[support] Drupal as a PHP development framework?

[Seth Freach]

Daniel,

Yeah, if you're thinking of Drupal as a library, you are approaching it 
from the wrong direction.

Knowing nothing about your app or experience level with Drupal, I'm 
going to assume 3 things:
  - Your app is in a production environment and in use by your users
  - You are the only person supporting this app
  - Drupal is new to you.

If those three things are all true, I would probably lean away from 
porting to Drupal, it probably wouldn't make good business sense.  You 
may find yourself spending significant amounts of time just learning 
Drupal before you even begin to think about your app in a Drupal 
environment.

On the other hand, if you are looking to build more apps going forward 
and want to learn a robust framework to build those on, the time spent 
now will be a valuable investment, especially, if this particular app is 
one that has a small user base and will not significantly suffer for 
being a learning environment (aka: guinea pig)

-Seth


Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hi Seth,
>
> Thanks. That's a very useful answer, about how I should think about the 
> application if I used Drupal. That I shouldn't see Drupal as a library 
> that use, but rather see my app as a Drupal component.
>
> I'll need time to think about whether this is what I'm looking for. I 
> don't have a clear picture of what I want yet.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Daniel.
>
>
> Seth Freach wrote:
>   
>> Daniel,
>> Short answer: Yes.
>>
>> I have been previously and currently am involved with a few web app 
>> projects that were started or rewritten from scratch on Drupal.  In 
>> fact, the reason that Drupal was chosen over any of the other CMS's 
>> available is specifically because of its superiority amongst its peers 
>> in the CMS space as a PHP development framework.
>>
>> The most important thing in my experience is to make sure that you 
>> approach the project from a correct perspective.  You'll get the best 
>> results if you think of the app being constructed *with* Drupal, doing 
>> it the Drupal way.  This is a very different thing than building it *on 
>> top of* Drupal, where you try to reach down and leverage Drupal 
>> functionality when it suits you.  This approach might cause you to 
>> rethink a lot of the application and data architecture in a rewrite.  
>> Drupal can do the job wonderfully, but know that it probably won't just 
>> be a "rewrite", but rather a "redesign", from the data model on up.  
>> Allowing Drupal to handle all of  your user management, for example, 
>> sounds great, but thinking of how Drupal users are going to interact 
>> with your application's data will force you to rethink how Drupal will 
>> best do this.  Ideally, it would become less and less your application's 
>> data and more and more Drupal's content, structured in the way that 
>> Drupal organizes its content (nodes, CCK, possibly OG's, ...), and 
>> accessed the way that Drupal accesses content (Views, perms, ...)
>>
>> ...if that makes sense ;)
>>
>> Seth
>>     
>
>   
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