You mentioned that you had to hack core to display your nodes in different orders… you can use http://drupal.org/project/views for that.

The beauty of Drupal is that most of the stuff that you want has already been developed and you can just drop it onto your server and go. Drupal’s modular architecture encourages a fairly high degree of standardization among contributed modules.

At any rate the essence of what I wanted to say is this: If you find yourself hacking core, then you probably don’t know what you are doing… My brother and I have not touched core for any projects using Drupal later than 4.7 (At that time we did not know what we were doing either)…

I really think that anyone wanting to just explore a free and fairly easy to use CMS should look into Drupal.

Drupal’s power and flexibility are not for the casual web publisher. These people will be comfortable with the ease that WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, etc. have to offer. A person wanting a blog would only be interested in using Drupal if they would also like to say: sell subscriptions, build their own content types, define their own blocks, regions, menus, and so on. Drupal gives you the ability to do pretty much whatever you want.

Regards, Derek

You are right, either:
- Don’t hack Drupal.
- Ask to add that specific functionality.
- Accept the limitations of applications like Drupal.

If your website is really that customised, then not any CMS will work for you.

Nice article though, you got me interested!

That would be me, the only uniqueness I’m looking for is in the appearance and content of some sites I’ve set my mind on developing.

Does Drupal handle traffic spikes well, can I cashe it so the server load will be same or similar to loading static pages?

How hard/easy is it to customize Drupal sites look, compared to other sites that use cms?

“Next, I want to do something different with nodes, like, order them in a different way or something. That requires a database change and some extra indexes on the nodes table, say. I can hack Drupal to do this, but now I’ve forked Drupal and my upgrade path.”

Which is not correct, IMO. This scenario would be trivial to accomplish in Drupal without resorting to hacking, forking or coding at all, in fact (CCK + Views). It would also qualify as “fairly standard” bit of functionality, which is what you say Drupal does well: “It’s flexible enough, fairly scalable and easy to customize.” So, your addendum contradicts your example. So do the sites of the companies to which you refer - they are building plenty of sites with “pretty specific functionality.”

You seem to put all forms of customization into the “hack” and/or “fork” category. It’s not quite so binary, I think. The documented API allows developers to tap into core features, which can generally be put together in ways that create new and interesting functionalities. The API is patched and updated, and these benefits flow into the new features that you’ve built (module system).

Finally, the exploration, in general, of “framework” vs “my own ground-up code” is not really adequate. Maybe you built your code to be optimized, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you need to write it all over b/c you painted yourself into a corner without a large community through which to vet your idiosyncratic code.

No, your just wrong. Drupal *excels* at this kind of task; it’s a key reason developers often choose it for their projects. In fact there is an entire sql generating UI that allows users to flexibly generate output in multiple formats, multiple layouts, etc, (views). This is a common technique in CMS applications.

The problem isn’t that Drupal forces to you to create forked installations. If you are forking your installation, you are almost 100% of the time doing it wrong. The problem, if you wanted to make the case, is that there is a steep learning curve with regards to that API. But, having worked with “enterprise” CMS systems, this is generally the case with a sufficiently generic system.

Of course, there are *lots* of things that Drupal can’t do or would be ill suited to achieve. It’s a case of the right tool for the right job. But to say that you have to fork Drupal to manipulate content is a sadly misinformed understanding of the system. With views and cck alone, you can do a great deal of content manipulation without writing a single line of code. If you code, all the more so…