Nick Lewis: The Blog

Foundry[1], a new theme I'm working on, is getting close to release. Here's the latest screenshot. 

This theme is something of an anthology of design/templating/css solutions I've found over the course of this year. My most recent of which is a horizontal nested menu tree (contained within a div rounded using javascript), with background images, and support of infinate levels. Oh, and it works on the big browsers: IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Safari. 

Drupal's phptemplate is the most powerful, simple, and flexible templating/theming system on the planet*. Yet, it seems that the majority of drupal themers, (and wannabe drupal themers) are ignorant of its true power.

More disturbingly, vast numbers of people still insist that Joomla!, typo3, and wordpress's templating systems are easier, sexier, and slicker. These people are either loony, or wrong.

As an expert in PHPtemplate (isn't that scary), I've decided its my duty to show the true power of PHPtemplate to world.

Consider these tutorials, a proper (and steadily growing) introduction to drupal's templating system.

Last summer, nearly every client that I talked with who wanted a CMS would ask for Mambo. This was in spite of Drupal's obvious superiority in terms of code, flexibility, and power.

I was forced to conclude that Drupal's biggest weakness was the first impression it was making. I spent about 2 minutes looking at drupal.org, and Mambo's homepage, and the cause of Drupal's weak first impression was dead obvious:

Generally, "Power in Simplicity" makes a better first impression than "Community plumbing".

Hardly an Earth shattering observation. You could ask a 5 year old which slogan is better, but they'll probably be laughing too hard at the implications of "community plumbing" to answer the question with words.

Today, I can't remember the last time anyone mentioned Mambo to me. So, 9 months after I wrote that article, I am going to go out on a limb and say it: Drupal, as a platform and community, won. We've left the competition in the dust. (and funnily enough, those who make up the competition seem blissfully unaware of the fact).

We won in spite of the fact that we still advertise the idea of plumbing together as a community; its clear the drupal community is not plumbing anymore; we're kicking serious ass. The number of users, and nodes at drupal.org as DOUBLED since I wrote that article. In one year, it was estimated (somewhere, Zack Rosen mentioned this) that the overall economy of drupal increased by 10 fold. And don't even get me started about what the forms API, CCK, Views, Relationships, CiviCRM, OG, blah blah blah ... let's talk about something else:

The Imminent Release of Drupal 4.7.0 is only the Beginning

So, where is drupal going to be in another 9 months? We probably won't have made it to the cover of Time magazine... yet... However, based on my conversations with Adrian (for all practical purposes the inventor of PHP-template and Forms API), here are just a few things that the future of drupal holds: