A few questions about Drupal

Vadim Barsukov, also known on the sites drupal.ru and drupal.org under the nickname "vadbars", answered questions about the work of drupal.ru, cms Drupal, Drupal6.


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- So, the first question, probably the most interesting for Russian-speaking cms users now: what happened to drupal.ru ? .masterhost, infobox, who is to blame?


Honestly, I know no more about this than everyone else. After some intrigue with promises of a speedy recovery of the server, an announcement appeared on the site: “After an air conditioner crash at the provider's site (
masterhost.ru ) the hard drives and the power supply of our server came to a fault. ”I am sure that the team of Alexander Grafov (server Chuvash.org/Roleplay.ru , which hosts the site drupal.ru ) is doing everything to get out of the deep out and I wish them every success in this.

But these recurring crashes on the Internet themselves (for example, the recent interruptions in ICQ) suggest philosophical reflections on how insecure our Network is and how thin is the film of civilization that separates us from the Stone Age. :) The Internet, which seems to have been created as a network of communications invulnerable in the event of a nuclear war, easily falls victim to a broken computer fan or an overheated air conditioner in the server room.

Well, if you look from a pragmatic point of view, then these "man-made disasters" push me to thoughts that were well expressed by another forum member on drupal.ru under the nickname
V.Kh .: “Still, I come to the conclusion that I should have my own server
problematic. Replacing drives, replacing the server and so on. Shared is better if not
there were these limitations. And if we take that, then the best is probably
- This is a VPS / VDS with the largest possible values, but not yours.
server. ”( http://harzah.net/node/866 ).
I, too, for such a division of labor between hosters and web developers (I apologize for the surplus of foreign words :).

- The question is probably asked more than once: why is Drupal? What are the pros / cons for you now this cms has.


Many copies were broken in "religious wars" on what is better: Joomla or Drupal, WordPress or Drupal ... "Who will win - a whale or an elephant?" Comparative CMS functionality tables, various benchmarks and performance tests - all this can be found on the Internet enough. I will not speak again about the technological features and the ideology embodied in Drupal, although they, of course, are wonderful.

I want to say now about another aspect, psychological. For any master it is important that his tool is not only powerful and effective, but also convenient for him. After all, sites are made by living people, with their own preferences and peculiarities. In programmers or web developers go not just to earn money for survival. People express themselves, want to say something to this world and receive in return glory, love and attention. And the choice of a tool (be it a CMS or a programming language) says a lot about who chose it. One is looking for simplicity and the ability to create a website “at the touch of a button,” while another wants to put the construction of their websites under complete control. To build the site as a building - brick by brick from the “zero cycle” to the weather vane on the tower.

Drupal successfully balances between these extremes. What attracts me to him is precisely this combination, on the one hand, of the ease of assembling typical sites from ready-made “cubes” -modules and, on the other hand, the ability to constantly set increasingly complex tasks for themselves and perform them thanks to the incredible flexibility of the internal structure of this CMS (the famous drupalovskaya taxonomy). It brings pleasure - the opportunity to feel the whole process "at your fingertips" and feel how the level of your skill grows with the sites.
Someone on drupal.ru successfully compared other CMS with car assembly kits, and Drupal - with a car factory. :)

We can not say about one more thing that impresses me in Drupal - it was originally conceived as a means of creating human communities, and not just as another tool for the production of sites as sets of some texts and pictures. Even the slogan to
drupal.org sounds like this: “Community plumbing”, which can be freely translated as “Master community”, we organize the interaction between people. And this very precisely corresponds to the essence of the Internet as an intermediary between people, as the “habitat” of modern man.

- Knowing that you are an active member of drupal.org ,
it would be silly not to ask: what awaits us in the release of Drupal 6? When will he see the light? If there is information, share what the main emphasis is on in the development version.


As far as I know, none of the Russian “drupallers” are directly involved in the development of the Drupal core - we are still ahead (“and no one is behind,” as one friend of mine says :). But the Russian Drupal community is developing very fast, new interesting people are constantly appearing with their ideas and energy to realize them. Who knows, maybe by the seventh or eighth Drupal, and we will be able to offer a backbone idea for the next release, as it turned out now with the task of improving the multilingualism of Drupal. It was proposed by a young Hungarian programmer and became the main feature of the future version.

