[development] Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:12:39 -0800
Liza Sabater <blogdiva at culturekitchen.com> wrote:

> Hi gang, 

> Delurking for a bit : My comment on Ignacio's comment got a bit
> longish and given it is not directly related to development, I took
> it to my blog. 

You took it too personally. I think Ignacio's comment didn't intend
to diminish the importance of blogs.

But I think drupal is not competing in the super-duper blog space.

I know I'm going to upset both fields with what I'm going to write.

If people would like to have a no-brainer, fancy cms for "everyone"
they would chose Joomla. If people would like to have a no-brainer
blog they would go for WordPress.

Drupal is a CMS framework... more than a framework and less than a
"prepackaged" CMS.

This makes it a tool for developers. And I'm happy with it because
there is no other product filling that marketplace.
Drupal pays the bills of web designers and developers too, not just
the former as other CMS.

And I think you'll always see more Joomla installations even on PMI
web sites but more drupal istallations in the more important places
where there is place for differentiation.

That doesn't mean that we should make it more "end-user" friendly.
If it becomes more "end-user" friendly, application developers will
have to work less. That's why I prefer drupal over phpcake, p4a,
modx, django, turbogears...
But this doesn't have to be done at the expenses of ease of
customisation, professional installation etc...

On an other topic... I saw comments saying we had to help themers and
not module dev. I think this kind of discussion is much more
strategical for drupal marketplace.
As a developer with few design skills I definitively enjoy to make
web designers as much independent as possible, on the other side I
will develop modules and I don't want stuff get into my way.

Writing commodity software is OK if your business model is based on
providing the infrastructure, selling ads etc...

While I absolutely appreciate ease of installation for me it has
another meaning than untarring a file in a web space and go.
eg. it means ease of putting up a dev and production installation,
ease of upgrade, ease of backup/restore elsewhere...

Well accordingly to Collaboration Loop, reported on CivicSpace
themselves:
"You may not recognized the Drupal name but you have used the
product. According to estimates the number of sites using Drupal is
in excess of 50,000! These include MTV UK, Sony's MusicBox, Leo
Laporte's TWiT site, NowPublic, The Onion, Spread Firefox, Linux
Journal, and several political sites such as Vote Hillary, Draft
Obama, and Chris Dodd for President. Web 2.0 darlings Flock and
SocialText use Drupal on their corporate websites..."
Most of these sites may have some characteristics inherited from
blogs but they are quite different in scope and structure.

Chris own flock is the antithesis of a blog for example.

With the exception of few things I agree with most of Chris comments
and as well I agree with Larry's comments too.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it