Drupal 7: Sooner or later, but hopefully sooner

Drupal 7 will be finished by June 2010 - if things go well. If they don't, it'll be the autumn - a year after construction was supposedly done and just testing and debugging remained. It all depends on whether 114 critical bugs can be fixed, the creator of the open-source content management system (CMS) Dryes Buytaert told …

[Mike Scott]

Wrong Numbers

Your numbers don't add up. First, 1% of a trillion is 10 billion, not 1 billion.

Second, if there are really a trillion websites then only one site in a million will be in the top million sites. So if 2% of Drupal sites are in the top million, then that's a *fantastic* result -- a Drupal site is *twenty thousand times* as likely to be in the top million as a site chosen at random.

[loopy lou]

Not just wrong, nonsense numbers

One trillion sites? Utter b*&%ks. Are there really more than 100 websites for every human on the planet? So each developer has made, a few hundred thousand sites?

Maybe, just maybe, one trillion webpages, if the vast majority are machine generated on demand.

[Volker Hett]

I like Drupals stability

Not that others crash more often, the stability of the codebase is what I'm after.

Every Wordpress update from 2.0 to 2.6 broke lots of plugins and themes, especially the G2 plugin for the Menalto Gallery I use for my pictures. Not so with Drupal, that's why I switched to 5.1 then and now run the current 6.16 without any problems with the updates.

When I have to implement security updates I don't want to lose half of the functions and wait another month or two to get back to a working site just in time for the next critical bug fix. That's where Drupal is very good. So I can wait for Drupal 7, which is no problem, even Drupal 5 is still in maintained.

[scottboy]

Eh?

I'm often accused of pedantry (actually, I'm just picky), but what is this meant to mean?

Google in 2008 said there's one trillion web sites putting Drupal one billion sites.

[Anonymous Coward]

YACMS

Don't we have way too many content management systems already?

With most of the ones I have looked at, the problem isn't so much that they are buggy [although they usually are], it is the fiendishly complex configuration and lack of documentation that makes them hard to adopt. I haven't looked at Drupal yet, so it would be interesting to know how it scores in this regard.

[Volker Hett]

Documentation is quite good

Although it is far from easy to configure and you better have root access to your server.

[Kevin Bailey]

Agreed - but Drupal now seems to have it sorted

It wouldn't surprise me if Drupal became the dominant CMS for the web - although I prefer there to be competition to keep everyone on their toes.

I've tried a few out over the years - Zope - oh how I loved Zope - tried to train an extra programmer etc - but Zope never worked out. Early Drupal didn't either. Joomla/Mambo - too much, too much.

One thing I like about Drupal is that it is really cut down in its vanilla install. No WYSIWYG editor for the users out of the box. You get to add the one you want and just the buttons needed and assign this to only the users you want etc.

Sounds complicated but you're able to get three levels of user easily;

visitors (who can login and post comments etc)

site admins (who can moderate posts, update news articles etc)

overall admin (that's you that is - setting everything up)

I'll warn you now - the learning curve is so steep its almost a wall - but get on top of it and the flexibility means that you can base virtually any website project on it.

(Obviously, stick to Magento for e-commerce sites)

Kev

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh

It's a content management system is it?

Nice of the article to say so.

Not that I care anyways.

[Kevin Bailey]

Drupal makes a next leap forward RE databases

OK - so Drupal takes some learning but using CCK and views actually extends the database model we all know/love.

On a standard database you store text, numbers, dates etc etc (IP's BLOBS etc etc)

On Drupal with CCK and views you create custom fields/data types really easily - with a few clicks.

Say I have an entity called 'car'. Within minutes you can create all the required data fields; make, colour, registration date, model, engine size, fuel type, description tags etc.

For each of these fields you select an input widget.

So registration date is a calendar control or dropdown selections, the fuel type is drop down, the tags can be zero or more terms. More importantly, image handling is brilliant. The lists behind the dropdown lists are easily managed in what's called a vocabulary.

So you can then store all these content types - next the views module enables you display any part of the data in different ways. Views act in the same way as an SQL select statement.

Another good point is that it great permissions control. So if you want a user to just keep the list of cars up-to-date then a list of cars is all they'll see when they log in. This makes it possible to create updateable sites for average users. We've doing this with custom builds for a long time - but Drupal make this much easier.

And after using both Drupal and Joomla over the years I feel that Drupal will gradually overtake Jooma/Mambo.

Initially Joomal was better - but Drupal has evolved into a brilliant framework. It takes some learning but it's worth it.

It simply 'feels' better as well.

[Jonjonz]

Drupals Lack of Backward Compatibility Its Greatest Drawback

I use and love Drupal, but lack of backward compatibility is making me start considering other CMS's.

Since Drupal sneers at backward compatibility (too girly man for big dog Drupal developers) trying to updrade to a new version is MAJOR work for small shops or large sites.

Moving from 5 to 6 is a nightmare.

Also Drupal's official sites are deeply unfriendly to anyone trying to implement Drupal who is not a full time coder ('What, you don't know how to code this in PHP and patch it on your own?")

No wonder its stalling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah 5 to 6 is going to be spooky.

I have a pair of drupal's for several years now.

I started using drupal (4.x) when invision board wouldn't supply updates to an exploitable version, I was pissed at the time, I vowed I would never get stuck with a proprietary commercial system ever again. I had to hand copy everything to the new drupal. A pain in the ass, and eventually after a couple days, I just dumped a lot of the data and kept some historic stuff.

Originally, it was hard to find a webhost who could promise drupal would even work, short of running an unmanaged box.

I know eventually 5 will RIP and 6 will rise up and shine. Hopefully at that time there will be a clearer upgrade path just like there was from 4.x to 5.x.

The only little problems I had the whole time were discontinued modules. Today I use as few modules as possible, as they tend to get exploited more often than the core.

To date, EVERY problem I have come across has been solvable by searching the error message.

While I am not the best artist, I have found I can make nice DARK and LIGHT themes using the existing templates. While there were not many themes at first, it's not as bad now. Wordpress gets all the glamor and support with free themes still -IMO