Release 6 of Drupal

February 16th, 2008 | Lutz.W
Posted in Internet | No Comments »      

Instead of commenting on Hong Kong’s latest storm in a teacup, created by the still unresolved celebrity-porn-scandal, let me pick up some more important news:

The brand new Drupal version 6 has been released shortly — there is a screencast comprising its new features, namely a simplified installation, a more user-friendly drag-and-drop administration back-end and support for OpenID (which is the real killer-feature to me).
After building quite a few websites with Drupal, I am personally not shilling too much for it any more. Don’t get me wrong here, Drupal is great with all its networking features and homebrew-plugins; but I eventually grew annoyed of two of its characteristics:

First, I don’t like Drupal’s on-site administration. An admin-area is not supposed to be handled in the same space like the website it dishes out, in my opinion.
Second, and rather unnerving to me is the code Drupal produces, which is cluttered with unnecessary mark-up (like div’s) wrapping each and all of its contents. The bottom line is, I found myself writing preg_replace functions to strip undesirable pre-formatted contents from most designs.

After working with CMSs for about two years, my light-bulb moment was finding that each CMS has its own philosophy; Drupal’s approach then to me is, you only need a few clicks and you already got a (pre-formatted) site. While this is useful in some situations, it’s counter-productive in others. A CMS with a completely different attitude is ExpressionEngine, which I’m using quite a lot at the moment (I’m building Coobico with EE, for example). EE’s unique strength is that nothing is preset by default. You need to build every detail yourself, giving you unmatched control.

There is nothing else to it but to keep yourself familiar with two or three different CMSs for different specifications, I guess.


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