Drupal Sucks... (or in Soviet Russia Content Manages You)

I like TWIT and follow lots of their podcasts. Amongst others, I follow MacBreakWeakly. They are known to start making ratholes. In their latest podcats 55, they end up on a debate about if Open Source projects are innovative. It is an old discussion and both side (yes, no) have their points. If you look at it from the lower OSI levels and the commodity stuff, they might be right in a way. Linux for example is invisible for users, GNU/Linux might be visible for sysadmins and KDE for users. But Linux is invisible. Innovations in the kernel are regarded by most people as efficiency, not as innovation. A new cool filesystem? Means nothing for the average user. Faster? Smaller? Cleaner? Efficiency, not innovation…

And if you look at OpenOffice.org –no matter how great the product is- it is lagging behind their mean competitor; the Microsoft Office suite. Sure, it is better at I18N and obtaining standards and good enough for most people. But it isn’t regarded as innovative by most people. So there is a case for people saying that Open Source software is not innovative. Note, these people are not debating that open source licenses are innovative, or that the open source way of running projects are innovative. "Just" that the software –the product- is not innovative.

On the other end of the spectrum are people saying that true innovation can only be reached by openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally; Wikinomics or the “open source way” of project management. These people look at Mozilla (Firefox) and how Microsoft is struggling to follow up and is playing that game rather bad. Or they look at KDE and Gnome that are way better UI’s then Vista and for sure then XP.

My stand? Open Source Software is software. Some software is highly visible – a browser, a GUI- some software is only enabling other software, a kernel, memory allocation or a filesystem. Innovations are everywhere; some are visible for the enduser, some for the programmer, some not at all. If you only label “innovation” that what you can see, then you innovation is as big as you … well have vision. And most people have a very limited sight; they might look at the eycandy stuff (yes, that would include me) or at the API’s but seldom see the complete 360.

Now how is this relevant to Drupal? Well, Drupal is both a Content management System that users can work with and it highly visible for them as it is a Content Management “Framework”, only visible for programmers. So innovation that we – the Drupal Community- make will be regarded by some as visible and by some as invisible. Views for examples is way ahead of its time, SQL statements via an easy GUI. If you are a programmer of a website builder, you will love this kind of innovation. Now if you are a webmaster or use rof that same site, you will not see this and hence not label it as innovation. Point is: Drupal is for the user and for the programmer. Innovations in Drupal are for everybody, it is just that not that many people will see it and hence label it as innovation

No back to Mac Break Weakly. In the podcast 55 around 30 minutes after the start, Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Andy Ihnatko start a rant about innovation and Open Source. For Apple lovers a normal discussion. Mac OSX is based upon a BSD kernel ("not innovative") and has a proprietary good GUI. The basics is on Open Sourced, the value is brought by proprietary software. Or so the arguments starts.

Then the move to Drupal. Here is a transcript of the rant (snipped some stuff):

Andy: ”The last thing I want is that any software or technology is under control of the Open Source Software community…
Leo: ”What?!”
Andy: ..”because they are really really bad creating end user applications.
Merlin: … that was a lot more true 5 years ago. Are you actually using recently stuff? Cause lots of stuff has come a really long way.
Andy: I got the latest Ubuntu… I got the latest Open Office. And I still don’t have a working Wifi on that notebook. And I still think Open Office is where Mickrosoft Office was 4 years ago. All the really cool stuff. All the really innovative stuff, is created by companies like Apple. Open Source is great at standard building and it is great for creating alternatives for people. [...OpenMoko vs iPhone rant…] I don’t think that Open Source developers understand the need of end users who just want a solution.
Merlin: … that can be very true. It can be hard to use. And right now, I am doing a lot of work with Drupal… this is an Open Source application
Andy: Don’t talk about Drupal, IT SUCKS!
Leo: Laughs very loud.

Then it goes on and one. Now before you bash Andy, listen to him and think about his points from his point of view. I think Drupal –the community, the project and the product- is one of the most innovative software projects. But a user is always right. Always. And if a potential user thinks the product sucks, we need to make it better. Not change his mind, change the product and let him change his mind.

Twit.tv by the itself is a Drupal site build by our friends over at lullabot.

Views is far more. But not innovative

"Views for examples is way ahead of its time, SQL statements via an easy GUI". I'd call views a lot. But not easy. And calling it "sql statement builder" is neither correct nor does it doe justice.

Views is a page builder. Sure: under water it does SQL, but that is the case with 99% of the stuff in a databasedriven CMS.

But, views is not that innovative. Sure, there are many CMSes that offer only the pages as they were developed. But I've worked with manny a (closed source) CMS that had views-alike things for ages. Many asp.net and jboss applications have views-alike 'build "aggregated" pages with a gui. So, yes. Drupal has many innovative things, but wrt this prticular point it is not innovative. It's merely catching up. Oh. And I am a fan of views; don't get me wrong. Its just that we should not be blind for what else is out there when looking at fancy Drupal things; what's new to the drupal comm. might not be new for many CMSes at all.

