What are some of Drupal's shortcomings? [closed]

Answer 1

I think it's high learning curve is the only shortcoming as most companies struggle finding good Drupal talent. http://drupalize.me/ and http://buildamodule.com/ are doing very good job to reduce this high learning curve.

Answer 2

Drupal is an impressive system. It's surprisingly small for all it does, and it's module system is extremely powerful. But as Eli said, a lot of your tasks are going to rely on other developers doing something in a particular way.

There's a debate within the Drupal community over it's design. Drupal was around before PHP's OOP features were strong, but now that they are, there's frequent discussion about changing the system to use object-oriented data structures. Depending on your tastes, this could be a downside to you as a developer. I'm of two minds about it myself.

The system can also seem to be very "magical" to newcomers, in that somehow it does all this crazy stuff with little explanation. "I only just defined a function, how the deuce does Drupal know how to call it?!"

However, I must say that in general I'm a big fan of Drupal. It's a good system that gets loads better with each major version. I for one can't wait for 7.

Answer 3

i find it awfully complex. as a php developer im tearing my hair out on a daily basis over issues that have nothing to do with php but with drupal itself. how / why / when does it do X? its a big beast that needs to be tamed. documentation is limited to a few very good guides, a whole lot of shitty ones, and even more useless forums threads that always seem to pop up in google.

usability on the backend is crap. a custom theme will also alter the layout of the "admin" part of the package which can be extremely frustrating and results in less than pretty layouts.

if you're working with html slicers, its impossible to use html that has not been created specifically for drupal. it pretty much forces you to use drupal-html, with lots of divs, 5 verbose classes per div, etc. by nature, html/css guys can not be expected to know drupal at this level.

i dont like the way it relies on filenames (10 words long, with very subtle differences between them) to build a theme.

having said that, some of the stuff it can do is very cool and saves you days and days of custom php development

Answer 4

The lack of true object oriented design means that you frequently have to rely on other developers' foresight to leave "hook" functions to let you alter a certain behavior.

Using Drupal 5 I've also run in to situations where the only way to complete a relatively simple design change is to patch Drupal itself (and then be sure to reapply patches with each new official Drupal release). But, to be fair, you should have seen how bad it was in Drupal 4.

I'm also annoyed that when I take the time to identify a bug or quirk in the current production version of Drupal, I submit a patch, and the patch is never committed because, basically only security bugs get fixed in the current stable release.

Answer 5

I find that the default admin interface isn't very intuitive compared to other cms' like modx or joomla/mambo

Answer 6

Drupal is good to get started but you spend more time 'undoing' than actually getting things done. This has been changing especially with the release of Drupal 6 and to be fair it's more apparent in contributed modules.

Managing migrations is also a problem as Sean said. I still don't know of a good method of moving changes from a dev site to a live one.

I am not sure there is anything I would change in the current core and most of the deficiencies are being worked on. Image management needs work, the default admin interface is a little cluttered making more complicated layouts without getting views/panels, etc. involved could use some work.