Drupal is dead

So I have finally got rid of Drupal as my choice of CMS and changed to WordPress.  OK I know that I’m still using a default theme but I have never claimed to be a designer.  As a company we still use Drupal for e-commerce sites although that may well change in the near future.  The majority of our commercial sites are built using Codeigniter or raw PHP which is of course my preferred option.

Why have you dropped Drupal you might well ask?

Simply that for all it’s claims it doesn’t cut the mustard. For simple presence type commercial websites (standard 5 page sites) it is too big.  For heavy data processing sites it is over complicated to develop with. A very good case in point is this blog.

In first case we find that it takes too long to get the final few changes done and the average user seems to struggle with the user interface. I’ll expand on this a bit.

WordPress ImageDrupal out of the box is no different to WordPress, Joomla or any other system. To get anywhere near to a WordPress type blogging site you need to add quite a few modules. then comes the dreaded themeing (that’s their spelling by the way) job. This can take so long and normally all the profit out of the job.

I know Drupal has an easy way to easily create new content types but in reality you normal don’t allow the end user access to these functions because its beyond them. The admin panel is a nightmare for non-technical users – which most of our clients are, which is why they asked us to build the site.

Heavy lifting applications are easier to build and debug, tailor, tweak and change when you have built the source code yourself, hence any really serious stuff we use codeigniter. We have tried to use Drupal but you end up building so many modules using what think is an average API that is faster to build from scratch.