Vancouver’s big on Drupal. On almost every corner in Gastown you’ll find a passionate advocate who’ll talk your ear off about its flexibility, the benefits of leveraging its community of developers and the extent to which out of all the choices for Content Management platforms it sucks the least.
But surely the primary function of a CMS is to make content management simple and idiot proof for non-technical users. It’s here that Drupal fails so spectacularly that I’m astounded it is even referred to as a CMS. Developers often argue that it’s unfair to expect Drupal to be user friendly because then it would inevitably be inflexible. A classic logical fallacy if ever I heard one, sort of like saying “all developers work faster if they use a command line interface therefore everyone who wants to work faster should use the command line.”
My crash course in Drupal included being presented by a local Drupal shop with a content management interface that consisted of a seemingly randomly organized list of every piece of content on our site, some of which could sort of be edited, some of which required direct editing of the raw html rather than text and none of which offered even the most rudimentary workflow management, scheduled publishing or approval process. Oh, and if you want to deal with really advanced stuff such as, I don’t know, images, you better brush up on those programming skills. In about five minutes it would have been possible utterly and irreparably to decimate the website, with no hope of restoring it without programming expertise. Going back to that argument about flexibility, it’s interesting to note that it’s all theoretical. That is, in theory any beautifully intuitive content management interface can be created to manage your Drupal site, but here I’m reminded of a classic bit from Seinfeld:
JERRY: So, when do I get my dinner?
KRAMER: There’s no dinner. The bet’s off. I’m not gonna do it.
JERRY: Yes, I know you’re not gonna do it. That’s why I bet.
KRAMER: Ya well, there’s no bet if I’m not doing it.
JERRY: That’s the bet! That you’re not doing it!
KRAMER: Yeah, well, I could do it. I don’t wanna do it.
JERRY: We didn’t bet on if you wanted to. We bet on if it would be done.
KRAMER: And it could be done.
JERRY: Well, of course it could be done! Anything could be done! But it only is done if it’s done!
In other words, without substantial customization Drupal simply isn’t viable as a CMS. To paraphrase those irony-deficient Ronseal TV ads from the UK, Drupal doesn’t do what it says on the tin.
Start to venture into virtually any kind of basic functionality present on a moderately interactive website and you’ll quickly get to know and fear the words “that requires us to write a new module”. You’ll also discover various peculiarities that either force bizarre user interaction patterns on your audience, or again demand the creation of a new module. And because Drupal is primarily deployed by development shops rather than a guy you have sitting in your office, you’ll pay through the nose, again for the alleged benefits of flexibility.
Recently the Drupal community has seized on Chris Pirillo’s use of the platform as the basis for Gnomepal, which has the noble objective of making Drupal more of an out-of-the-box solution for real publishers. Perfect, except that (no disrespect to Pirillo intended) I’m not sure there’s anyone less connected to the real-world demands of normal, non-technical users than Chris and the army of geeks who follow him.
The belief in the Drupal community is clearly that it’s all about the… community. That is, the power of a disparate community will be harnessed to deliver the features and usability desired by end users. But the fatal flaw in the Drupal community model seems to be that its community consists entirely of developers and not publishers. Or worse still development shops who make money by customizing Drupal.
I stumbled upon Mike Stopforth’s excellent overview of Drupal vs. WordPress while writing this piece. I’m sure he’d disagree with my overall assessment of Drupal, but nevertheless I completely agree with his comment:
Drupal’s problem is that the community behind it - genius’s that they are - simply don’t get marketing - they need more people like the gang at Lullabot, and I daresay you and I to help them ‘humanise’ Drupal.
Saying that the Drupal community doesn’t get marketing is an epic understatement, but that is perhaps what it comes down to, and where the power of the WordPress community becomes particularly relevant.
WordPress doesn’t pretend to be a CMS (although for many websites’ needs it’s actually more than enough), but it’s become close to the de facto choice for anyone seeking to create anything from the simplest blog to the most sophisticated magazine-like content site. The guys at Automattic clearly were driven by exactly the right kind of singular purpose: take something very difficult (creating and managing a website) and make it spectacularly easy and idiot-proof.
