than a hobbyst tool" just remember that almost everyone uses linux every day whether they know it or not. And when someone says Drupal is too confusing or too hard to use, well, my feeling is that they are just begging for the installer which allows easy creation of installation profiles so with 4.7+ (i.e. the next version of drupal to be released) we'll see tons of Drupal distributions that will solve his problems.

1,000 Blossoms of Drupal

Seriously, the installer and profiles will fix most of this guys problems. Change the menus, disable a few modules, enable some others (like TinyMCE) and basically all of his complaints are addressed. Easy! The blogger installation profile - everyone wants that! The PodCast installation profile, these guys talk about it a couple times! What else?

With a tip of the hat to CMSReport. CMS report aggregates lots of content about all CMS, but they also have some original content. I'd prefer more of the latter and less of the former, but that's just me.

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Comments

it is not designer Friendly

I tried it you are right it is the debian of CMS. I tried it after all the attention it seemed to be getting. Its not worth the trouble learning how to configure and work with it. Joomla seems to be doing much better in this regard. If Drupal is a debian Joomla is a Mac. With the release of Joomla 1.5 which has been completly refactored I am sure developers would quite whining about its horrible codebase. Plus I can get better support and help with the incredibly large number of Tutorials/Screencast etc avaliable and a more responsive community. I am sure drupal could do a lot better if they did something about its admin user interface and installation procedure(yeah I know in the coming version they do have a automated installer).

Thanks for the Hat

I just wanted to say thanks to Greg for pointing out CMS Report as a good site to visit. I hear you on the original content.

While I would love to provide more original content it's nearly impossible to keep people informed of all the latest happenings with content management systems. So where I can't provide the story myself on a particualar CMS topic I lean on the news aggregator to get readers to the sites they need to go to stay informed. Some people like this, some people don't.

After reading your post, I decided it might be best to make sure I provide a link on my pages for original content.

-Bryan