Have been meaning to link to this for a while. Scot Hacker looks at Drupal vs. Django and why he prefers Django to Drupal. (With a side of WordPress.)
Drupal represents a middle ground between framework and CMS that we’ve chosen not to take. Drupal is far more capable than a CMS like WordPress, but also much less flexible than a pure framework. But more importantly, the facts that Drupal isn’t object-oriented, isn’t MVC/MTV, doesn’t have an ORM, and is generally less flexible than a pure framework, not to mention our preference for working in Python over PHP, all contribute to our decision not to use it.
Caught it in Jeff Waugh’s Twitter feed. Wanted to write up some of my own thoughts on WP vs. Drupal from my limited experience with Drupal, but haven’t had time.
Would be interested in informed opinions on either side.
Excellent repost, Zonker – many of us only deal with these frameworks as a tangential part of our business. It helps to see the issues brought back into more familiar software programming terms. I’ll be very interested to hear your experienced thoughts on these.
I have built sites & apps in raw C, Perl, and PHP (procedural and OO), and also in WordPress and Drupal, and exploring Django now. Also worked extensively with a proprietary .NET-based CMS. Also worked on the Kiva/Netscape Application Server, which used MVC concepts way back in 1998.
Personally I think it all comes down to comfort level with a certain framework, and then finding justification for that opinion. Pretty much all other issues can be overcome. Familiarity with language and comfort with concepts go a long, long way toward making a project successful, and more importantly, there is nothing wrong with that. People have preferences for a reason. Experience with multiple systems lends the skills necessary to make good decisions on appropriate technology. As the article says, “a good developer can do good work with just about any system”.
I’ll never go back to RYO. Frameworks and CMS systems are simply too useful. But I also won’t bind myself to a single system—it depends on the needs of the client.
(Love the quote from the article “we had had our fill of PHP”—how many times have I said that!)
@Jeff Conditions willing, I’ll be writing more about expanding WordPress and writing new apps in Django in the coming months. Might even see if I can get some articles out of it once I get my first serious app out of the way.
I agree with your analysis. For any technology, not just programming, once a person is comfortable with a certain solution, then it’s a matter of “how do I justify doing it the way I’m most comfortable?” Actually, that probably extends to most things…
There’s a huge Drupal community here in Portland, and one of them convinced me that I should move my web presence to Drupal. So I migrated three sites to Drupal. First of all, there was a month of pure agony as I learned how to do simple system administration.
But the crowning touch was when I started learning social media marketing. It turns out that Drupal sites require some pretty complicated setup to generate search-engine friendly URLs. With WordPress, it’s simply a matter of selecting a control panel option.
So I now have four WordPress sites. I don’t think I need an MVC framework. But if I did, there’s also a huge Rails community here in Portland, and I’d probably be banned for life if I used Django.
But seriously, I know Ruby and never bothered to learn Python or PHP, so if I did need a framework, it would be Rails.
@Ed I find that, often, the community you know is equally important to the technology. Similar, I guess, to the adage of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If you mostly know people who’ve embraced a specific technology, then you can usually solve your problems faster with that. I’ve looked at Django and Rails and I think I’d like Django more. But I don’t have a network of Rails folks who I’d turn to, so that might be part of it.
I’m right there with you on URLs. It’s a piece of cake in WP.