What is Drupal for anyway? I thought it was a code library that makes it easy for non-geeks like me to build functional web pages.
All I want to do is change one of my submenus from vertical to horizontal. But after half an hour of searching it appears the only way to do this is to master Skinr which I'm sure is no sweat at all for a bunch of bigshot programmers like you guys, but I don't have time or inclination to learn your craft.
Here's how I finally accomplished my objective: I wrote the html for a one-row, three-cell table at the top of my page and pasted the links in each cell. Now I'm going to have to teach my client how to write basic html because your fabulous content management system can't do it. This is a bit like strapping wagon wheels to a Ferrari.
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Drupal is a CMF - a Content
Drupal is a CMF - a Content Management Framework. It's a framework for writing web applications and building websites. While non-coders can (and often do) use it, it's very beneficial for coders as it has a lot of APIs for writing code quicker and easier than other systems.
The rule of systems is that complexity and flexibility are proportional. The more flexible a system is, the more complex it becomes. Drupal is EXTREMELY flexible, but that flexibility comes with a cost - a large learning curve. It is not a simple system, and generally takes some studying (and swearing, and fighting with the system) before one can figure out how to use it effectively.
Drupal is not unnecessarily complex - it's complexity is there for a reason (to effect flexibility). It's just that you hit the wall of not knowing how to deal with that flexibility.
There is a good chance the system can't do what you want without using an add-on module of some sort, or else altering the theme of your site. If you start a new thread describing your issue, in detail, someone can probably point you at a solution to help you achieve it.
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Drupal is for coders?
So is Drupal for coders only? I'm having so many problems with the site I'm designing I'm seriously considering quitting Drupal. I write my own content management websites in PHP and they work fine. This is the most frustrating, badly documented system I've ever come across. I just reloaded my whole site, an operation that took two hours because I couldn't get rid of an error generated by the theme.incl file. After slogging through dozens of forum postings, I finally tried one suggestion: replace the '>' character in the breadcrumb with something else. Well, whoopee, I should have thought of that right away. How could I be so stupid?
Now I'm trying to make a simple teaser but I can't do it. Why not? Because Deck refuses to work and because the page break in CK Editor won't work either.
I'm working on a Mac so I thought I'd check my site on Internet Explorer 6.0 on my old PC. What a mess! It doesn't even make sense, the menus are vertical when the should be horizontal or the other way round.
I need a content management system that works. I'm pulling an all-nighter because I've got a client who wants his website done in the next four hours. Thanks to this stupid excuse for a content management system I'll never make it and my client will think I'm a jerk. Thanks Drupal for wasting my time and money.
Drupal sucks
I just googled 'Drupal sucks' and got 160,000 matches
No Drupal isn't for coders
No Drupal isn't for coders only, many non-coders use it, and use it well. However, it's particularly nice for coders due to it's framework and flexibility. This in turn makes it possible to make many, many modules for different things, which is why there are so many modules on Drupal.org.
You are having troubles, but the other side of that is that thousands and thousands of sites are made on Drupal that work perfectly fine. See my portfolio (through the link in my signature) for some of my own. You googled 'Drupal sucks' and found 160 000 matches, if you google 'drupal rocks', you will find 224000. So if this is some kind of indicator, it appears more people are happy than unhappy.
As for your site not looking good on IE6, well that's not a Drupal thing, it's HTML/CSS, and the responsibility of whoever created the theme for your site. If it's Garland or one of the other themes that come packaged with Drupal, that would be a problem, but I'm quite sure of them are all IE6+ compatible.
No offense, but you obviously promised something you couldn't deliver. That has nothing to do with Drupal, and everything to do with bad business on your part. If your client thinks you a jerk for it, he is probably right, and you only have yourself to blame. Personally, it doesn't matter to me one way or another whether you never use Drupal again and hate it for the rest of your life. But promising what you can't deliver is a mistake so many designers make that makes the whole industry look bad. Before making promises, you should at least make sure you know how the system you will be using works.
I'm sure you are just frustrated right now with the time pressure, but you should take this as a lesson to be learned for the future, not just for Drupal but for all your business dealings - don't promise something you don't know whether or not you can deliver. It's just bad business.
Full-time freelancer, always looking for work.
jaypan.com (my portfolio)
I'm looking for an intern. Apply within.
For the record
I never promised anything. I told my client I didn't know anything about Drupal but that it looked like a good system according to the book I bought by one of the Lullabot founders and from the videos I subscribed to on Lynda.com. I had hopes this would be what those sources said it would be-- an easy to use extensible system that could be maintained by groups of relatively untrained people. Please refrain from making ignorant, self-satisfied remarks about what you think are good business practices.
Well if you didn't make any
Well if you didn't make any promises, you have nothing to worry about then. You can simply tell your client that Drupal is quite complex and therefore it will take a little longer. Since you didn't promise any kind of completion date, your client has no reason to think you are a jerk for not finishing by some mythical completion date. Problem solved!
Full-time freelancer, always looking for work.
jaypan.com (my portfolio)
I'm looking for an intern. Apply within.
...
Drupal is many things depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
Drupal is a CMF: content management framework for those who take the time to leverage it's capabilities.
Drupal is a CMS: content management system for those who use it.
A significant amount of this information can be found by clicking on the Documentation link at the top of the site. One link under 'Understanding Drupal' is 'Is Drupal right for you' which you may have missed in your rush to criticize the work of thousands you did not pay yet received benefit from.
