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by thinnerlizzy 927 days ago
Any comments from folks who actually kinda like Drupal? I can cop to it almost driving me to tears until I got over the quite considerable learning curve, and once past that I could most any CRUD app with minimal, if any, new code. Once I got over that hump it was actually quite amazing for prototyping CRUD apps or selling small apps to clients that they never would have otherwise ordered given the cost and time of rolling your own.
2 comments
ksenzee 926 days ago
I’ve been writing Drupal code as my day job since 2009, and honestly I think it’s fabulous. It serves a narrow niche very well. People try to use it outside that niche, and they suffer. I feel for them. It’s not the right tool for everyone. You really have to be willing (and have the time and resources) to learn the entire framework, and figure out the Drupal way to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. The learning curve is indeed quite considerable. But it is a formidable toolkit, once you’ve learned it, and you can do really great work with it, really quickly.
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CitizenKane 927 days ago
Honestly Drupal is solid for a number of things, and in terms of getting a CRUD type app/site up it's probably still one of the fastest ways to do it for the non-technical. Actually pretty cool that you can get APIs straight out of the box this way.

That being said, Drupal was initially a forum/blog and it definitely seems somewhat out of place in the modern web landscape. One of its Achilles Heels is that its rendering layer is notoriously slow and overall it's heavy. It's module system also doesn't mesh well with PHP's typical request/response execution model from a performance perspective (anyone who's spent time tuning PHP opcode caching for this knows what I mean).

That being said, the content type and field system is still great and it would be great to see a more generalized version of this concept. This is another area where the implementation is pretty heavy on the Drupal side. Things like this have ultimately limited adoption and not having a clear migration path from D7 to D8 didn't help either.

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