Drupal Theming Sucks

Clearly the developers of Drupal, a leading opensource Content Management Framework, are not designers. When they have to publish a 250-page book on theming Drupal—it means it is too hard.


Comments

4 responses to “Drupal Theming Sucks”

  1. ozzy Avatar
    ozzy

    Agree!

    For the life of me I can’t understand the rationale behind building HTML from PHP code.I always thought Smarty was invented to take away the drudgery of that! It’s cleaner, more straight forward and easier to extend and maintain.

    While Drupal has features that puts other popular CMSes out in the shade, theming for Drupal can be a dauting task. I’m still yet to decipher all the obscure terminologies and “theming functions” I have to master to get a functional site up. I’m presently migrating 2 Joomla sites to Drupal, and after 5 weeks, the re-occurring thought in my head is-Joomla was not this difficult!

    IMO,Drupal needs 3 things to make it more productive and usable:

    1. Refactor terminologies.Taxonomy,vocabulary,terms,synonyms while being valid English words are poor descriptors for content categorization. These are the kind of stuff reserved for unrepentant geeks who have not outgrown their Unix terminals, some might say bilingual nerds who speak 2 languages fluently-half-English and assembly language. I bet a large percentage of users(yes including native English speakers) have had to look up the meaning of these words b4 deciphering how to use it in Drupal.

      A simpler terminology IMO would be -Category,Sub-category or something not so arcane.

    2. Use Smarty.Make Smarty the default templating engine.Make the Smarty pattern ubiquitous in the distro.I predict this will be the fall of Drupal if not implemented.
    3. Officially integrate CCK and Views into the core and do some usability test b4 releasing a new build.

    There, I feel better already…had me a bad weekend hacking away at content types,vocabularies,taxonomies,terms and theming functions.

    1. ttoh Avatar
      ttoh

      @Ozzy

      I’m glad you were able to get that frustration out of your system.

      I totally agree about theming—it is way over-engineered, IMHO. I think they took a mantra of “Theme as much or as little as you want”. Unfortunately, it collapses under the weight of its intricate design. However, it does has some good points (see my “cup half-full” post about Drupal)

      Given the usability testing that has been done, they should be addressing some of the terminology for D7. It’s unfortunate that the verbiage used in Drupal isn’t stored in some sort of resource-bundle. We could build a module to “fix” things for clients who get confused by the language used. I would totally appreciate that rather than having to modify the core files.

      Personally, given that I’m an information architect / interaction designer, terms like taxonomy, content-types and terms make perfect sense to me. 😛

      Good luck in your quests to master Drupal—it’s definitely an adventure.

      -Tai

  2. juicytoo Avatar
    juicytoo

    I couldn’t agree more.

    Coming over from joomla where I can plug CB and SOBI and create something within 3 weeks.

    Doing the same thing in drupal seems forever. I have to theme, theme and theme, and then test workflow. With joomla, workflow is already inbuilt unless you want to change it.

    I’m really tempted to go back to joomla. At least I know I can point the finger at someone and pay say, $100, to have a solution.

    Also you still cannot allow a user to theme their own profile.
    ie.
    http://drupal.org/node/35728#comment-1822580

    Glad I found other people with the same experience.

    1. ttoh Avatar
      ttoh

      @juicytoo

      CommunityBuilder is a great mod — it’s not perfect, but it has a surprising amount of functionality built in.

      The ecosystem for consultants seem to favour Joomla. Anecdotally speaking, clients seem to be more impressed with the administration interface of Joomla over Drupal.

      For a simple blog and personal site, like my own, I would never recommend Drupal. The administration headache of security updates, module updates and theme design: Just too much overhead.

      So much so, in my next redesign, I will probably migrate systems again. Possibly back to Textpattern, modXCMS or ExpressionEngine.

      Tai

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