This kind of game changing innovation creates a very different kind of community — users who are passionate because they’re able to do something that was hitherto as close to impossible as makes no difference, and do so for free to boot. Putting this kind of control in the hands of non-technical publishers hasn’t stopped being a revolutionary thing, but what’s possibly more revolutionary is the way in which WordPress’s critical mass of users has created an entirely new ecosystem of innovation around plugins.
WordPress plugins are designed to make still more difficult / impossible / utterly alien tasks and features immediately accessible. Many of these are things that can help your website make money (the excellent AdSense Manager, for example), integrate with other popular services (such as Twitter and Flickr), or aid in the promotion and discovery of your site (All-In-One SEO and the Google XML Sitemap plugins). Imagine that, tools to make your life easier. Isn’t that a better kind of flexible?
So going back to Drupal… It’s really not for basic or moderately sophisticated content-based businesses, and it clearly doesn’t, can’t and won’t work for anyone who wants to publish not program, at least not anyone who hopes to do so without a huge investment of time and money. And yet it’s unlikely to be your platform of choice for building a large-scale website. It’s all-but impossible to find in-house Drupal experts, and while I’m in no way qualified to get into Rails vs. Django vs. doing it yourself vs. everything else debate, 99 per cent of the start-ups I know wouldn’t for a second consider Drupal to build a community site, a SaaS application or much else for which the website and the business are one and the same. They wouldn’t pick WordPress, either, but it makes no claim to be a powerful framework for building applications; instead it just does what it says on the tin.
But finally my biggest beef with Drupal is that it appears from my outsider’s perspective to be a platform always ensuring it has an excuse for its failings. It’s not user friendly because it’s flexible. Your project requires vast, expensive customization because Drupal provides oodles of functionality for free as long as you stay within its limits. We tried to please everyone and in the end kept no-one, including me, happy. The lesson, I think, is that great technology knows what problem it’s solving and relentlessly chases it down, and ultimately that’s why WordPress’s limitations pale in comparison to its brilliance.
Comments 22
Hm. Not sure how you’re arriving that WordPress is more flexible than Drupal in the specific items you mentioned. There exists:
- http://drupal.org/project/adsense
- http://drupal.org/project/twitter
- http://drupal.org/project/flickr
- http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap
And SEO package looks like a combination of http://drupal.org/project/nodewords module and http://drupal.org/project/pathauto.
In the vast majority of the cases I’ve been exposed to, the answer is not “that requires us to write a new module” it’s “You could whip that up in CCK and Views.” No programming required there, although the UI for Views is a bit tweaky.
Does Drupal have a learning curve? Absolutely. The “tin” never implied that it didn’t.
But I’d recommend spending some more time with Drupal, particularly with some of its “building block” modules, before writing it off entirely. There are tons of helpful people in the Vancouver area who I’m sure would love to help you out!
Posted 05 May 2008 at 12:27 am ¶Oh, and regarding the usability problems, that’s definitely something the Drupal community is working on improving. We took a huge step earlier this year with some formal usability testing at University of Minnesota (http://buytaert.net/first-results-from-usability-testing) and one of our Summer of Code projects this year is a Usability Testing Suite (http://drupal.org/project/usability_suite) which will help us perform similar tests remotely, so we can gather user feedback *before* confusing options are made part of Drupal.
Ongoing work in this area is being coordinated at http://groups.drupal.org/usability. We’d welcome your input on how to make Drupal easier to use for content publishers!
Posted 05 May 2008 at 12:36 am ¶@webchick: Thanks for the comments, but my point isn’t necessarily that WordPress is more flexible; rather that its community has grown around what the publisher wants. If I look at the modules you reference, in every case they have an added 25% of complexity vs. WordPress that is simply a dealbreaker for mainstream users.
