Why Xaneon Switched from Mambo to Drupal

Thanks for the welcome :-)

The techies, such as myself, on our little team always do a full code review before adopting a new system or application. When we first evaluated Mambo once upon a time, we weren't exactly thrilled with its architecture; but it had a lot of other things going for it, so we went ahead and adopted it. Obviously, at that point, we really had no idea how limiting and frustrating our choice would yet prove to be...

I honestly don't know how we managed to skip over Drupal on that same "round-up"... But it's at least better to join this party a bit late than never. Drupal's got everything a future Mambo 5.0 was supposed to have: built-in clean URLs (I'll have to wean myself from talking of "SEF"...), node-based content database, real access control, and much else besides. What's there not to like?

As for Drupal's code, it's certainly one of the cleaner PHP apps I've personally looked at. It's obvious from the code and its design that there are some very experienced and talented developers working on it.

While some people in the Mambo camp have complained that Drupal's code is not "object-oriented enough", I see those kind of complaints mainly as "hobby programmer's syndrome": the PHP language wasn't exactly designed with object-orientation in mind, and buzzwords don't solve real-world problems; well designed and implemented code does. I've written large applications in Lisp/Scheme without ever missing object-orientation, and I use Ruby on Rails instead of PHP if I want to map some elegant object hierarchy on top database objects with reasonable effort.

It's always about the best tool for the task at hand, and Drupal performs admirably for most of our particular needs.

That's an interesting upcoming feature you mentioned, Adrian. We've actually already ourselves implemented http://[username].mysite.com/title-goes-here for one project. Very useful for creating a Blogger-type service ;-)

Ours was a quick-and-dirty approach, though, done without any modifications to the core or modules, through a maximally simple, shorter than 100 line addition to sites/mysite.com/settings.php. Got to love how easy it was to do that!

as a project which has been integrated in both drupal and mambo, the article was right on.

its been quite nice and amazing as to how well we integrated with drupal and how nicely the system behaves. The power of a powerful system lies in the fact that it allows other components to make its own decisions, but does a great job integrating all the components (we code in a very non-drupalish OO manner, use Smarty etc)

Getting the code up and running on Mambo was actually quite easy. However integrating it within the Mambo core seems to be a lot of work/effort (we have not made any headway on this part)

While we are at it, here are a few things that would be nice to address in drupal at some stage: (which i dont think are on the roadmap)

1. a better more general ACL based permissiong system. (not everything in life is a node!). Drupal's permisisoning system is ok, but not scalable for large number of roles / permissions

2. better seperation of code and html

3. More friendly (potentially xml based) module installation. Check mambo's component installer

lobo

Try google and you should be able to get a cached version.

Edit: Hmmm...Unusually, neither google cache nor waybackmachine.org has the page. I think they may have requested google to remove the page from their cache (unless cache behaves differently).

Hmmm, I'm really disappointed as I keep trying to talk up Drupal with friends and I thought this article really was the bees knees.

The closest thing I could find was this thread on the Joomla forum.
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?topic=1676.0

Xaneon has been dissolved since last November so I don't imagine the article will return to xaneon.com (though the domain is Kari's, so I have no idea or control regarding what he intends to do with it).

As I'm the one who wrote the article, I have a local copy of it and can e-mail it to anyone who needs it (just use the Drupal contact form in my profile to contact me, and remember to include your e-mail address.)

If there's enough demand, I may put it up on my website. I'm a bit surprised at the attention, though, as I didn't honestly think it was such a great article. It was written in a hurry and didn't go nearly into as much detail as I would've wanted to if I'd had the time.

Thanks for keeping drupal users informed about the change.

OT: I recently found this homegrown caching project by another drupal user:
http://www.aguntherphotography.com/projects/website_cache.htm