[support] Do you *really* have to be a programmer - was Re: Newbie question on concept

[J-P Stacey]

Hi Krister,

> enough by far to get around, partly because i have a terrible memory for
> syntax, so my question is do i really need to know about programming to
> be able to manage Drupal?

I don't have enough experience to comment on Drupal as a whole, but I've 
been able to get a long way without doing any hacking. Modules just seem to 
install themselves when you unpack and checkbox them, and new content types 
will chug along with the default views. If you add new fields to content 
types with the CCK then the module also brings in a default way of 
representing those fields on the page, so you'll only ever need to CSS it.

As an example, currently I'm marvelling at the ecommerce module, which seems 
to do a whole payment workflow without a single line of PHP being written by 
me. E-commerce generally is a huge, sprawling mess, and getting it right in 
other frameworks has typically involved a lot of hacking, but so far not 
with Drupal. Ask me again when I've had a fiddle with the WorldPay 
sub-module, and trying to send them custom fields, though!

The reason we've been doing a lot of programming is that, if we want to use 
Drupal for our clients rather than ourselves, then they're going to have 
quite exacting standards and we need to stretch Drupal to its limits as 
early as we can so we know what it can do.

Cheers,
J-P