And the answer from the Drupal community always seems to be that I should spend more time with it before moving on. My biggest issue is that my time is not valuably used by learning arcane attributes of a system rather than simply running my business.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 7:23 am ¶Point well made by Mr. Gibbons. The case is closed. Only choice for Drupal to be the WP of CMS framework, they can do it if the leave idea-fixes behind. change the discourse Drupal… listen the ‘market’ and reason
Posted 05 May 2008 at 11:07 am ¶If WordPress can do what you need, then use it. When it can’t, then it’s time for Drupal. You might find that your business does not need the power of Drupal, fine.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 12:28 pm ¶This issue really is at the heart, I think. For quite a few years, the evolutionary pressure in the Drupal community pushed things towards exposing more and more and more (and more! and then more!) options for each feature. The idea is always to avoid the need for custom code on most sites, but in many cases the end result is an administrative UI that looks like the Death Star’s dashboard.
Slowly but surely, the Drupal community has been waking up to the idea that streamlining the user experience means removing options and providing sensible defaults. In the latest version (Drupal 6), there are a few small examples of this in action. One is the elimination of unecessary options from the Cateories/tagging management interface. The API tools to do things like complex multi-parent topic hierarchies are still there, but the default UI doesn’t expose these confusing and little-used options. The result is a much, much better experience.
Obviously, reworking one administrative screen doesn’t solve the underlying problem you’re discussing. But it is an encouraging move: the past couple of years have pushed Drupal towards greater flexibility, and hopefully the next few will result in streamlined UI for the most common use cases.
In any case, thanks for your thoughts. Even if you never use Drupal, the input offered about how the experience can be improved is extremely helpful for the project.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 1:43 pm ¶@Jeff: Thanks for the thoughtful response. I’d love to see Drupal evolve as you’re describing.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 1:56 pm ¶I’m no CMS expert, but I am a web publisher and WP doesn’t do what I want - and I don’t think I am alone. The idea that WP, more than Drupal, has grown up around ‘what the publisher wants’ depends a lot on what you want as a publisher.
If WP does what you ‘want’, then you should, by all means, use it. But it isn’t too hard to stretch WP to limits it can’t go.
My impression is that it is harder to get Drupal to do the easy stuff, but it is easier to get Drupal to do the hard stuff.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 3:19 pm ¶I can’t help but jump in on this as I think you’ve probably done what most newbies do with Drupal and that is flounder a little. Worse that an actual “drupal-company” helped reinforce that impression, as every day I show the simplicity of a Drupal-based system to new customers and frankly, they get it. That’s not to say that as a publisher you don’t have a learning curve, but obviously you seem to be describing a scenario where you’re obviously doing it yourself, and in any case you’re definitely on the “suck” end of the learning curve for Drupal at that point. Today I can build amazingly simple and amazingly complex sites both in very short amounts of time and virtually all that work is done within the afore mentioned CCK/Views recipe. Those two products together are what truly give Drupal the “fabled” flexibility, and may be a large portion of the reason you feel it doesn’t perform as advertised.
Ultimately the question has to be “is this a web-publisher’s tool?” and the answer is simply “not yet”. But what can be constructed by a knowledgeable Drupal developer can certainly be used as a publishing tool very easily. The next objective would be to make that process easier, and as Eaton mentioned, a product isn’t perfect when there’s nothing left to add, but rather when there’s nothing left to subtract.
Eclipse
Posted 05 May 2008 at 5:06 pm ¶@EclipseGe: I appreciate your points, but you’re not really addressing my main issues with Drupal. On the one hand it royally does suck as an elegant, intuitive CMS; on the other why would I use it to build an ambitious web application? Virtually no-one I know in the start-up tech community would even consider using Drupal as the basis for their business, so I’m left wondering who it really is for? Perhaps a very specific kind of publisher prepared to invest large amounts to get what would essentially be a completely customized publishing framework?
Posted 05 May 2008 at 5:17 pm ¶Daniel,
That seems a little premature as some of the largest media companies in the world are making great use of Drupal. Fox uses it for the Fox Searchlight, Popular Science magazine’s website is done is Drupal, Warner Brother’s Records puts a huge number of their artists on Drupal… and the list goes on and on and on… so obviously, your argument doesn’t work for everyone because while you might be able to make the argument that thousands of developers (almost as many as work on the Linux kernel) are all wrong, arguing that some of the largest media companies in the world are ALSO wrong seems a little short sited (and I say all of this in the nicest way possible, I’m just trying to make as pertinent a point as possible).
