The Drupal Advantage
March 30, 2010 by admin
I decided I should start a new book for my musings about why I have adopted Drupal, and what I hope to accomplish at this website. This book will have lots of overlap with my other books, but I felt the need to distinguish between what I need to, or have done, and the reasons why.
To begin, I'm thinking about what types of things are easier to do in Drupal, and what types are harder.
Drupal Pros
Actually, there is very little that is easier to do with Drupal than it was to do with Dreamweaver. In Dreamweaver, I had templates I could use to create what in Drupal would be block content. Certainly it was easier to create a look-and-feel of my own. The big advantage of Drupal is that, theoretically, at least, it allows me to give other people the power to add content to my website. That may not really be that great of a thing for me. I need to figure out why I want other people to be able to add content to my site.
There are some things that are easier in Drupal, though. I love the contact form, which provides me with a super easy way to get secure email from my visitors. I love how easily I can compile information from the database with Views writing the queries for me. The fact that Drupal provides a relatively secure way to open up the site for use by others is compelling, but so far, somewhat elusive.
Drupal Cons
Drupal does not perform anywhere near as well as a conventional website. Page serving is slow, and I have yet to figure out how to get any site to perform acceptably (let alone well) on a consistent basis. Also, editing html in Drupal is painful beyond belief as compared against editing the same html in Dreamweaver.
Since one of my goals is to allow non-technical users to make good use of the site, there needs to be a way to make page creative very, very intuitive. This turns out to be rather difficult, unless I assume that users will only ever want to type paragraphs of plain text or take advantage of pre-defined content types I provide. I am working on the latter, but a truly good html editor would be a huge help, and so far, I haven't found one.