Interdependent Web

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(note: I don't hate Drupal; this is the title of a DrupalCon session by James Walker.)  Session details: Why I Hate Drupal

• James ("walkah") Walker has been working full-time on Drupal since 2003
  
• co-founded Bryght, a hosted Drupal service (before Drupal had an easy installer)
• Wordpress was founded at the same time and succeeded wildly while Bryght failed
• now works for Lullabot as director of education, trying to make Drupal make sense
  

1. the scary alien head logo -- what's that about?
   
2. exponential growth ... but Joomla and Wordpress and even SharePoint are way ahead
3. Drupal is a CMS, so should make it easy to manage content, but it is still very difficult for most people
   1. list of modules is daunting and misleading
   2. theming section doesn't offer much improvement; more likely to make it worse
   3. unclear how to upload pictures or format text, and input filters block tags
   4. 4400 contributed modules -- where do you start?
   5. documentation is unclear and hard to search, and community is not supportive of newbies
   6. Views 2 interface is really confusing!
   7. upgrading process is brutal
   8. so upgrade on a staging server... but merging is nearly impossible!
4. so maybe Drupal is a development framework... but limitations of PHP have dictated some weird coding
   1. arrays as objects?
   2. some of our most creative work is justifying our half-assed compromises
   3. we're told not to hack core, but drupal_alter / hook_form_alter essentially build things twice
   4. "Not Invented Here" philosophy sometimes prevents us using external libraries even if they've already solved the problem
      1. PHP has a built-in function for loading configuration files, but we don't use it for .info files!
      2. used to use a 3rd-party XMLRPC library, but we wrote our own
      3. James himself wrote our own OpenID library and now has to support it
   5. frameworks should make our lives easier!  but API is not intuitive at all and many obvious functions are missing
   6. some column names are reused in different contexts in multiple tables, like vid
5. so maybe Drupal is a community... but growing so fast that nobody knows anybody anymore, so it's hard to work effectively
   
   1. to our credit, most original community members are still involved
   2. Drupal 6 had 900 contributors, but only 2 could commit patches -- they're great people, but not superhuman and have to understand all of core
      
   3. anybody can change an issue to "reviewed and tested by the community," so only some testers have credibility, and new contributors don't know whom to pester
   4. not a meritocracy but a do-ocracy ... so "do more" and sleep less and have no life
   5. Drupal is not a movement because only developers are running with it... when non-techies run with it, then maybe it will be a movement
6. need to choose -- what is Drupal trying to be, and to whom?  Core needs to be useful to somebody out of the box.