I have recently read quite many posts about Drupal and how it sucks. For example Sean Coates has recently posted that he is looking replacement for Drupal.
There are many good arguments why Drupal sucks and I agree most of them. But my opinion is also that Drupal sucks less (of the CMS’s which I have tested). It has best combination of end user usability and developer extendibility.
When this conversation of which CMS to use is going on there will always pop up one opinion which is that you should build your own CMS. I think this quite bad opinion and I’m going to show this with one real life example.
I’m currently working with one really simple website which was made one of my workmate who is not in the house anymore. That site is really simple, it contains only few pages and news section. He used his own framework to build that website. That framework has many nice features for example its configuration files are yaml files and it uses syck extension to parse yaml files. It even checks if syck is installed and if not it will use Spyc (Pure PHP implementation for yaml parsing). It also has nice automatically generated admin section where you can manage all content.
Nice features which doesn’t matter for end user at all. Now comes the funny part which matters for end user: it has possibility to upload and attach images to news. These images can even be changed, but not removed from the news. I can tell you that even Drupal has feature to remove attached images ;)
Someone would argue that problem is incompetent developer or I am making generalization from one case. I can tell that was only one example and I have seen same kind of issues several times with different developers. Also one true problem with self made frameworks and CMS is documentation. When that earlier mentioned developer left from the company all the knowledge of that particular framework left with him. Nobody else knew how that framework worked and how it should be used. How you can maintain that kind of project?
I can tell you that we are using currently using Drupal for all website where we need CMS features and Symfony web framework for more advanced cases. I can also tell that in early days we developed our own framework but we found that we don’t have enough recourses to actively improve our own framework and some point it came more sensible to pick one more sophisticated Open Source framework.
I see the problem with all popular CMS is that code base is quite old and which means also quite ugly. But newcomers has hard work to take their market share because all old CMS has lot of feature (because they have been on market so long). How you can compete with better code base if you don’t have same features? In the end only features matters.
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