With all that said, no one has claimed Drupal doesn’t have a significant learning curve, but I think it’s important to keep in mind a couple of things… Primarily, calling Drupal a “CMS” might also be a little premature. My pitch to most customers is that Drupal is a rapid development framework that happens to do content management. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t some setup involved, and again, that’s best done with an experience Drupal Developer.
We (the Drupal community) recognize that Drupal has some more work to perhaps cut out that middle man… that’s the purpose of the system, to cut out all the middle men, and perhaps in the interim we’ve created a new middle man, but if that’s what it takes today to get to where we want to be tomorrow, then I think most of us are willing to accept that trade off.
As previously mentioned Drupal has been undergoing usability testing, as it is a goal of the community at large to improve this usability not only for us, but for everyone. Drupal recognizes it’s not “there” yet. But we have a lot of “flexibility”… far more so than any other system out there… if we aren’t as “simple” to use yet, then some more people with your view point who’re willing to help us improve in the areas would be super appreciated.
Eclipse
Posted 05 May 2008 at 7:30 pm ¶@Eclipse: That seems to be the standard refrain in the Drupal community (lots of giant companies are using it, ergo it must be great). But what’s really happening is Drupal dev shops are having some success in selling their services to these companies, in much the same way that the big dot-com era web shops sold Interwoven, Vignette, WebLogic and other platforms from the proprietary world.
Lots of shops selling hours for Drupal implementation seems to me to be quite the opposite of any of the empowering effects of something like WordPress.
And don’t get me wrong, there is entirely nothing wrong with selling services for Drupal implementation. But that’s completely different from the kind of rapid application development demanded by tech. startups.
I do find it interesting that this kind of response is very consistent in the Drupal community. For example, I write that none of the tech. startups I know would ever consider using Drupal, and your response is that I must be saying Fox and Warners are in the wrong because they’re using it. How are these things remotely related? Where did discussion of large media companies suddenly spring from? These are great customers for $500k web dev contracts, but not at all relevant to the discussion here.
By the way, for 99.99% of the startups I talk to (who use everything from Cake to Rails to Django, and more), it doesn’t even cross their minds to think of Drupal as a framework. They’re the people at the leading edge of web development and they see it as a CMS. Grabbing on to the framework label just seems like bandwagon jumping.
And I go back to this: On the homepage of drupal.org there’s a bold pronouncement that Drupal is an open source content management system. Yet you and others constantly say that it’s not really a CMS so we should forgive its failings here. Sounds to me like a community with an identity crisis, or simply reinforcement of my point that it’s a community unable to do one thing really well, as has happened with WordPress.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 8:21 pm ¶Daniel,
Respectfully, I would submit to you that your comments are again a little bit off the mark. This is sort of Lullabot’s field, but they spend quite a bit of time educating the field… this includes the big companies as well the smaller firms (in many cases, single developers). Sony BMG has one of the best drupal developers on the planet as an employee, and there are others on staff there who do drupal work as well.
I do find it so odd that you seem so focussed on startups. Businesses with a history seem a better litmus test to me, however, I’m sure there are others far more qualified that I am to comment on this particular dynamic.
As to Drupal being billed as a “CMS”… who can say? What I CAN tell you is that Drupal IS a rapid development framework… a huge portion of that is learning curve, and to discount it before experiencing it, is to mislabel Drupal before actually learning what it’s about. I can’t help you with that misconception because, even for an experienced programmer, the learning curve is pretty steep.
Finally, I think the reason it looks like we’re all drinking the same coolaid is because… largely, we are. The Drupal community communicates a lot, and largely I think we’re all on the same page as to where we’re heading and what we want to be doing. If you don’t like Drupal today… try it again next year about this time.
