Great, simple post.

I know it's an old post but I had to say how true some of your points are, not just for Drupal, but as software "mentality" wisdom. These kinds of problems plague the whole developer world and often hold up progress and informed decision-making.

Two of your points are worth restating:

• Developers Hold a Deeply Held Belief that *their* tool is the best
• Developers Often Don't Form Opinions From Experience

To be a good developer, you need to fight an all-out internal battle against falling prey to these two "mental blocks". It's not easy. As you point out, people like to feel smart, and the "social capital" of tech-blogging encourages people to elaborate on the opinions of others as if they were facts drawn from their own experience.

Readers of developer's blogs are advised to learn to spot the difference between opinion and verified knowledge, and favor the latter. When developing, we all have hypotheses about what modules or techniques may or may not work. The error is to treat your hypothesis as something of value "just because you are smart". I am smart (I think), and my opinion always changes as I try to implement things. I start off believing I have the answer, and midway through the process, I really discover the shape and size of the problem. By the time I am done, I have proof that I was either right or wrong, and rarely does it end up the way I expect.

Bias toward tools is another problem, and the only real answer is to force yourself to use multiple platforms, multiple CMS, multiple languages. Don't compare PHP and C++ unless you have used both extensively for real work. Don't voice comparisons about Drupal and Joomla unless you have a couple sites working on each and have seen how the expectations play out in reality. The more tools and languages you use the more you discover how little a particular tool matters to the effectiveness of the result, so I recommend discounting claims about the superiority of particular tools. It has more to do with who is using the tool, and how they are using it.

Of course many people won't have the time to really make such first-hand comparisons, and will have to shut up. Sad, because then they won't seem so smart. But the world will be a better place. Quieter at least.

well, the more modules you add, the more Drupal chokes.. which tends me to believe that it is fit for a CMS-kinda site, and not for instance a social networking site (where you would be adding more features ie. modules by the week).

i understand this is the way the API works, but this should be kept in mind when going for Drupal or not.

Thanks for the points. After reading this post i have a better idea why my few developers don't use drupal. I think with the combination of PHP and Wordpress, we didn't need to use drupal.
Know the question is that, Is drupal loosing its capability.

One thing to keep in mind: Those of us that ARE using Drupal to make money (lots of it in some cases) are completely ovewhelmed by the amount of work out there right now.

Companies want Drupal sites built. I have been turning work away for 2 years now because I cannot keep up with the jobs I've got.

The learning curve is steep, but once you're over the hump, you're sitting pretty.

The reasons I use Drupal as a developer:

1. MANY MANY more contrib modules (that actually work) than every other CMS I've tried (and I've really tried to diversify out of Drupal)
   
2. Wide acceptance amongst businesses and plenty of "big name" websites (the onion, mtv europe, the usual list) that I can point to when someone asks "but is Open-source good enough for our site?
   
3. Building modules is easy. I bought one book (the now-ubiquitous Pro Drupal Development), spent 2 days playing with it, and have never looked back. I'm not a genius. I have personally trained 3 other developers this same way: "Here take this book. Read it. Build me a module that does X,Y,Z. Call me when you're done."

In my line of work at least, the biggest challenge I've faced is anti-PHP sentiment from enterprise CIO types who think going .NET is going to do them one-better than anything open-source. THat's a real challenge, and it's not limited to Drupal. I would face the same hesitation if suggesting Plone.

I've been working with Drupal for about three months now and like others here I find it very frustrating.

I don't have a lot of experience in using MySQL and PHP, but I've found that using these tools rather than working with modules is a much better way to get things done. In some cases I can write PHP code and a MySQL query in less time than it takes to click through Views and work around its bugs.

Drupal's Web interface is cumbersome. As others have pointed out, it requires too many clicks and too many page loads to perform even simple tasks.

The Drupal forums can be helpful, but in the past few days I've noticed that they're off-line more often than not. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I have been a PHP developer for quite some time, but I just discovered drupal and it's beautiful API. The API documentation is just wonderful and it is a dream to work with, and it didn't take that much time to learn thanks to a great tutorial on building modules.

The module system is another fantastic feature. It's hard to find code that expresses the object oriented architecture so clearly without actually using the built-in language features for doing so.

The downside is the administration, which can be a little bit hard to work with.

I am deeply impressed by the drupal project and I will probably use the platform for all my future php web projects.

I only started using Drupal couple of months back and surprisingly, finding APIs was one of the easier things to do thanks to api.drupal.org (I love how you can see the full function right there and look at all the cross references). What I found tons more frustrating is that in the admin part of the site, everything is so many clicks away. If I want to remove 5 fields from a content type, I need to click a total of 10 times with as many page loads. This doesn't sound so bad at first but when one has to do similar things everywhere, it becomes very painfull. Admin menu comes in so handy because of this very reason because it saves you 2-3 clicks everytime.

I think reducing the average number of clicks required to perform admin actions should be a priority. I think last SoC, somebody did a module called Fast Toggle which tried to address this issue in some of the places. We need a blanket overhaul of the same kind.

Perhaps we need to not only publish the api, but also write a ton of tutorials and examples. Also make sure that these are in one location that makes sense.

Nick,

How true this is..

Thanks for sharing.

Shrop