For whom, all the same, Drupal?

In 2008, when I first heard about Drupal, I eagerly wanted to try it, because at that time I did not know anything except Wordpress and Joomla. Not knowing the history of the origin and the meaning of the name, it seemed to me too serious and trustworthy. Maybe at that time it was associated with something or it was simply consonant with something serious ... Although the desire to see what it was was very large, some strange fear of that unexplored seriousness kept me. Nevertheless, the time has come and I decided to get acquainted with the most serious CMS for me. The meeting was a complete disappointment! Accustomed to the structure of Joomla, I was afraid to imagine life without components and plug-ins. In general, the time I spent with Drupal was short and extremely unproductive. And I decided to part with it, at least - for a long time, at most - forever.

The separation was long enough. I decided to return to Drupal only at the end of last year, when the version number 7 continued to break through to the masses. But the second undertaking gave me an idea of ​​some kind of severity and seriousness unknown to me. Maybe the reason was that the standard templates, because no one has yet canceled the "meeting on clothes." But I overpowered myself and, plucking up my courage, installed this CMS a second time. This time I was planning to drop a little deeper than the last and understand if this system is really ideal for programmers. Immediately, I’ll make a reservation that I’m not a programmer at all, and my knowledge of php was only enough for a more or less advanced guest book, which I wrote under the strict guidance of a friend.

This time I decided that the correct approach to the study of Drupal would be an understanding of the principle of operation and the search for analogies with the familiar CMS. After reading the basic concepts, in my head everything began to fall into place. Joomla stereotypes were collapsing, where there were components, modules and plugins. In terms, we had to rebuild and find analogies (for example: Joomla-modules ≤ Drupal-blocks, Joomla-components and plug-ins ≤ Drupal-modules). It took not much time. It was necessary to recognize the strengths of Drupal, in which, according to my comrades, flexibility and omnipotence lurked.

Immersion

One day, a friend of “drupalist” told me that if I recognize the subtleties of the Views module, then I practically will not be impossible in terms of output and presentation of information on the site. I took the word, and after a short period of time I turned to him with the first problem. I remember the problem at that time was unsolvable for me and I complained to my friend that this Drupal is too complicated for me. Without thinking twice, he sent me an amusing learning curve for popular CMS:

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For a long time I looked at this picture, trying to find myself on this curve. Maybe I can already be attributed to those who fell, even without having conquered the summit? Having examined it more carefully, I realized that this is nothing more than a comic picture with a bit of truth. Tuning in to move on, I dropped dark thoughts and began to search for solutions. I found most of the answers to my questions on the official Drupal site. Russian-speaking forums left a bad impression. There are few who help for free. Although, occasionally, nevertheless, there are those who share behind “so” very useful information that really broadens the horizons.

Rejecting all stereotypes, I began to dive deeper; more and more often, I independently found solutions for the tasks set before me and recognized many of the charms of Drupal, such as the Views, Rules modules and various kinds of themes. Knowing, though not one hundred percent, these topics, I came to understand that much in Drupal can be done without coding at all. It is a pity that such an understanding does not come to everyone who is confronted with this CMS ...

Drupal is not for programmers?

Once a friend asked me to help me deal with a site that was created with the help of Drupal by some stern programmer. I happily responded to the request for help and, having received access to the site, was slightly shocked. The site was created without using the usual approaches: for the menu, the creator of that site wrote its own module; categorization was done without using taxonomy; Many information blocks were embedded directly into the template. I realized that many php programmers use Drupal by only a few percent, without using its full potential. The rest is written by themselves, sometimes in modules, sometimes straight in the template, and often adding files, which, in fact, are the core of Drupal.

Is this necessary? To write something of your own? Sometimes - yes, but this rarely occurs. For most tasks, there are excellent modules that have already been tested and successfully applied to many working projects. Of course, you can meet with a task for which the module has not yet been written, but in this case you can think of something, changing the approach to the implementation of the task. Often it is necessary to look at the impossible task a little differently and it becomes clear that the solution is on the surface and there is no need to fence one’s own thing.

Naturally, there are tasks when programming is indispensable, but this can be done correctly without touching the kernel, template, or third-party module code. In Druapl out of the box it is possible to program directly through the web interface: whether in the material, in a block or in views (Views). In my opinion, such pieces of code are much easier to detect and maintain.

Conclusion

From the above, it is clear that for solving a specific task there is usually more than one solution. And the one that programmers use is taking place. But I have a question: why then, dear programmers, do you need Drupal or another CMS? Maybe it's time to switch to frameworks, there you'll have to code more often and there it is quite expected ...