Why @chriswilsondc is full of shit about Drupal
Chris Wilson at Slate (@chriswilsondc) has an absolutely bizarre article up about the White House’s recent move to Drupal. In it, he criticizes their move to the open source Drupal project, giving a thoroughly explained list of issues.
The only problem? None of them are actually issues.
Drupal knows best… Should you, say, go completely rogue and try to add some Javascript in the body of a page—a 14-year-old technology that controls interactive components like buttons—the platform will have none of it.
A major problem, yes? Sure, if were the truth. Drupal actually makes it quite easy to include <script> tags. You can use the “Full HTML” input filter, or you can edit the “Filtered HTML” input filter to allow the tag. The reason Drupal does this out-of-the-box is because many people use Drupal for user submissions, and JavaScript can be used to do malicious things to other users of a site.
Drupal is impenetrable… a lot of ordinary, code-fearing people who just want a simple Web site are getting left behind.
Ordinary, code-fearing people shouldn’t be building government websites like WhiteHouse.gov. I’d never recommend a non-developer set up a Drupal site, just as I’d never suggest that a non-technical person install Linux. If you’re an ordinary, code-fearing person, go to WordPress.com or Tumblr.com and start a blog.
If you’re the Federal government’s IT staff, though, I’m glad you’re using a powerful system, even if it’ll take a few weeks or months to learn the development ropes. Chris Wilson’s argument here against Drupal would have the US Army driving tricycles instead of tanks because they’re <whiny voice>too complicated</whiny voice>!
Drupal hates change. Want to modernize Drupal by upgrading to a newer version? Ask these guys how that worked out for them.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that “these guys” had a single, very specific problem, and that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘evidence’… anyone who’s moved from Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 knows full well that Drupal loves change. There have been dramatic changes in the Drupal API with each major version, and the difference between D5 and D6 is like night and day.
Drupal is disorganized. Instead of displaying your pages in folders that you can browse, like you do on your personal computer, Drupal provides a nightmarish content list.
Drupal, like most content management systems on the market, has taxonomy for this. Folders are a poor metaphor for a content management system, because a piece of content is often relevant to multiple topics.
… unlike most content management systems, Drupal doesn’t have a convenient way to prevent two people from accidentally editing the same page at the same time.
Yes, it does. If you try to make changes to a node and someone else changes that node before you save, it gives you an error message. There are also contributed modules that attempt to automatically resolve the conflict if possible (ala Wikipedia). On top of all that, Drupal’s revision system (again, like Wikipedia) allows you to see each change made to a node historically - and revert/merge as necessary.
Drupal is righteous. The open-source movement has done wonderful things for the Web. But at its core, it remains a religion.
Oh, honestly. How does the fact that some members of the community get a little over-enthusiastic have anything to do with how useful a system is?
The site originally used Drupal but soon hired a private contractor—at a reported cost of $18 million—to rework the site.
Fun story: if you click the “$18 million” link that supposedly supports the point that $18 million was spend to move Recovery.gov from Drupal, the resulting page has a link titled “that $18 million contract”. Click that, and you get a piece titled “Recovery.gov: Debunking Rumors: $46 million for a website?” that points out that the $18 million figure includes five years of running, maintaining, and developing the site and its server infrastructure. Yep, it costs a lot of money to run a site of that size, but Drupal’s not the reason.
I’ve no idea why Chris Wilson has an axe to grind about Drupal, but it’s clear that he has at-best a layperson’s knowledge of it, and at worst no experience at all with the system. Any Drupal developer could’ve let him know that every argument in his screed has enormous holes.