Eclipse
Posted 05 May 2008 at 9:42 pm ¶Daniel, I have to say that I think your are just opposed to Drupal and anything I say will make no difference. But I work with Drupal on a daily basis building complex, large scale websites. When I go home, for personal publishing I will use Wordpress.
Is one better than the other? No, they are two different applications in my opinion. They both have their appeal to different markets. For my personal blog or website, at least to me, Drupal is a little overkill. I just want to post some articles and have some photos for my flickr page. But on large scale sites, I couldn’t imaging creating it in wordpress. I am sure you can, but I feel Wordpress is more like Dreamweaver where Drupal is more like Textmate (sorry for the Mac comparison).
But again, I am sorry that you do not like Drupal, but to say that it is completely irrelevant is irresponsible of you. It obviously is a relevant force on the web. Instead of ranting against Drupal, write an article that is a little more positive in saying “I didn’t like Drupal, this is why because of X, Y, and Z”.
Steven
Posted 06 May 2008 at 6:02 am ¶@Steven: Your comment more than anyone else’s reinforces my doubts about the viability of the Drupal community. Why be so defensive in the face of rational, real-world criticism from those outside of the community? And to say that my post is “irresponsible” is frankly laughable.
If you read my piece you’ll see that it isn’t about saying WordPress and Drupal are interchangeable; rather that WordPress’s model has built a strong community of end users, while Drupal’s has created an inward-looking community of developers and dev shops.
Oh, and as for your suggestion that I be more positive and “balanced”… I’m not writing a term paper for a community college. If you want Drupal to succeed you’ll have to accept that it’s about responding to, not arguing with, the market’s reaction and perception.
Posted 06 May 2008 at 6:59 am ¶@Eclipse. I think we’re going around in circles here, but the reason I’m so focused on startups is because that’s where innovation in technology originates. It certainly doesn’t live in the web development team for a large company, or in a community built around servicing these companies.
Posted 06 May 2008 at 7:05 am ¶Well, again Daniel, I think that must be a difference of opinion on who is developing what, but I think we can probably agree to disagree.
Eclipse
Posted 06 May 2008 at 9:15 am ¶Here, here, Daniel
Posted 06 May 2008 at 12:54 pm ¶Except for marketing your entire argument is hollow. You title your post that Wordpress will make Drupal irrelevant but you don’t make a clear case for how. You only argue that Drupal does nothing well and you state this is “obvious”. There are plenty examples of large-scale websites, blogs, startups, social-networking, and brochure-ware site etc. being built on Drupal.
Both Drupal and WordPress have functionality extensions in the form of modules and plugins, respectively. WordPress comes with more features built-in to the core download which is good for some people, the people who want those features. And because those features are in the core product the main development team can spend time perfecting the user experience of all that functionality and interfaces. I am certain there are plugins for WordPress that have a horrible user experience just like there are Drupal modules that do.
Posted 07 May 2008 at 11:41 am ¶@Ben: As Ian Bell notes in the comments thread of his response to my post:
Here’s the problem with your comment: you say my argument is hollow. But it’s not an “argument”; it’s a result of real-world experience with the extent to which the Drupal community has built something that works only for the Drupal community.
And as is clear from the piece, I’m not suggesting that WordPress and Drupal are interchangeable; instead that successful products, platforms, frameworks will always emerge from the kinds of community that WordPress is building vs. the kind that Drupal has built.
Posted 07 May 2008 at 11:53 am ¶“But on large scale sites, I couldn’t imaging creating it in wordpress.”
Not sure what you mean by large scale, but if you’re referring to traffic or # of users, WordPress.com is a good counter-example to both, with over 3,000,000 users and serving 600+ million dynamic pageviews a month. If you’re below that size there’s a beaten path for how to scale.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 12:07 am ¶@Matt: Thanks for stopping by. Just watched a video of your presentation at the web 2 summit; sounds like there are a lot of interesting developments coming to WordPress.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 6:49 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
Dan is Down on Drupal…
Dan Gibbons of Carrie and Danielle is down on Drupal. Can't say I blame him, he pretty much nails the reason why I have avoided Drupal for any project I have managed…….
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