<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Domenic Santangelo <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:domenic@workhabit.com">domenic@workhabit.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Stella Power <<a href="mailto:stella@stellapower.net">stella@stellapower.net</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
>> However, in the end, you get what you pay for!<br>
><br>
> Well, Drupal is free and you don't pay for it. :)<br>
<br>
</div>One of the things that surprised me when I started working with Drupal<br>
is the breadth of functionality that's left out of core. No automatic<br>
path aliasing? No subscribing to a post? Wait, I can't add more fields<br>
to my content types??? For a "Content Management System", Drupal core<br>
is _severely_ lacking in features.<br>
<br>
The logical end is that modules now have inflated importance to<br>
Drupal, because you (basically) can't do jack without at least some of<br>
them. This creates an odd disparity: the concept of "modules" refers<br>
to both one-off, unimportant, unfinished modules, AND to<br>
cck/views/pathauto, three modules you basically can't build a site<br>
without.<br></blockquote></div><br>That is actually one of the strengths of Drupal. Core providing extensibility, and<br>not trying to be everything for everyone, and farming out functionality to contrib.<br><br>Contrib is where innovation happens faster than in core, because the "think it,<br>
code it, commit it, release it, download it, try it, improve it" cycle is faster in <br>contrib. It is not dependent on a few core committers with limited times and <br>hundreds of tasks to get it in. People who want to try something can do it faster<br>
and people download and test and improve it faster as well.<br><br>The second thing is that there are many arguments of task X be done in a certain<br>way, and not another. If core did something just one way, then all the others will<br>
be precluded without being tried in the field. By providing an extensible framework <br>where people extend it in different ways, and "let the market decide" which one is <br>better, or even if all of them exist at the same time, everyone wins.<br>
<br>Over time, we continually re-evaluate and move stuff in and out of core as appropriate.<br>We pick what has been proven and get it in core, like we are doing with fields now.<br>And we send other parts to contrib.<br>
<br>This is the open source way: It does not have to be perfect, just good enough, and then<br>released to the community to tear apart, use, extend, remix, borrow, copy/paste, ...etc.<br><br>Think of Linux: it is just a kernel and people take it and extend it, bundle it, port it<br>
so it runs on everything from cell phones to IBM mainframes to supercompters and<br>many things in between. If Linus insisted on doing a distro early on, it may not have <br>been as successful as it is now.<br>-- <br>Khalid M. Baheyeldin<br>
<a href="http://2bits.com">2bits.com</a>, Inc.<br><a href="http://2bits.com">http://2bits.com</a><br>Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.<br>Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra<br>
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- Leonardo da Vinci<br>