There will be many improvements in the translation of the interface of sites: automatic download of translations together with installed modules and design templates, the ability to select language versions for individual subdomains (for example,
ru.yoursite.com/page ) or use prefixes (for example, yoursite.com/ru/page ), etc. In addition, there will be new features to support multilingual information posted on your site. The same message may have different translations, which will automatically be displayed depending on the language selected by the user. This could have been done before with the help of third-party modules; now it has been significantly improved and will be included in the core of the system. Support for localization has become better: date and time formats are set up more flexibly in accordance with national standards, support for writing from right to left (for Middle Eastern languages) and
etc.

Improved installer. It has become more logical, more beautiful (support for design templates is included) and more convenient. May issue messages in the user's native language. Drupal generally contains a very interesting idea of ​​“installation profiles”, which allow the developer to form various scenarios for the installer as they gain experience. This significantly reduces the process of deploying almost finished sites of various types (corporate site, e-shop, school site, portal or virtual community and
etc.). In addition, developers can share these profiles with their colleagues, which improves cooperation and the division of labor between them. This is important, since the development of websites has long ceased to be a lone artisan's work, this is a collective work and joint work.

There will be important changes at the system level: the menu system is rewritten (they promise faster work and a more logical construction), work with recording system events in the logs has become more flexible (you can organize administrator notification by email or SMS, you can choose which events to record in the log) , the logic of interaction with the database was redesigned when creating tables (this will make it easier to port Drupal to other DBMS, for example, Oracle or SQLite), etc.

Numerous changes are expected in the user interface, in file management, pleasant improvements in the theme of design ... just do not list everything. Therefore, of course, we are looking forward to the new version. The exact release date is still unknown, but the “founding father” Dries Buytaert says, it seems, about “code freezing” in a month.

- What are your favorite projects implemented on drupal.


Of course, the most beloved is drupal.ru . And not from a technical or design point of view (there is still a lot to do in this area). This is a place of communication, and communication is so interesting that you “sit down” on it as a drug. Imagine how we are now, when
drupal.ru not available? :)

Naturally, if we talk about projects created with the help of Drupal, we should mention the offsite - drupal.org . It demonstrates well all the strength and weaknesses of the Drupal system. The excellent scalability and flexibility of the structure of a large portal is combined with the intricacies of the help system and increased server requirements. To the merits of the authors

drupal.org can be attributed to the fact that they are trying on this site to make the most of the new features and features of Drupal. As an example I will give the possibility of organizing "groups", that is
. a kind of subsites to which only certain categories of visitors have access. At drupal.org, it is used to organize discussion groups ( http://groups.drupal.org/ ) to discuss and jointly develop various Drupal development directions or organize collective events. It is fashionable, modern and “webdvanolnoe” - it’s not for nothing that Google, as they say, looks towards Drupal. :)

Drupal is often blamed for neglecting the external, designer side of site building for the sake of internal logic and performance. Indeed, the standard Drupal design templates (“themes”) look rather poor, despite the excellent “temization” opportunities that the engine provides. But lately, Russian designers (for example, garamond with
drupal.ru ) offered new comfortable and beautiful themes. And this, I believe, is our Russian contribution to international Drupal. It is becoming more and more beautiful Russian-language sites - http://www.drupalsites.net/countries/russia . Of course, here we should especially mention another “patriarch” of Russian Drupal - the site http://designcollector.ru/ .

- What can you wish / advise developers who only decided to switch to drupal?



I will not cheat - the "threshold of entry" in Drupal is quite high. It is necessary to get used to the ideology of the system, to get used to the terminology, moreover, there is not yet complete and detailed documentation in Russian, and as the version changes, the API and
etc. etc. But the presence of difficulties, maybe this is for the better - you will have something to do when you enter our fraternity (by the way, it can be called “sisterhood” :) - we have quite a lot of women and girls at the forum).

But the main advice is - do not be afraid to ask questions on the forum: our community is very friendly and willing to share its knowledge and skills with newbies. An intelligent answer to your question will help everyone, including those who come after you. And they will look like a guru and will interview you. :)

As stated in the film “That Munchhausen” - “Join us, gentlemen, join us!”

- Thanks for answering the questions. By the way, yesterday, finally, problems were solved (I don’t know everything yet) with the problems of hosting drupal.ru! That holiday has come on our street. And you, Vadim, would like to wish you success and good luck in future projects!