The lack of CONTENT Management in Drupal

Hello Everyone,

Please calm down. This is why I generally hate posting on websites, because these discussions inevitably rankle peoples feathers.
I will admit that the original tone of my message was borderline flame bait, but you have to understand that my problems started
when I went to upload some modules to my website and it essentially broke everything. It then took me 3 days (11 hrs each)
to try and figure out what the heck was going on. I eventually ended up fixing it. So from that standpoint I was
really frustrated when I posted that article. But despite my original tone, my points are valid and shouldn't be dismissed
simply because this is a "volunteer" project. In an earlier post I said I hate that attitude because saying it's a "volunteer" project,
"why don't you contribute," is a statement designed to put the user in their place and scare people from questioning or dare
to be frustrated by anything that goes on with the project.

I joined the Drupal community because I had hit a wall with things that I wanted to do with Xoops (like multi-site and subdomains) and the development has been "seemingly" nonexistent for several years. I was very involved with that community and lead the documentation efforts and helped keep the devs focused on the end-user experience prior to Xoops launching. The end result is a system that is very User Friendly, easy
to understand and pick up. Drupal on the other requires this huge learning curve, speaks a totally different language than any other
"standard" open source cms system. Nothing about it is very "intuitive," it's powerful and very flexible, sure

But there are certain basic things missing with Drupal, for example the News system is ridiculous, there's a place where you
can post your content - which is great, but to actually "manage," it, well....Before this system can become a true CMS, it needs
to provide some central way of managing CONTENT. Again, I don't say this to slam Drupal, I picked this system over all the others
because it's obviously very powerful and people are designing amazing websites with it. But I shouldn't have to go out and
hire developers to get the results that I want. It defeats the whole point of going with a "free" open source system. Again if I have
to hire developers to work with it, I would hire them to create something from scratch, purchase a reasonably priced
package or break out the old DreamWeaver, NetObjects or Go-Live and do it myself.

In all other CMS - Xoops, Joomla, PHPNuke, Zope, etc, there's one central place called "News General Configuration or Article Configuration, etc." where everything is there, it lists all the recent articles in a table, usually has an ordering feature, a publish/unpublish, publish date, and edit/delete tab. Where's this functionality in Drupal? I know when you post an article, these things are listed under the article, but as "drop down" boxes, my writers have no clue these things are even there - I'm actually going to create a user manual for my writers so they can properly post, I'll post it
on this site when I'm done to show you what I mean by simple and "clear," because I'm writing the guide for my writers who can basically
only use MS Word anything more technical than that their heads explode.

Another thing in most of these other systems, in the news area is a column layout button, where you can simply check a button and it'll automatically change the layout to a 2 or 3 column layout. If you don't like it, it's simple to go back to the regular single column layout. There's usually a
feature where you can set how the news is displayed - headline, teaser, spotlight, etc. Again, all of this is done from one central News admin area. In Drupal to do this stuff you have to hunt and peck through 10 different "modules" the settings, the views, the frontpage module, etc. Or you have to install panels and try and decipher how that works and where the actual pages are that use that. Or maybe design a frontpage in DreamWeaver and then copy and paste that code into the Page module (I think that would work), etc... So to make Drupal easier for use silly, demanding, complaining, whining, stupid, newbies who god forbid don't want to dig into code and hacks, how about creating a real News Module for the core?

Onto the blogging issue, I would like to start blogging, but I'm not entirely clear how to lay it out so that it "looks" like a blog, for instance
I "blogged" from an event a few months ago and the posts looked really cheesy and like any other regular news posting. Now this is clearly
a design issue on my part, but navigationally it just looked, I don't know plain. Just a bunch of teaser text. I don't know how Drupal could
sex that up to make it look more like a wordpress type of thing.