Thank you for the detailed response. Feel free to quote me about Drupal :) It sounds like you have experienced just what I'm afraid of: I will spend all this time making a Drupal site with the intention that it will be easy to inherit, and then my theoretical successor scraps it.
Josh Welker -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Christian Pietsch Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 10:39 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Very frustrated with Drupal Hi Joshua, On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 09:47:06AM -0500, Joshua Welker wrote: > Thank you all for the responses. I hope my original email did not come > off as too abrasive. No worries, I find it a fair depiction, and I share your Drupal pain. > The issue for me is that I am having a hard time figuring out what > exactly is the use case for Drupal. Do you want a dead-simple website? > Use Wordpress. Do you want to add some complex custom apps? Use a > framework. Do you want the worst of both worlds? Use Drupal. Right. May I quote you on this? I prefer static site generators such as Jekyll for dead-simple websites and blogs. > If I get hit by a bus, not only will someone have to relearn Drupal > and all its modules, but they will also have to wade through my > spaghetti-code efforts at patching functionality into Drupal. After I decided to leave a project where I had developed a Drupal intranet site, my successor scrapped it and started from scratch using Owncloud. And I do not blame him. I would have preferred using something other than Drupal, too, but was not allowed to at the time. (In case you wonder how Drupal and Owncloud can fit the same purpose: The goal was to develop a Virtual Research Environment, and nobody knows for sure what this is supposed to be, so there is room for interpretation.) > Right now, my framework choices are narrowed down to Ruby on Rails, > Laravel (PHP), Django (Python), and Flask (Python). For anyone who has > used these, do you have any insight into how maintainable your > projects are and how easily they are managed/inherited by others? In my new role, I inherited some Flask applications, and I find maintaining, debugging and extending them pure joy. If you have to use Perl instead of Python, use Dancer instead. I also tried Django, but it I feel it forces me into a corset that is a odd re-interpretation (or misunderstanding) of the MVC model. Cheers, Christian -- Christian Pietsch http://purl.org/net/pietsch