By PhilipReed on

This is probably a little different from the standard fare on this forum, and I apologize if it's totally out of place here.

Recently I took on my first Drupal project. I have 1-2 years experience with PHP and a proprietary CMS, so it's not like the genre of apps is totally foreign to me even though I know that Drupal is rather more complex (and better-designed!) than what I've been dealing with up to this point.

The Drupal project didn't go well, largely because of my own mistakes in managing my own work. We got in a crunch, I tried to fix it quickly by hacking Drupal (and Gallery, which may have been a bigger culprit frankly), and the client lost faith in that approach. All's well that ends well -- the project turned out OK with a lot of hand-hacking of a mini CMS -- but it resulted in a lot of pointless work that I could have avoided by knowing my toolset better. And in the end all that hand-coding didn't make me any better at Drupal, or any other standard approach. :(

Among the various lessons I learned, the most relevant here is pretty obvious: learn Drupal better before deploying it professionally! But I'm posting this hoping that the community can provide some more tips, suggestions, encouragement, war stories, general empathy, whatever.

I certainly haven't given up on D. In fact, I'm convinced that had I known how to customize it a bit better (and perhaps not messed with the Gallery2 piece, which turned out to be overkill) the original approach would have turned out fine. But I'm eager to hear the community's thoughts.

Comments

arjunrn’s picture

arjunrn commented

Hi Phil,

Of course you're right that we need to know the toolset before using it for a live project, but it happens so often that we find ourselves stuck in a project that requires us to use tools and applications we're not familiar with.

One approach should be not to get stuck with such projects in the future or if that is not possible then at least include some "startup/learning" time in the estimation.

Cheers
A