From an ex drupal site builder

I was asked to help out a client i use to work with, but i dont work in drupal anymore and can i just say that i am so glad i dont. After the site that i created had been taken over by someone else it has now been completed destroyed. Its looks really good though ( better then i had it ) but the client can in no way ,shape or form edit anything on the site. It has gone into hyper complex mode. let me give you an example

So there is are four rectangles ( i dont want to say blocks because that will confuse me has i carry on ) on a page each displaying information .. arguable static base information. So what did this person do. Well he created a rabbit hole. Each of these rectangles are pages themselves. They then each have their OWN view with a filter based on the content type and a taxonomy term , that is all the view is. Then .. and this is where it gets loopy, the views are blocks. So there are 4 views which are 4 blocks to display 4 rectangles of static content. All of this could have been created as one page of type page because it does not matter what taxonomy it is. This guy likes taxonomy though because there are tons of them.

So that is all well and good, but now i need to just changed the title. Easy right just filter the page type by its content type .. but hang on .. its based on a taxonomy term as well so i can filter it based on the content type by it will only show the nodes that have taxonomy .. "so just select the category in the filter section". Ah if life was only that simple. There are so many categories that the drop down list goes off the page completely , with one scroll the drop down is gone as are my hopes of getting to the page. A Search should do it right .. wrong , page not there, why .. only heavenly unicorns know that answer. So now i am wondering is it a page at all. So I navigate back to the most useless view ever created and it is .

So Now i am thinking maybe he has created some web service maybe with Json thats holding the data and mimicking the the representation as a page. I see him now eating pizza laughing with a evil laugh at the though that someone at some point in time might need to change the titles.... . . . . i think he is a joomla developer.

So back to why i am glad i dont use drupal. Well so many reasons but mainly the large scale complacency of drupal developers .. hang on hang on .. i am not dissing you its this environment that leads to the mentality of "Oh there is a module for that" so it has a few security holes or it doesnt quite do what i want so Ill just hack the site building to pieces . Heck i did it. Its a time saver for sure.

The core devs also seem to be running some sort of development sprint ( and i am not talking about scrum here ). drupal 8 already? How are companies suppose to keep up? This company i am working for is on drupal 6.18 and they dont have the money to now go and redevelop the thing in 7 and drupal 8 is almost out ( ok i am not actually sure of that, I just saw a module already packed for drupal 8) but this dev model seems to be a profit machine. You might be are well and proud about ohhh " the open source thing and we saving the coding world from big bad evil closed source code" but the amount of money companies have to fork out on developers to maintain a inherently unstable ( in that one joomla site builder can come and make a content management system into a content un-managable system - im not talking about the core code base ) platform and then constantly keep it up to date with updated modules and version. This is not open source. Yeah sure we can see the code .. whipty f87jk12ng do.

What acquia got 30 Mil in the last suit leg humping session. Open source ... yeah its not like it is in the heads of the hippy coders , its not white hat hacking, it is just plain out business 101 with a marketing campaign of "we are free". Its like prostitutes giving away their service for free and BAM! You have to go and buy penicillin . And all these hundreds of thousands of legacy sites are just waiting to be hacked, the security patch's are even on this site for the world to see with the core code to tap right into. Anyone know about www.csskxs.com? yeah go check your global.css's .

So i am glad i have moved on. There are some seriously core devs working in this system but I personally think its pretty broken and drupal should seriously consider adding a face monetary system instead of prancing around like a care free hippy with a neo marketing scheme.

I dont ever plan on using drupal again, if was fun while it lasted , ignorant fun , but fun none the less. Drupal does have a awesome community;