I give up

maybe drupal doesnt fit your needs and joomla or whatever does. remember, it is a platvorm rather than an ready to use outofthebox thing...

--
groets
bertb

In a few days my first Drupal-site will be finished, and I have to admit I have experienced the same frustration described above and it costed me way too much time.Though not an experienced programmer I know a little PHP/MySql. I will stick with Drupal because it has charmed me, but to me Drupal is a difficult woman, always looking for a fight and getting it too. It gobbled up lots of time the past 2 months. It's quite possible some of the things I mention below are simply untrue, because after 2 months I still have no clear view of Drupal's inner workings.

Some minuses about Drupal:
- Learning curve is steep compared to something like Joomla.

- It's difficult to theme beyond simple alterations. Sure it can be done, but it will give you hell. Soon you will be writing your own MySql statements in template.php. I took a look at ExpressionEngine mentioned in the post, it's much, much easier to grasp and theme and also quite powerful. Sure you get page.tpl but it's just one generic template. The node.tpl, block.tpl etc. are also generic templates, so you need some knowledge of php and Drupal to make them behave properly if you want some changes in the lay-out in different sections of the site.

- Drupal documentation is chaotic and badly written. Sorry, but it really is. Most of the time I haven't been able to find the answer I was looking for. This takes up time, lots of it! I still don't understand the scoping of Drupal, not some trifle! I'm sure it's explained somewhere, couldn't find it though. I consider this a very serious shortcoming. Yes I know, don't start.

- Drupal core seems rock-solid but a module like Flexinode, which I couldn't do without, is indeed bugging a lot since Drupal 4.7. I had to apply my own dirty fix to get it up again and it gives me the shivers, it's not the sort of stability I like. Why isn't Flexinode in the core yet? I think anybody who wants to use Drupal as a CMS needs it badly.

- Right now I'm running 4.7.0, because I had my share of problems after upgrading, I'm scared of upgrading again, I'm afraid it will break some modules or maybe even worse things might happen so it will take up another week or so to get it all fixed. Same goes for clean URL's. I tried it in an early stage of development and nothing worked anymore. I disabled it again, still nothing worked ...

- Even with just a few modules enabled it's not that nimble a system! It can be heavy on the server and lots of Drupal sites or not that quick and you don't need to look that far to find an example ...

Well now, my religious new friends and enemies, I'm curious what you will say ...