[consulting] Drupal considerd dangerous

[Larry Garfield]

On Thursday 21 December 2006 12:22 pm, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

> No amount of wishful thinking here will enable a non-IT-savvy
> small-business owner to maintain their own Drupal site of any
> sophistication. 

There is nothing Drupal-specific about that situation.  The more accurate 
statement is "no amount of wishful thinking will enable a non-IT-savvy 
small-business owner to maintain their own web site of any sophistication".

The more sophisticated your web site, the more technical knowledge you need to 
know how to build and maintain it.  It doesn't matter what your underlying 
software is; the curve is still increasing.  

IME, Drupal helps with the "80/20" rule: You can get 80% of what you want with 
Drupal with only 20% of the effort.  That doesn't require a huge amount of 
technical knowledge, either, just some Drupal knowledge, which is a great 
strength.  

Getting that last 20%, however, requires knowing how to tie together a half 
dozen contrib modules in non-obvious ways, writing sometimes non-obvious PHP 
in your theme itself, discovering obscure features of Drupal that you didn't 
know existed, and knowing when to break from the Drupal Way and just hack 
something in lamely because that's how to make it work.  None of that is 
obvious or intuitive.  When you hire or become a "real" Drupal consultant, 
however, it's that sort of knowledge that you're paying for / acquiring.  And 
anyone who tells you that you don't need a very strong grasp of PHP for that 
is lying. :-)

If that other 20% is what you desperately need, then Drupal may not be the 
best choice.  I'd lay money Joomla or Wordpress or Typo3 aren't either.  Your 
best choice is very smart people who can make that 20% happen, and then let 
them use the tools they most skilled with.

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, 
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to 
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession 
of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."  -- Thomas 
Jefferson