I hate Drupal

I hate Drupal

The first iteration of www.vuuch.com was in Drupal. That decision doesn’t count among the best we have made. Since last August, I’ve struggled to warm to Drupal. Today, I am coming out of the Drupal-hating closet to tell the world what a mess this system is. It’s impenetrable, unsupportable, slow, awkward, poorly architected and ugly. I’ve heard Acquia is doing well selling support — to paraphrase Homer, “Duh.”

Now, finally, we Drupal-bashers have the beginnings of a reaction. Check out this article by Tony Byrne titled “Don’t Get Run Over By Drupal.” It’s written from the perspective of an enterprise (for whom the Drupal mess can quickly become a festering cesspool) but it has the core element of truth that I needed to come clean. Byrne notes that Drupal is fashionable, like an iPhone. Lots of webmaster lemmings take their cues from fashion, but like a pair of too-high platform shoes from the 70’s, they are going to get hurt.

Me? I’m almost done with a new version of our website, a draft of which can be seen at wp.vuuch.com. “WP?” WordPress, baby. The bestest, coolest, fastest, easiest CMS of all.

Update November, 2013: While Vuuch is dead, unfortunately Drupal isn’t. Not having learned much the first time I got burned by Drupal, I freely made the choice to try Drupal again with another client. This only proves that humans have no memory of pain.

I am gratified by the level of traffic this post still gets, two and half years after I first got singed by Drupal. So, I am leaving the post up because Byrne’s article is still available and as pointed and poignant as it was then.

 


Posted

in

,

by

Comments

15 responses to “I hate Drupal”

  1. Alex Neihaus Avatar
    Alex Neihaus

    I find it remarkable that this post, not over five years old, continues to get search traffic and frustrated comments like Gvjky’s. If you are thinking of using Drupal, you really need to re-think that decision.

  2. Gvjky Avatar
    Gvjky

    I hate Drupal, its technology, philosophy and people around it (and the logo).

    I worked with a company as a Drupal theming and frontend engineer for a few years. It was a totally painful period for me to have been digging out things in the Drupal chaos. I wanted Drupal 8 info, but the official site have old info and examples only.

    Almost all Drupal guys don’t care clean DOM structure, I had to fight against heavily nested div tags with tons of useless classes poured out by the Panels module. Only one or two unique classes are enough for me!

    Also what made me sad was that Drupal people believe they are dominating the CMS scene and always arrogant towards other CMS users, such like “Command line? We could use it 5 years ago, blah!”.

    After two years of my involvement with Drupal, I have completely fallen behind in new frontend technology. Now I can make a Drupal 8 theme from scratch, but I don’t want to do that anymore.

  3. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    Sorry to necro but after 3 years of developing drupal(laravel, umbraco, Node etc etc)  sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that Drupal the CMS Ouijia board sucks.

    The Drupal API I love.

    Any time you, as a developer, end up trying to point and click for 2 hours and fail to figure out how to make a report (view in this case), you say **** this,  break out vi, and it takes 10 minutes to write a 12 line php script to do the same job, there’s a serious UI problem with the CMS.  This speaks volumes about how powerful and easy to use the API is.

    The whole purpose of a CMS is to enable users to create content (reports included). If users need a developer to do this stuff, the CMS has failed and can not justify it’s existence.

    The drupal core development team needs to take this beautiful API they’ve developed, toss the CMS into the bit bucket, start over with the UI, and build a new interface from scratch using their excellent API.

    It’s hard to rationalize how they can do such a great job with the API and have a user interface that sucks so unbelievably bad. They really need to hire a usability engineer.

  4. stubb Avatar
    stubb

    Because Company X wanted to save a few bucks and let Gladys the receptionist manage their website in addition to answering the phones, the rest of us have to deal with garbage like Drupal.

    1. Alex Neihaus Avatar
      Alex Neihaus

      While I certainly sympathize with the sentiment, I am not sure Gladys the receptionist would even know what Drupal is. If she did, she’s likely to have run screaming from the reception desk with her hair on fire.

      I think we are still being victimized by Drupal not because of end users, but by developers who wouldn’t know a decent content management system if it hit them in the face.

  5. […] railed against Drupal on this blog repeatedly here, here and here; and started gushing about WordPress over five years ago. At least I am […]

  6. Autopraonica Webs Avatar

    Drupal isnt so bad, but you are right WP is better. For begining it is easy and it has a lot of features, like Joomla!

  7. rick Avatar

    “Why can’t they just build themselves a spaceship and go live on a drupal planet, far far away.”

    LOL!

    Drupal is not so bad. It’s just trying to do so so much and it’s been getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

    All things to all people doesn’t work so well.

  8. […] a year and a half ago, I wrote a post titled “I Hate Drupal.” It’s turned out to be one of the most popular and enduring posts on this blog. The […]

  9. JFR Avatar

    I hate drupal. I can’t believe developers choose to use it and are happy with it after even a week. Why can’t they just build themselves a spaceship and go live on a drupal planet, far far away. I hate it so much that I will be forced to quit my job before going nuts (so close). WordPress misses me and so do I. So versatile and powerful when you know how to use it. A word of advice to all of you who future drupalers… run!

    1. Peter Drinnan Avatar

      Hee hee. You took the words right out of my mouth. I am fixing a Drupal site right now and all I want to do is run away. What a horrendous thing it is. It reeks of Geek and there is no beauty in it at all.

  10. […] my theme also reaffirms my deep admiration of WordPress and my distaste for Durpal, even though I have just completed a Drupal website for a client. (I recommended it Drupal. Same […]

  11. peter drinnan Avatar

    It seems that anyone who has wored with any other CMS and comes into Drupal land suffers because they know there are more intuitive and friendlier ways of doing things. I think if you have never used a CMS before it is better because you have nothing to compare it to.

    Drupal falls into this weird place where highly technical users love it, programmers hate it and ordinary people just stare at the screen wondering what the … they are looking at.

    From a training perspective, I can tell you it takes 2x longer to train a client to use Drupal than WordPress.

    1. Kevin Avatar
      Kevin

      I have used Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Concrete5, and Modx in the past years.
      Joomla has always been my favorite then WordPress. Well since Modx and Drupal have decided to change their CMS backends in the recent versions I have grown to really hate Drupal. As well as Modx but that’s a different story.
      Wordpress is decent I use it on more simple websites and Joomla on complex websites.
      But over all I’m to the point on Drupal 7 I never care to work with Drupal again.
      It just plain sucks now.

  12. […] we have moved from Drupal to WordPress. On my personal blog, I’ve described my frustrations with Drupal. Here, I want to sing the praises of WordPress. It ain’t perfect — nothing is. But it […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *