[Spyro7]

I started with Drupal around the time version 4.7 came out, and I always thought that the project would have done better for itself by focusing more on its potential as a framework rather than a CMS.

Drupal has always seemed to have something of an identity crises. Some people think of it as a fully-featured CMS, some think of it as a framework or platform, and then you have a ton of people just trying to use it as a more flexible blog.

I think that when the community exploded in size, it had only really begun to wrestle with the identity question. The lack of some definite focus as Drupal's popularity expanded probably contributed to the current situation.

Frankly, I think that the majority of the current problems would be solved by trimming all of the fat from the core. That would allow the core developers to focus on making the core fast, stable, and flexible. Let the wider community maintain and provide any extra functionality.

[aasarava]

>> Drupal has always seemed to have something of an identity crises. Some people think of it as a fully-featured CMS, some think of it as a framework or platform, and then you have a ton of people just trying to use it as a more flexible blog.

This has been my take on it, too. (I've been developing Drupal sites for clients almost exclusively for the past 4 years.) The confusion persists because Dries Buytaert believes it's possible to be all things at once. In his keynote at DrupalCon SF last year, he brought up the question of whether to focus on becoming an easy-to-use CMS for people who don't want to code (competing with WordPress) or being an awesome platform for developers, and answered it by saying "both". (My apologies for paraphrasing.)

Without any clear direction on this, the core definitely becomes vulnerable to bloat as there's no clear model with which to approve and reject features.

That said, is Drupal truly in a crisis, in the sense that the project will die soon if the core maintainers don't act immediately? I'm not so sure. I don't feel like the slow uptake of Drupal 7 has as much to do with bloat and half-baked features (of which there are a few, like Dashboard, but not an overwhelming amount.) Rather, the problem is with a few important contributed modules still not being ready for prime time. In particular, modules for nodereferences and breadcrumb management are still in flux months after Drupal 7's release.

In time, those will catch up too and Drupal 7 will likely have a few if not several years of good life in it. That's a long time in the life of a Web site, and hopefully long enough for Dries to realize that he needs to step up and make some tough decisions about which direction he's going to steer the community toward.

[eaton]

>> Frankly, I think that the majority of the current problems would be solved by trimming all of the fat from the core.

The challenge, of course, is that everyone has a different definition of "Fat" versus "Muscle." The developers who actively maintain the codebase are a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall community that uses it. Many of the features that are frustrating and annoying to maintain are popular among the non-developers who use Drupal for site building.

Balancing the usage needs of those people with the maintenance woes od the developers is one of the big challenges.

The other is dealing with the identity crisis you describe; the lack of willingness to focus on a manageably small set of use cases or target audiences became a real problem once Drupal's growth curve started swinging up around 2007 or 2008. Now, simply declaring that things are "more focused" will orphan large numbers of users who came on board and started doing their own thing with Drupal while it was less focused.

It'sa conundrum.

[roel_v]

"Frankly, I think that the majority of the current problems would be solved by trimming all of the fat from the core."

There are 100's of projects who proclaim to do so, and all of them remain obscure. By having a core that does, well, nothing (no blog, forum, commenting, news workflow, permissions, ... systems), as a developer you sill have to go hunt for 'modules' of which you usually have no idea how well they work and if they'll be maintained next year.

In theory the 'plugin' system is nice, in practice it turns into the situation where the 'core' rolls on like a freight train, leaving 'plugins' by the wayside, and users scrambling to patch together the known working versions and plugging the holes left by the incompatible versions. In the end, you still have to do a bunch of programming - but oh, before you can, you need to spend weeks to learn all the ins and outs of how to do so.

The answer is in slowing down development speed. Yeah it sucks because you can't work on cool new stuff, but maintaining backward compatibility and having a large base of usable modules, that are actually vetted by a larger group than just the one or two people who work in that module and only use the bleeding edge version themselves anyway is the only way to build a platform that people can rely on being there new year, and the year after.

[darksaga]

I agree and I believe if they simply picked a direction, be it a CMS or Framework, it would indeed trim out a lot of the fat from the core like you mentioned.

The fact they're trying to be all things to all people is what will likely cause the project to fail. Which is unfortunate, since I do like using it.