"Drupal Sucks"

If you knew anything about object-oriented programming, you'd realize that (hang on, I have to scroll up to grab your own words as the best evidence) Drupal's hook system is probably the most OO thing you've seen in decades. Just because it's not called a class or a stdObject or whatever doesn't mean it's not an object, Smart Guy. ;)

From Wikipedia's page on OOP:

Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction, encapsulation, messaging, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance.

Data abstraction in Drupal? Check. Been there since the beginning. Whole big Drupal API thing (you know, API documentation, something "real devs" used to take seriously back in the day) about it if you care to read...

Encapsulation? You betcha', tough guy! We encapsulate things in directories, not files. You might know these directories as modules. There is a very sophisticated (but also simple and standardized) way of restricting or allowing access -- by other modules or by users, content types, bundles, fields, menus or any other wild thing you might dream up to encapsulate them in. Whole bunch of API documentation about using Drupal's hooks, permissions, and menu callbacks if you care to read it and stop being such an ingnoramus, big fella.

Messaging... hmmm... we don't usually need to send messages to other objects because they've already "gotten the message" by the time Drupal bootstraps, in 30ms or so. Again, why tie up processing power?

Modularity... well, uh, they're not called "modules" for nothing.

Polymorphism... one thing having many forms? You mean like a variable? Gee, ever looked at Drupal's $user object? Either you haven't, or you don't know as much about OOP as you profess in your pompous pontification above. Yeah, we have polymorphism. Making one little function behave in different ways depending on the parameters Drupal feeds it is one of the most fun things about developing with Drupal. Again, the bootstrap just gives you so much to work with...

Inheritance... we don't really do this one much in the Drupal world, it's true. Gosh, we suck. Of course, we don't need it, either, for the most part since we have so many other ways of overriding... but hey, it's not very "OO," right? Oh... wait... Drupal modules can and do use classical inheritance when they need it so, snap I guess it is kinda "OO" after all.

You know the old saying, "'Tis a poor carpenter who blames his tools." Well, I would say it is also a poor carpenter who disrespects tools he doesn't know how to use.

Let me take a slight detour and seem to contradict myself: I do think that Unix beats DOS/Windows hands-down for reasons that I can't fully expose here, mainly because of the way a Unix system keeps everything modular. Windows is always tied to the registry, and the longer a Windows machine runs, the more gucked up the registry will get. That's why Windows machines tend to slow down over time. I've seen Linux boxes run for many years, smooth as silk.

But for most people, Windows is just fine.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming: Drupal...

I don't think any development tool is inherently "easier" or "better" than any other. The final product is all that matters. "Killer Apps" are built with .Net, Ruby on Rails, Zend, Wordpress, Joomla or any number of tools. The thing is, computing devices are incredibly stupid. They can only do exactly what they're told. You can use any number of tools to tell them what to do. It's much more about the carpenter, not the tools.

Wordpress is a fantastic CMS if all you want is a blog that will get moderate traffic. What I've seen with Wordpress over the years, though, is that as you extend its functionality, it becomes hacky and unstable. It also does not scale well. Sure, you can scale a Wordpress site, but to get a WP site to handle a million unique visitors with a wide horizontal spread of traffic (say, 100,000 pages hit on a regular basis) takes a lot of doing. Drupal, on the other hand, is built to scale seamlessly. I know this from experience when one of my little sites hosted on a $9/month shared host got pounded with 100,000 unique visitors across multiple pages one day after being featured on Yahoo's front page. Not only did the site not slow down, it performed better that day because everything went into cache.

Another thing about Wordpress is that the plugins are just that -- plugins. Each plugin kind of sticks out on its own and does its own thing. We have modules in Drupal that are like that to an extent. We also have very powerful modules that do little to nothing when simply enabled (Views, Feeds, Services, Rules, etc.) but provide developers and site builders with incredible tools.

And I think Joomla is a good CMS as well -- better than Wordpress for a non-blog site.

Yes, the learning curve with Drupal is a bit steeper, but the flexibility is incredible. As for getting rid of your "Read More" link, there are a few simple ways to do that. I smiled when I read that because I remember going through the same sort of thing. Once you learn how to do something with Drupal, you find that a whole world of other possibilities opens up because you understand the system a bit more with each little victory.

I also have to say that for the "middle user," the site editor or admin, Drupal is getting much better out-of-the-box, but a good developer will be able to create a pleasant, intuitive user experience for that user, giving them enough control to edit content but not so much that they can get confused or break the site. Again, I know this from experience with clients who are delighted to be able to edit pages inline, view their site statistics, manage mailing lists, and do other things just by logging in.

In the final analysis, though, it really doesn't matter what tool you use to build your site or app. What matters is that you know how to use the tool and you understand the basics of good engineering (do more with less, and heed Murphy).

