NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Ajai Khattri <ajai at bitblit.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Oct 2009, Damion Hankejh wrote:
>
>> The need for customization
>> outstripped the usefulness and time savings of its base functionality. After
>> ~2 months of working with it and some top-shelf Drupal consultants, we
>> scrapped everything in Drupal and returned to our custom PHP/MySQL/Smarty
>> code base -- I quickly grew tired of hearing, "Drupal does things this way,
>> so we have to rewrite this module."  In hindsight, the time spent
>> customizing Drupal to meet our requirements would have been better used to
>> roll our own features.
>
> This mirrors my own experience using content systems to build web sites,
> and why I moved on to frameworks. At some point there are just too
> many integration points where it becomes more costly to modify and
> maintain than building with a solid framework. Drupal is not really a
> framework and wasn't designed to be, but ome people have molded
> (twisted?) it to do more.

I was in a similar situation at MTV - and opted to go with the Joomla
framework (and NOT the CMS) for this exact reason. A CMS has to be a
one-size-fits-all proposition in order to be useful to a wide
audience, and that makes bloat and inflexibility an unfortunate
passenger.

I used the Joomla framework much in a way one would use CodeIgniter,
Zend or Kohana - I built exactly what was needed, and nothing more. No
timezone support, no dynamic navigation, no multibyte characters, etc.
That is the only way you can make scalable websites, and I think that
is the main reason the stack/scaffold frameworks like RoR, Symfony and
Cake get such a bad rap for scale.

Until Drupal truly makes a framework under their CMS, they will have
the same problems - something I discussed with some core contributors
several years ago. I hope that is the route they take, as that
provides many additional benefits as well.

-- Mitch