
Drupal: 15 years old - geerlingguy
http://buytaert.net/drupal-15-years-old-and-still-gaining-momentum
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geerlingguy
Drupal and Wikipedia both celebrating 15 years today; jQuery 10 years earlier
this week... All three projects that have affected my life in a very positive
way, and have made the web a better place.

Thanks, Dries, Jimmy, and John!

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bbayer
I used and liked Drupal a lot. The only thing bothers me to see enormous
number of queries running even for a single page web site. I think it is a
sacrifice for the sake of creating all-purpose application.

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jacquesm
No, it's the price of a naive approach to maintaining a data model
programmatically. This is a very weak point of drupal and the performance
overhead it generates is incredible.

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aikah
> it's the price of a naive approach to maintaining a data model
> programmatically

Are you talking about their node system ?

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jacquesm
That's the least of the problems. Drupal creates tables willy-nilly and hits a
very large number of them for a single page request.

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rvense
I've seen a thousand request for a single page when logged in as administrator
(since the menu structure for the admin interface comes from the database as
well).

I talk about this a lot and I must admit I rarely use words as diplomatic as
naive...

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jacquesm
> I talk about this a lot and I must admit I rarely use words as diplomatic as
> naive...

That has to be the first time that I'm labeled 'diplomatic'. I have different
words as well but I see no upside in using them, those who choose to pick
drupal after many years of broken processes, lack of an upgrade path between
major versions, abandoning large numbers of users on broken and unsupported
code anybody that chooses drupal today really deserves what they get.

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smpetrey
I just started playing around with Drupal for work today. What a serendipitous
day :)

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jacquesm
Save yourself a lot of grief and either go for symfony2 (also quite heavy but
a lot better written and much more maintainable than drupal), or laravel
(based on symfony2 components).

Better yet, avoid the php ecosystem completely and go for a more mature one,
even the python and ruby frameworks have better long term prospects than most
php based stuff.

The biggest downside is that you'll find it harder to find programmers, the
upside is that you'll find fewer 'absolute beginners' and interviewing will be
a bit easier (fewer respondents, higher overall quality).

I'm writing this as a very long time PHP user that also spent considerable
time on the drupal offerings.

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noir_lord
> Better yet, avoid the php ecosystem completely and go for a more mature one,
> even the python and ruby frameworks have better long term prospects than
> most php based stuff.

Agree with everything you said except this, PHP has recently undergone an
renaissance in development, 7 is a huge step forwards (proper AST, the start
of an optional type syste, 100% speedup, half the memory usage - I've actually
seen these changes on stuff I'm running), composer and the PSR's also helped a
great deal.

I expect the split on python/ruby/php to remain pretty constant, Python stuff
remains excellent but they aren't doing anything revolutionary in terms of the
Web story, Ruby with RoR has made some excellent changes in the new release
but in terms of impact I don't think they exceed anything available on PHP.

I'll happily agree that PHP is a horrible language but it's also incredibly
productive to program in if you avoid the warty parts (getting easier to do)
and approach it like a Python (which I also am) programmer would in terms of
writing good maintainable code.

The comment on developers is accurate, there are a lot of PHP "programmers"
who fall short of the average in the Python or Ruby community however the
total pool of good PHP developers is likely (I don't have metrics so I'm
guessing on that one) larger than the total pool of good Python (web anyway,
python is _everywhere_ ) and Ruby web devs just on community size.

I don't regard having to winnow the chaff a big problem, I'd sooner have more
good applicants (in absolute terms) mixed in with a lot of bad applicants than
having way less good applicants in a different language.

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jacquesm
Agreed with everything you wrote here, I should have been more precise.

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noir_lord
It's the internet, it largely doesn't matter how precise you are someone will
find a way to correct you somehow ;).

That said your advice on using Symfony2 or something else over Drupal is
_extremely_ valid and I can say that as I used Drupal for a couple of years
and ran into all the usual issues (worked fine for non-logged in, fell over
with a few hundred logged in users), as a nice way to generate largely static
content for end users it's just about acceptable but people seem determined to
not use it for that, whether you can blame Drupal for that or the end users is
an interesting question I guess.

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mercer
Oh good lord... I thought my Drupal sites were fine until for one of them it
required a small amount of logged-in users. Performance was terrible so I
enabled some dev module to see what was going on. I was faced with a
ridiculous amount of queries, each of full of joins.

I now don't use Drupal anymore, although I might occasionally whip it out for
a site that only requires a few admins to log in...

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ajsalminen
One of the major improvements in Drupal 8 is caching that works for logged in
users.

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mercer
That's good to know. Another reason to kick Drupal 8's tires when I have some
time!

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gushie
Is that all? I thought that was just the gap between major releases ;-)

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jonesb6
Pretty sure one of the Drupal guys worked in the same co-working place I did.
He was very cool, anecdotally promising the future of Drupal to be really
cool.

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jagger27
Dries will be presenting at hack.summit in February.

