By omigosh on
Do a Google search for "Drupal sucks" (in quotes). You'll get 3,530 results. I tried the same query with Joomla and got only 692 results. Tried again with Wordpress and got 12,200 results.
I've got about ten years of web design experience but working with Drupal makes me feel like a moron. It's taken me six months to get my first site done and it will be the last one I ever build with it. It's slow, overly complicated and badly documented. I started using Drupal beause I'm not a good coder and I was sick of patching up my own content managed websites. But even my elementary CMS seems to work better than Drupal's. This is the most disappointing technical innovation I've ever run across.
Comments
there is a better discussion
there is a better discussion over here: http://drupal.org/node/144239 . Some of the comments in that discussion may make your feelings stronger but there are other comments as well that side on justifying What Drupal IS.
Personally I feel proud of being a part of the drupal community and using drupal, though it may be a bit tiresome to get hold of it in the beginning.
Maybe you should try to build
Maybe you should try to build your sites in DrupalGardens first http://drupalgardens.com/ - with the help of drupalgardens you can enter the "drupal-world" in a simple way. If you are done on gardens you have the ability to export your whole site including the theme for more customization etc..
It still sucks
I've tried Drupal Gardens. It is slow as molasses.
I've visited the other forum site and am already familiar with the recommended book. I didn't buy it earlier because it seemed too advanced.
I understood, from my reading of the Oreilly book Using Drupal, that websites would be easy to develop. In fact the Overview on page 1 says "Drupal makes creating your website; adding new features; and day-to-day editing and deleting of content quick and easy."
This statement is misleading. The authors of the book conveniently don't leave their email addresses or other contact information. Are they ashamed of what they have written?
Some Drupal sites are impressive but a closer look reveals they are kept alive by full-time web programmers and trained maintainers. The few showcase sites that seem to be truly content managed by untrained maintainers are not impressive at all.
My conclusion is that Drupal is like the proverbial horse designed by a committee. In trying to do everything it does nothing and makes it difficult.
_
That's completely unfair-- every one of those authors, including angie "webchick" byron (one of the two drupal 7 core maintainers) are active members of the drupal community-- its likely you can reach them directly just about any day right in irc. They are hardly hiding or ashamed. In fact, for you to even suggest such a thing of highly visible drupal.org participants seems indicate you don't spend much time in the drupal community.
As for the misleading statement-- i can see why it can be perceived that way. But it's a relative thing-- 'quick and easy' relative to what? Relative to hand coding a full site in html using a text editor and dreamweaver? Then yes, relative to that it is 'quick and easy'. Relative to creating a document in a word processor? Then no, it's not 'quick and easy'. Relative to clicking away in 'site builder' -- again, no, not quick and easy. It's all relative.
Drupal has a long way to go but it's also come a long way (even just since I found it a few years ago). But the fact remains, creating a CMS type website is still a technical undertaking. Regardless of the CMS you select-- and they all have their pros and cons.
But all of this begs the bigger question-- if it sucks, why use it, lol. Feel free to go and create your web masterpieces in wordpress or joomla (or whatever other CMS is better than drupal). I've tried them both and I'll take drupal every day of the week and twice on sundays-- and no, i'm not a professional developer. Just a self taught code jockey.
i'll never understand why, people who think drupal sucks and don't want to use it anymore, feel the desperate need to make histrionic posts on drupal.org, lol.
Sorry, I think I'm being very
Sorry, I think I'm being very fair. If the authors of that book had qualified their introduction I'd have no complaint. But I bought that book and started my six-month exercise in frustration simply because of that statement and because the authors were major Drupal contributors. I wouldn't have used Drupal if they had been more accurate in their estimation of the effort involved in creating a reasonably complicated site.
As for contacting them, I've tried to so through Lullabot but they don't list individual emails, just an email form. I may never hear back from them.
I found it much easier to learn PHP and MySQL from a couple of books about five years ago. I was able to create about 10 sites within a few months. These sites offered full content management, e-newsletters, an events calendar, advertising and even 'themes'. Many of these sites are still operating. If you like I"ll send you the code and you can become an evangelist for my CMS since you're so easy to please.
Once I get this single Drupal site out of the way, I'll go back to doing my own coding or maybe buy into a commercial system. Drupal is far too much trouble with too few benefits.
Sorry you experienced slowness during the Drupal Gardens Beta
Recently we have rolled out several performance improvements, and soon we'll be adding CDN for even more performance, so we hope you give it a try again.