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

Answer 1

It has a seemingly bad security record: http://secunia.com/advisories/search/?search=Drupal

Answer 2

To me, the biggest shortcoming of Drupal is that large portions of a live Drupal site are stored in the database. Since there's no automated way to migrate content or configuration between systems, rolling out changes to a live site must either be done manually or dealt with by excessively complicated code.

Answer 3

One of Drupal's biggest shortcomings is that it dances on the line between a turnkey tool for nonprogrammer site builders, and a framework for developers building complex webapps. It has some cool stuff to offer both groups, but the concessions to one crowd always tend to trip up the other.

The growing trend in the Drupal community is to explicitly build developer APIs, then layer administration UI and end-user UI on top of the APIs. This is a good thing, but there's also still a lot of legacy architecture. The project turned 8 years old this week, and every site requires a mix of modules that are evolving at different paces.

If someone hasn't already built a module that does what you want, effectively leveraging the system without hacking core code requires grokking a lot of different internal APIs, a lot of unique-to-drupal data structures, and studying up on some occasionally funky workflows. A lot of terribly bad and impossible to maintain sites are floating around in the wake of people who needed to do tricky stuff and didn't have the expertise (or the time) to research the "right" way to do things.

(Disclaimer: I just co-authored a couple of chapters for a book about Drupal, and I do Drupal work full-time, so I'm about as far from 'unbiased' as you can get. But I do like to think that I keep perspective. I heart Django, too.)

Answer 4

Drupal gives powerful tools to Non programmers ,They can easily build up a full featured site with less time. But the problem is that learning curve is too high for Drupal.

If a person is new to drupal and want to make something customized it will take lot of time if he wants to do it in proper way. There are lot of ways to do a single thing in drupal,Finding out which is he best or proper for a new comer is a head ache.

Answer 5

Drupal will get you 80% of the way there out of the box, but that last 20% will take months and months.

Answer 6

It's written in PHP4. This will change as of version 7. You can write your own modules in php5 of course. As a seasoned Drupal developer and I find my resume has suffered due to my limited exposure to php5.

It's not the best for running services like SOAP. Calling the whole Drupal stack to provide a web service is too much of a performance penalty. The services modules are still in development.

No database transaction support. This becomes an issue when you scale it up to extreme loads.

It would be good to run tests from the command line. This was possible with simpletest 1.x but the current version doesn't support it very well. Simpletest is not mature enough. A clean Drupal install can fail tests. Some of the default included tests force you to use content types and modules you may not need and you can't disable these without hacking the simpletest module.