Aug
25
Drupal – Not for muggles
It's drupal "out of the box". Only better organized.
Light travels very quickly indeed. At the same time, the universe’s maximum speed limit is still frustratingly slow for anyone actively considering interstellar travel.
It’s all relative, isn’t it?
Considering what drupal does, considering what’s actually going on under the hood (not to mention the materials from which the engine is honed), it’s really very fast indeed. At the same time, if you stop considering that, and instead just start clicking your way around a reasonably sized drupal website, you’ll have time enough to update your facebook status and twitter your breakfast du jour while you wait for the search results to display.
There are workarounds, of course. For example, you could decrease front-end load times by distributing key assets via a CDN, enable APC on your server, look into MySQL 5 query caching or use the filesystem to cache static versions of pages. And so forth. Host willing.
Any of that sound straightforward to you? If so, you are a geek, congratulations. If not, that’s a shame; especially as you’re the kind of person drupal is opening its hypothetical blue arms to viz. “Drupal allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content”[1] and “anyone willing to invest a little time and effort can learn how to use, setup, configure and maintain a Drupal based web site.”[2]
This then, is my gripe. Drupal is a geek’s CMS, much like linux is a geek’s operating system. That’s just fine, but let’s not pretend otherwise.
In fact Drupal is not a solution, it’s a starting point. It’s lacking in both the usability necessary for direct muggle interaction and the polish necessary to sell it to marketing. Out of the box, it’s about as useful as an IKEA flatpack without the instructions and half the bolts.
We might almost call it middleware; and indeed it is partially self-categorized as a “content management framework.”3 In this regard it has its own pros and cons which I will come to in a later post. The bottom line is that you’re going to need developers – good, creative developers – to build a half-decent online experience from these ill-assorted Lego bricks. And if you have good, creative developers, then you have other options on the table.