Falling in Love with Drupal
Filed under: Development — Micheal on October 24th, 2007
About three weeks ago I started work on a “pro bono” project for my Alma Mater. Once I produced the mockup I decided this would be a good opportunity to integrate with a different framework. To save time, money and provide a quality product I was on the hunt for the right framework. I wanted a framework that would provide flexibility so someone else could take over in the future and also provide scalability so if the project grows beyond our current vision the framework would handle it. After rummaging through several frameworks, I came across Drupal.
I found many reports stating there is a learning curve with Drupal, even for the seasoned PHP developer, and they weren’t kidding! However, once I dived in and figured out the template system it was pretty smooth sailing from there on. The content management portion of Drupal is awesome. I find that the learning curve is in discovering that referencing Drupal’s API is a must for overrides. Just to get the menu system to work the way I designed it, I had to create two overrides for the main and sub navigation. Since there is a definite limit on time with this particular project I absolutely love Drupal’s modules. The modules are simple and give just enough features to do the job. With all the power of Drupal, I found it strange that the output was built into the modules instead of using a MVC architecture. In order to change the layout of a particular module view, one must create an override in the template.php to then tell Drupal to pass the data to a template file. All and all Drupal is great if someone is looking for a feature rich CMS/framework that is scalable. It is important to determine if Drupal is right for the project. I would not choose Drupal if I were going to be doing a lot of heavy development, I would choose ExpressionEngine because it is based on the awesome framework CodeIgniter.
Once I rap this project up I will post some details and a link. We’ll see how excited I am at that time!
Subscribe
Drupal is a fickle mistress… oh yes, she’ll be nice to you if you play by the rules, but try to throw her the hacks, and she’ll teach you bad habits…
Hey man - do you ever go to Central Florida PHP? http://cfphp.org
Comment by Ryan Price — October 25, 2007 @ 5:33 am
Your right. With Drupal the main goal is to not have to edit any of the source but it can be a real challenge dealing with hooks and overrides due to quirky behaviors and existing bugs. An example of this would be trying to remove “Create Content” for anonymous users. It can be done, but not how I or many other professionals would like to see it done. Working with Drupal really makes me crave MVC. As I wrote above, Drupal is ideal for some projects but not all.
I have not been able to make one of the Central Florida PHP meetings but am aware of it. I have a list of meetings I’d like to attend but work seems to always get in the way.
Thanks for replying! You are officially the first commenter.
Comment by Micheal — October 25, 2007 @ 7:56 am