The last time I did any coding was several years ago when PHP was known as PHP / FI (PHP being "Personal Home Page" and not "Hypertext Preprocessor" as it is known now). When I looked at Drupal's 4.x code, I had a good idea of what each line did. It's getting harder with 5.x, and Drupal 6.x is around the corner that's supposedly using PHP 5.x? Then PHP 6.x is in the works? I upgraded my Drupal site from 4.x to 5.x a few months ago and now I'm finding that I might be behind with 6.x around the corner.
If I have to upgrade to Drupal 6.x, I'm hoping it's going to cook my dinner and pay my bills for me. LOL. I think the Drupal community should devote more of its resources to making it easier to install (to attract new users), and especially more easier to use and customize the advanced modules such eCommerce, Views, etc.
I think Drupal is favouring technical achievements over ease of use.
Just some suggestions, which will probably never get implemented. I still love Drupal. :-)
Comments
Newbie
It really does need for one to be devoted and php + html + css literate to use Drupal. I just started customizing it and was only after few weeks I got into most functionality (that I needed). People usually don't have such patience, and I found that one thing is very good and should be promoted more. This is Installation profiles - different versions of Drupal (which come with all needed modules inside).
I watched what can be done with Drupal, it was great. But, when I tried, core installation was nothing like. I then installed CCK, Views, TinyMCE, IMCE... then I got somewhere. But what a pain was to found out what I need among forest of modules. Great help was documentation + IRC #drupal-support. Thanks guys!
My conclusion is to put more Installation profiles versions that are ready to use with specific features. Than, only user intervention is with design.
Adding more to the core
I think one good idea to attract new users or make it easier for them is to package the core with XAMPP as an autoinstall program for Windows machines.
Yes, I agree with you that there are too many mods to install to make it functional. Some of these mods should become part of the core in the future. Like you suggested, this could be done through installation profiles.
Just my 2 cents. I have no intention of using another CMS, though.
Drupal nirvana in four days
I was able to get most of what i needed setup within 4 days, moving from wordpress to drupal,
In order to match what I had with wordpress (20+ plugins) i had to do some digging in the forum to find the answers, my nails are raw as hell lol.
My wordpress was a fully functional CMS setup (meaning) it could do just about everything and even make you breakfast, with Drupal out of the box matched at least half of the plugins i was using with wordpress, that itself makes wordpress obsolete, not to mention the drupal install was 5 warp speeds faster than wordpress install, then i had to find a few more mods to take care of the rest.
I agree its tricky to figure drupal out, i guess I should consider myself fortunate to be able to replicate what i had with wordpress within 4 days of using drupal. Is it a record ? :))
One thing someone pointed out here was to add more mods to the core, this is something that stumped me in the beginning, along with everything else in the drupal core, language, etc
I think a major green light with drupal would be to add more functionality out of the box so that most users would never need to use another mod. How great it would be to move from another cms or blog to drupal and be setup the very first day ready to go.
Anything related to site content setup, menus, blocks, etc should be ready to go easy to use.
I love the admin setup in drupal but was confused with everything be treated as content all listed in the same location and categories being used on everything. The terminology is from another planet and is not very userfriendly, what the hell is a node anyway ( i don't want to know).
My concern re: content is the more pages, stories, blocks, content views the admin area is going to get messy I think. Perhaps improve the admin interface for easy navigating
Wordpress is still king in terms of fast friendly and easy, its terminology makes more sense and having easy to understand php hooks, tags to put into template is brilliant.
With drupal, every time i do a seach i have to break out a dictionary just to understand what the person was talking about bladiyo code itaobe code ya code
my 3 cents and some change
I've used Geeklog, then
I've used Geeklog, then phpbb with MxPortal. It took me over 2 weeks to set up my site on Drupal. Your 4 days may be a record.:-)
Drupal does have its own terminology that one has to acquire oneself with to use it effectively. Work place analagy: Drupal is a complicated employee who has many talents; is powerful, smart, flexible; does things their own way, gets the job done, but is very hard to understand and harder to get to know. Drupal is an acquired taste. :-)
Agree
Agree with all the posts. Drupal is a nightmare for anyone without a PhD in web development.
I tried it, gave up and moved on to another CMS with no requirements for technical skills.
The biggest problem is That Drupal is built by geeks for geeks, and the community suffers intenesely from groupthink: we're always right, and criticism is violently suppressed.
What is needed is more input from non-technical users- the people who, after all, are the final users of any CMS. Open source products are most attractive to people and businesses who can't afford exensive commercial products. Alas, these are also the same people who can't afford expensive web designers on staff, or to set up their CMS. The people who are most drawn to drupal are the people who most need something that can work out of the box (without an army of plugins and mods), and be easily customised using menus and point-and-click (rather than HTML coding).