By Bèr (not verified) at Wed, 05/09/2007 - 11:18pm | reply

Fanboyz

For what it's worth, I can see why apple fanboys don't like Drupal, and we've got a long long way to go before they'll be even remotely pleased. But I also don't find that the twitters are really very insightful. They're fully subsumed within the Bay Area Bubble, the epitome of insiders. Out in the real world where people base the value of their website on results and ROI, there are many many many users who are pleased with how Drupal has empowered them, even if they do find it a frustrating system to use at times.

Drupal isn't great as an end-user product, but that's steadily improving, and will continue to do so as more and more helpful UI features and best practices are developed.

I don’t think that Open Source developers understand the need of end users who just want a solution.

What's the solution though? The broad and utilitarian reality of "Content Management" as an application means that the software can only be so intuitive or effortless out of the box. What's your content and how are you looking to manage it? What's your goal? Answers run the gamut.

Drupal can only be made "insanely great" for end-users in specific instances (e.g. specific websites), and then only by people who know exactly what they want, know how to get it, and happen to have a good idea in the first place. Now that I think of it, in many ways this exemplifies the open-source foundation + proprietary innovation point of view that the twitters are offering.

By josh koenig (not verified) at Thu, 06/09/2007 - 4:04am | reply

The same

The same complaint that is seen over and over on d.o forums and such. And yes, there is something to it.

Drupal is two things - a development framework, and a CMS built on top of that framework.

As a development framework, there is nothing I would rather work with. When I *first* encountered Drupal, and just wanted to build a mildly complex website, I also thought it 'sucked'. That was long ago, and once I dug in, I realized that there was nothing comparable (and I did compare .. I developed the same site, in tandem, on multiple CMS platforms). When I listend to that MBW, I wanted to ring Andy's neck. The same way I'm sure people wanted to ring my neck back in the day when I said "Well, Drupal can't do xxyy, and it looks ugly."

And they were right to want to ring my neck.

But how to make things more approachable or easier to transition into for the Andy's of the world? I'm not sure, and it isn't something that I personally lose sleep over. In my case, my eyes were opened to the real possibilities within Drupal when I continually hit the wall with the alternatives and began to look deeper under the hood of Drupal itself. You can't speed someone up to hitting that wall. But if they are doing anything reasonably complex, they will hit it. And they will change their tune.

Or at least, I did.

By drawk (not verified) at Thu, 06/09/2007 - 6:14am | reply

Scratch your own itch

But a user is always right. Always. And if a potential user thinks the product sucks, we need to make it better

This is a common and false misconception. You presume we work for some mythical user (or not so mythical in this case) out there. This is not so. I am working for the fun of it, for the acknowledgement and prestige it gets me in the community, in the hope it'll make NowPublic.com better. These are all my goals and I do not care about anyone else's goals. Unless, of course (s)he waves me a wad of greenbacks but then (s)he just succeeded to make the problem mine.

By chx@drupal.org (not verified) at Thu, 06/09/2007 - 6:11pm | reply

Merlin Loves Drupal!

Andy's got some good criticisms of Drupal's weakness in media handling. I think he's not seeing the big picture, but we really ought to focus on fixing this in the next version of Drupal. However, Merlin's been twittering about how much he loves Drupal. He's been doing some cool stuff with it that he'll probably unveil in the next few weeks.

By Jeff Robbins (not verified) at Fri, 07/09/2007 - 11:21pm | reply

Open Source developers are not users ?

I don’t think that Open Source developers understand the need of end users who just want a solution.

I - for one - am certainly an end-user. I type my quotes in kword, browse the web in firefox and konqueror, type this comment on kubuntu, and I am managing my finances with kmymoney, so that in a few months I will be able to afford an openMoko phone.

Does that make me end-user enough?

And yes. I also develop for KDE in my spare time, and full time in Drupal. So? Am I entitled the label "open soruce developer"?

What I am trying to say, is that somehow this Andy-guy has some weird idea of Open Source developers. He sees them as being some weird alien-alike, non-human race. He seems to think that open Source developers don't care if their Wifi Just Works. He makes it sound as if those people involved in Open Source projects don't care if they can use something "easy".

Wel, andy, and all others who seem to think of me as a weird, uninterested alien, I am not. My laptop Just Works (with ubuntu). My office programs are easier (for me, being an office nitwit) to grok then MS office 2007. My wifi just works, whereas I spent 2 days hunting for proper firmware to get that same dongle running under Vista. And I know how to administer my finances just fine; even though on a mac, with Quicken, I simply did not get it.

The iphone is probably fine, and all. But I'd prefer an openMoko, that offers me Just a few more features, is free and so on. Provided it Just Works, off course.
So, really, Open Source developers do care about a phone that Just Works. At least one does.

By Bèr (not verified) at Sun, 09/09/2007 - 6:12pm | reply