

Plenty of Drupal Jobs for Computer Science Students - CollegeMogul
http://www.collegemogul.com/content/plenty-drupal-jobs-computer-science-students

======
jacquesm
Drupal is a great concept, but the actual implementation leaves a lot to be
desired.

A few things stand out in my opinion:

\- no good upgrade path across major versions (automated!)

\- modules tend to disappear between versions, stop being maintained or get
redone without any regard for backwards compatibility.

    
    
      (this thread http://drupal.org/node/327225 was quite an eye opener for me)
    

\- the database model - I don't know of a better way to say this - sucks.
Using 5.x it makes a table per cck field, which makes drupal sites much
heavier on the machine than they should be.

If they fix those three issues it will be a world of a difference.

We host about 3,000 drupal sites, and the potential to increase that 100 fold
is there but the above issues are holding that back.

~~~
brandnewlow
I'd love to upgrade from D5 to D6, but I can't because I had to install a
dozen modules and make a few changes to the core code to fix the litany of UI
problems in D5 so it could be used by consumers. These modules aren't all
supported in D6. Short of dropping 3-5k to hire someone to come in and do it
for you or devoting a solid month to mapping it out and carefully upgrading, I
don't see how it's possible to ever upgrade a substantial (50+ modules) Drupal
site.

That said, nothing else out there compares to Drupal + Views + CCK. I just
wish it performed better.

~~~
jacquesm
Yep, that's my experience too...

The funny thing is that I don't understand why they don't get it together
more. A bit more direction and less of a 'let's code fest' would help a lot.

Bugs that I've fixed (sent in patches to the relevant maintainers) are still
in the templates more than a year later.

It's really weird because they _could_ go sky high.

------
ghiotion
It seems like Drupal always gets dumped on for having a crappy codebase (see
xinsight's comments as an example). Admittedly, I've not spent a lot of time
in the Drupal codebase, but I've used Drupal extensively on a number of
projects. I've looked at a lot of other CMS's (e.g. Joomla, Plone, IBM's WCM).
Drupal kicks the crap out of the other alternatives. Plone is so strange, it
doesn't even seem like Python.

The point that I think a lot of folks miss about Drupal (and CMS's in general)
is that they are REALLY hard to write. If you're a RoR or Django developer,
sit down some weekend and try to reproduce the Drupal core functionality. Get
back to me in 6 months when you're ready to test.

I'm a Django developer by trade, but when I come across a client that needs a
CMS, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Drupal is fantastic and very
sophisticated. You can do amazing things with CCK and views.

~~~
dasil003
I agree completely. I have worked a fair amount with Drupal, and anyone who
says the codebase is crappy is just plain narrowminded. The power and
flexibility of the codebase is incredible for the high level of abstraction
it's working at.

Granted, almost any of the architecture choices can be questioned or even
ridiculed, but that's inevitable when you are trying to be all things to all
people. It's all too easy for someone random programmer to come in and pick on
one thing and decide the code is crap, but yet the same programmer's ideal
solution would only work for maybe 5% of Drupal's userbase.

Also, FWIW, I'm not a Drupal fanboy. I can't stand Drupal and will never work
with it again. I think building a career on Drupal will severely limit your
skillset, and I think time estimation and client relationship management is
made much more difficult for a web developer due to the byzantine constraints
it imposes. All that said, Drupal does what it does brilliantly and in much
sharper form than any of the other PHP CMSs.

~~~
ghiotion
Your comment is great. Can you expand on your 3rd paragraph? Why will you
never work with it again and what byzantine constraints did you find? I'm
wondering if there's some aspect of Drupal that I'm missing and if I'm not
doing myself (and my clients) a long term disservice when I recommend Drupal.
Have you found other, non-PHP CMS's better?

~~~
dasil003
It's actually quite simple, I'm not interested in working on low-budget sites
that need a ton of functionality for a very low price tag. There's a huge
market for these types of sites, and Drupal and other CMSes are often the only
remotely feasible option for these clients.

The thing is that I am an end-to-end web developer with 15 years experience
with the full stack from back end, DB technology, server side languages,
Javascript, HTML, CSS, Usability, etc. I have a very precise idea of what I
want, and how to build it. With something like Drupal, you're only using 2-15%
of the architecture for any given project, but yet the rest of it imposes
assumptions and constraints which end up being performance and conceptual
overhead. You can get a lot of mileage out of it, but you're constantly
thinking in terms of the Drupal framework. This manifests in terms of lots of
little compromises. I much prefer to build the app up from a basic set of web
building blocks such as is provided by frameworks like Rails or Django. This
typically costs more, but enables a much more polished product in terms of
design, performance, and extensibility.

------
noodle
lets note that the graph copied was relative % growth. here's an absolute
chart:

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal,+joomla,+wordpress&...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal,+joomla,+wordpress&l=)

edited to add: note the spikes in joomla and wordpress, with subsequent dips.
it seems kind of ballsy to say that drupal is definitely not going through or
going to go through the same thing.

~~~
darkxanthos
Also let's compare it to the other frameworks (in an absolute fashion)

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal%2C+joomla%2C+wordpr...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal%2C+joomla%2C+wordpress%2C+asp.net%2C+php%2C+rails&l=)

If you say there are "plenty of drupal jobs" that is more of an absolute
measure than, "huge increase in drupal jobs"

------
xinsight
The irony is that I can't imagine any competent programmers not stabbing their
eyes out after looking at the Drupal codebase.

Oh, wait, I guess that explains the demand for Drupal coders.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
I think there are a few competent programmers who wouldn't mind working on
some Drupal-powered sites like Ubuntu, Nasa, Warner Brothers, the Onion,
Playboy Germany, Fast Company, Grateful Dead, Harvard's Science and
Engineering Dept, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International,
Popular Science, Universal Music etc etc [http://socialcmsbuzz.com/45-drupal-
sites-which-you-may-not-h...](http://socialcmsbuzz.com/45-drupal-sites-which-
you-may-not-have-known-were-drupal-based-24092008/)

~~~
xinsight
Sure, these sites look nice -- a major achievement when Drupal has HTML
sprinkled throughout the source -- but is there anything interesting from a
coding, interface or interactivity perspective? These sites could be static
HTML. (And probably are since you need a cache in from of Drupal for any
amount of traffic).

The only Drupal site I've seen which actually did something interesting was a
site from the last canadian election:

<http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/>

------
kitcar
One thing to consider as well is most Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla installs don't
actually require "coding", but rather downloading the correct modules and
setting up permissions / htaccess correctly. Not really challenging enough to
keep many compsci students engaged...

~~~
noodle
i don't think that full-time jobs are going to be about installing drupal, but
developing modules.

~~~
kitcar
It all depends on the job type naturally - assuming you're working for a web-
dev shop, most work will likely be new site launches v.s. new feature
development. If you're working client side, then correct its likely module
enhancement.

~~~
Periodic
I think you'd be surprised how easily you can put Drupal on a resume without
putting PHP.

I know a few web design firms where the "Drupal programmers" really are just
the ones who just know enough about Drupal to get the things working the way
the graphic designers want them. They just install the right modules and know
how to configure things and where to change files to get things to display
properly. They really don't know much about PHP at all.

------
mattmcknight
You know what's even more popular?
[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=sharepoint%2C+drupal&l...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=sharepoint%2C+drupal&l=)

------
roc
I note the original graph was offered in terms of Absolute job numbers. Shame
he didn't choose to share that.

------
Locke1689
Ah, PHP, how I loathe you...