Drupal was released in 2001 and has had 13 full version releases. Drupal 7 will be the 14th. It has it's strengths and it's weaknesses which you will find scattered about the issue queue and forums. It is also not something you will learn overnight.
In a community, reputation is everything.
Jay answered your questions with courtesy and supplied the information you asked. Yet belittled him and the community with your every response.
From your original post I have learned you are angry. You feel it is all right to make assumptions about people you do not know and call them names and that you still managed to post some useful information on how you solved a problem you had with a free contributed theme.
Skinr is not a core module so I doubt you are using a core theme. You may want to check the issue queue for both on if anyone else solved a similar issue, use a different theme more suited to your goal, or learn to leverage the theme layer and properly theme your menu. It may have even been built in but you were unfamiliar with how to accomplish it. It's hard to know because you posted a rant instead of a request for help.
Like any technology or system Drupal will take some time to learn. Depending on skill set and goals, you should probably figure on at least a few weeks of playing with it to determine how it fits with your goals and then which contributed modules you will need and assess their quality. Learning how to use Drupal.org and the communities resources is something you should plan on spending time on as well. Not doing so will significantly limit your ability to properly leverage Drupal. Not interacting with the community properly will also affect that as well.
Whether you continue to use Drupal or not is up to you, but ranting or trolling on Drupal.org is not the way to go about getting help.
Best of luck with your site and future community relations.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Not angry but frustrated
Excuse me for belittling Drupal and its many practitioners. I am honestly perplexed and frustrated with what I see as a huge amount of complexity and roundabout ways of doing things. If the reason you need such complexity is to allow for varying needs, why not just write your own CMS? I've actually developed my own very simple CMS using PHP and MySQL and used it to make websites for quite a few small business. My template works perfectly well but I need the extensibility of some modules. Do I have to use Drupal to use their modules, or can I somehow patch them onto my own CMS?
...
I don't want to write my own CMS. I want a CMS which I have used on various sites for 7 years. My needs are modest. But with Drupal I get a security group, built in users, content types and many other modules which let me in my spare time put sites together for friends and family with little to no coding skills beyond basic theming. others, why should they write a different CMS, they get upgrades, users, groups, contrib.... all they need to do is know Drupal very well and contrib to core inthe next version to enhance their needs. Lots of work int eh Drupal-verse for them.
The complexity is there because at one time it wasn't possible to do what Drupal does without extensive programming skills. Over the last 9 years the web has evolved as has Drupal. As Drupal is Open Source it moves in the direction of it's contributors needs and by the patches and code they submit. This is messy and sometimes results in solutions that solve someones problems but later, people who were not involved dis-agree with. Some of our mess is the bets solution at the time and some of it is competing solutions and the community is waiting to see which effort in contrib will win out and if that winner is something that needs to migrate to core or not. The gap between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 is longer then normal but is a result of many changes in the community and will most likely be a nice change for many but this cycle too repeats with each major release.
Can you use contrib modules without core? Unlikely. You could certainly use the GPL code in them, but the contrib modules relies on the core hooks or other contrib modules for the most part so using them successfully without Drupal would probably take the same time as just learning the subtleties of Drupal itself.
There are a lot of resources, you may also want to check out the IRC channel and just audit the conversation in #drupal-support and #drupal-themes to see what questions people are asking, how they are asking them and what if any solutions they recommend to achieve various goals. it may help you out. It may not.
People who have written their own stuff tend to have the most issue with grokking Drupal. Drupal was written by hundreds and improved by thousands and a lot of it was after several had 'discussions' about various approaches in the issue queue. The extensibility is something we've solved, but they way we've solved it may in the end not work for you.
Contrib is sort of a wild west. There are some quality modules in contrib and there are some others that, well.... Some people learn php and there are those that learn to program Drupal because there is enough documentation on this site for neophytes to do just that. Some disappear but others stick around and grow and improve their skills and their contributions. I suspect you are running into a combination of this. I would also suggest you find a vocabulary page in your book as well as the community tends to have specific meaning for a wide array of words :)
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
I could write my own CMS, but
I could write my own CMS, but it would take me months (years?) to come up with something that gave me a similar framework to Drupal. And the odds are, it wouldn't be nearly as secure - I'd miss stuff along the way and have security vulnerabilities. Some people think that because they write their own code it's secure as no one else knows it (security through obscurity), but microsoft products show that theory to be a fallacy. Microsoft code is closed, yet people find security holes all the time.
Drupal can be frustrating when you are first using it if you are under pressure to get something together. The better way to learn it is to put together a few sites for your own benefit to get a feel for it, then start to put together other people's sites. That way you can play with various modules and see what they do, which ones are better for a given task, and where certain modules are buggy. A large part of any decent Drupal developer's skillset is simply a large knowledge of modules for various jobs so that when it comes time to put together a site, you don't have to research and learn a module, you already know what modules are best for the job.
Full-time freelancer, always looking for work.
jaypan.com (my portfolio)
I'm looking for an intern. Apply within.
Thanks for your input
Well, thanks for your input so far and the time you've taken. I was in the middle of an unscheduled all-night session while corresponding with you folks and my temper was rather frayed. During the past week or two I tried and discarded three different themes because they didn't get along with I.E.6 but finally found a theme, Basic, which seems to work fine and isn't as complex as Zen. I agree that people who have done their own stuff have a harder time-- it's like that apocryphal story of an immigrant to Canada who lived in a big city and worked hard to learn the language so he'd be able to look for work anywhere in North America. But the big city was Montreal and the language he was learning was French.