Thanks for your input.

... just building a basic site with moderate traffic, Wordpress is a godsend. If you want to build an extensible web application that will be rock-solid for many years, there are better options, though, Drupal just being one of many.

I disagree with you about Whitehouse.gov -- the government wants to deploy the best, lowest-cost solution for a complex problem. That's why so many big government sites are running on Drupal. It's also why so many big private-sector sites are running on Drupal. Nobody is just throwing money away these days.

What is this about being unable to uninstall modules? You won't be able to uninstall a module if another module depends on it, and that's good. It prevents non-developers from breaking sites through configuration mistakes. I've never had a problem removing a module, and most of them will even "clean up after themselves" after being un-installed.

As for updating, I've actually found Wordpress far more finicky in that regard. If you're using a "push this button to update" solution provided by your host, that's not really Drupal's fault. One of the things that has continually impressed me about Drupal over the years is just how forgiving it is in that regard. I've not only updated but moved entire groups of sites from one hosting environment to another in a couple of hours without a hiccup, and updating is as simple as replacing the files and running update.php. AND you can update multiple sites in one shot which can be a nightmare with Wordpress MU.

Heck, the site you're looking at now started as a Drupal 4.1 site. It's 6.24 now which is a heck of a lot of minor updates and a couple of major updates (4 to 5 and 5 to 6).

As I said, though, it's not for everybody, and Wordpress is probably a better solution for a non-developer with a smallish site that won't need to be extended much.

I'm not saying that Drupal is the solution to everyone's problems, just that it definitely doesn't suck.

AOP and OOP are not mutually exclusive. How is this logically inconsistent with my assertion above that Drupal is, in fact, object-oriented, despite the fact that it does not (generally) use classical inheritance (although some modules and APIs do use it extensively, particularly Services, Feeds, and the Search API)? Drupal takes object orientation a step further.

I find it funny that you think functional programming is old-school. It is not at all. They didn't have the processing power for functional programming in 1979. From your source:

Drupal is written in the functional programming paradigm. Objects are used for passing basic data elements, such as users and nodes.

So, you see, we do use objects. If you follow the link to the functional programming page, you'll see that...

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.

HTTP itself is a stateless protocol. In fact, I think stateful web apps are a really cool idea (which is why I've recently been dabbling in WT) but 99.9 percent of web applications are not currently stateful.

With regard to 1979, you're confusing functional programming with procedural programming. Procedural programming is the opposite of functional programming, aka, imperative programming.

Thanks for playing, but like most of the bitter Drupal haters, you're just plain wrong.

... Drupal is fairly object-oriented. You are aware that just because you call something a "Class" or scope your variables by declaring them within public or private functions does not make you particularly cool or particularly object-oriented. What you put in a .class file, I put in an .inc file. What you call a public function, I call a hook. Whatever.

People who are not mentally capable of understanding that MVC is just a fancy acronym for a way of organizing files probably shouldn't be impugning the intellectual acuity of others.

... I want to highlight a couple of semi-valid points you made:

• Some contributed modules do suck, and it is often a good idea to either roll your own or hack them to suit your needs. In defense of that, however, I must say that many contributed modules are excellent, and they are all "Free as in 'speech' and as in 'beer'." This is in contrast to Wordpress or Joomla or (God forbid!) .Net. If you don't like the code, you're free to change it.
• The markup can get pretty nasty. This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. Then again, you do control templates and preprocesses so it is possible to make a Drupal site with very clean markup -- just not usually worth the effort since most people don't look at the page source anyway.

As for the rest of what you said, it's pretty much dead wrong front-to-back. For example, it's good for modules to add CSS and JS because then you're only adding rules when you need them rather than globally. If you're aggregating your CSS and JS (which we always do on a large complex site), it really doesn't matter because it all ends up in a couple of files anyway.

I could go on point-by-point, but I'm tired...

... I do use CodeIgniter and have built sites with Joomla. You're right that it's very easy to build simple web apps with these tools. Ditto for Symfony, Cake, Zend and a other frameworks. The problem is scalability. Drupal's data structure is highly normalized (meaning you do give up some performance, but you gain consistency throughout the system and changes propagate cleanly which is ideal for large, complex applications).

I don't know what you're talking about with regard to working on multi-developer teams. I find Drupal very good in this regard due to its modular nature. If everyone is working on a different piece, you very rarely run into conflicts, assuming you're using a halfway decent version control system.

I'm not saying Drupal is perfect, but the fact that you find it too complex is not exactly a compelling argument for its suckiness.

That's funny!

Yeah, I've never been known for my visual arts acumen.

Drupal is not. According to your source, it runs 20 percent of the top 10,000 websites. I'm not sure what their methodology is for calculating this, but that seems pretty solid.

You are correct that it's good to constantly keep one's skills up to date.