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