The fact that I can't format this very comment without knowing HTML (no WYSIWYG editor, but plenty of info on HTML tags) is just proof that the community is blind to the real world. I don't know (and don't want to know) HTML. I do know how to highlight text and select the big, black 'B' to make the text bold. And spellchecking?
Every release has more technical improvements, better code blah blah- and zero usability improvements. Each new release is just as user-unfriendly as the last.
Less input from designers, more from ultimate users is what Drupal needs. To start with, let's have a rich text WYSIWYG editor out of the box. And none of that nonsense about it being available as an add-on. If you went to buy a car, and the dealer told you to buy one without a steering wheel, because you can always instal one yourself, you'd tell him where to shove his car.
That's just silly
Violence? You're being silly.
If you just want a blog site and don't want to think about it, perhaps you should just go to blogger.com.
If you want a basic site that you can control, setting up a Drupal takes about five minutes IF you have a properly configured webserver and database, and permissions in the filesystem. If you don't have those two things, no CMS is going to be installable.
Drupal is intentionally split into a small "core" and a large set of contributed modules numbering in the many hundreds, allowing for complete customization. The extensibility lets you do anything you want at the cost of investing your time in the system.
For free, Drupal provides functionality far beyond a CMS that would have cost me over half a million dollars in capital expenses, three months of setup work, and an open account with a consulting firm just a few years ago.
As for your specific examples of WYSIWYG editing and spellchecking:
There are several modules supporting well-known WYSIWYG editors. There are legitimate reasons, including legal reasons, why they are not bundled into the Drupal core (and you may have to download components from other sites).
As for spellchecking, isn't that built into your browser? This isn't 1997.
Silly
Yelvinton
I'm being silly? And you're being a mannerless idiot. Your unecessarily rude and yes violent response was utterly predictable, and exactly what I described- the knee-jerk 'we are right and Drupal is perfect' defensiveness that is what prevents Drupal from being user-friendly.
I'm not going to even debate with you. The point has been made thousands of times already. Just learn some manners, ok?
Installation Profiles + Documentation
More choice/usage of Installation Profiles + Better/More Documentation is the key to solving many basic users requirements in Drupal... but why are we bemoaning these issues here, when we are all capable of fixing them? Anybody can contribute to the handbook, or submit a installation profile that works for them to solve a common usage scenario.
As for WYSIWYG, spell-checking in core? No, no, no. I manage four drupal 5.x sites, and I have not deployed these features in any of them, although I do use 20 out of the 23 the modules currently supplied in 'Core - optional'... that tells me something. And if I did want to deploy a nicer GUI for entering text in the future, I'd want to be able to choose which implementation of that I used by browsing through a range of available modules, not being forced to one. Drupal is designed to be modular to meet a very wide range of website requirements (and again, maybe this needs to be made clearer) - which may mean that 'Core' on its own actually meets no requirements, but if you take that away then you're crippling one of its best features.
Lastly, I am always surprised and a little frustrated when people expect to be able to just download a (free) software program, and despite confessing to having no programming knowledge, still expect to be able to get a website with advanced features running with no effort on their part... yes, drupal does have a slightly steeper learning curve than some other alternatives, but all the information you need on drupal, php, css, or mysql is freely available either on drupal.org or elsewhere on the internet. And there is a fantastically generous, supportive community here who do their best to help.
Yelvington: There's is no
Yelvington:
There's is no doubt in my mind that Drupal is the most powerful and flexible CMS available. I have no intention of using another CMS, having tried two others (3 if you count my 2 day experimentation with Joomla). Amusis said he tried using Drupal but gave up on it because it was too hard to install, but he was concerned enough to take this time and gave feedback to the community. We should be thankful for that and inquire about what specifically made him change his mind?
It's true that anyone with a hosting account can install Drupal's core in less than 30 seconds through Fantastico and Cpanel. But to modify, customize, Drupal, you should set up a version of Drupal on a local workstation to test changes before those changes are live. This requires installing, and knowledge of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. For most people this is done on a Windows machine. Then there's the actual installation of Drupal itself on the local workstation. If this step is difficult, it may turn many potential Drupal users to other alternatives.
Also, I think it is much easier to "de-install" modules than to install them. With installation profiles, users can remove modules they don't need with a click of a mouse.
It's been said many times before, that Drupal is built by geeks for geeks. I think that judging by the feedback that are given to new users who are offering improvement suggestions, Drupal will remain that way.
I'm sticking with Drupal all the way. But I think the next time a new potential user turns away from Drupal, it may be a good idea to ask them something like, "Specifically, what step along the process did you find difficult?"