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.
PHP 5.3.1 was released yesterday with 146 issues fixed. Today I found Sean Kerner’s blog post about it (I think link was in Reddit). I have to say I agree his feelings:
My FileVault image got corrupted and I lost all my settings and few documents (most of them were backed up on server). Because I had to create my configures again I was thinking if it’s time to upgrade to Snow Leopard. With fresh install it is good time for rethinking your own workflow and setups. This was what I did after OS install.
First of all Apple has made great work with this new version of OS X. They have also remembered web developers because Snow Leopard has quite fresh versions of Apache, PHP and even Subversion. OS X comes also with BIND DNS server. Before image-file corruption I had over 100 different web development projects installed on laptop. That means I needed easy way to create and install new projects. This is where properly configured DNS server and dynamic virtual hosts comes handy. In this tutorial we do required steps to achieve mature and easy to use web development environment with dynamic virtual host support.
In our company some developers from time to time propose we should move from Subversion to Git. I don’t see any point for that because Subversion is working quite well for us and if someone wants to use Git they can do it with git-svn. However for my pet projects I want to use some DVCS and for that I have used Git for a while. When I started to investigate Byteflow I also started to use Mercurial because Byteflow source is on Mercurial repository. I have also investigated little bit Bazaar, but from that I don’t have any real use experience (hope I will get some day). You can find out lot of hype and discussion about Git, but I have to say I have little bit ambivalence feelings of Git.
In first post I mentioned I would cover Byteflow installation and deployment process in next post. That wasn’t actually true because this third post :) I have developed with PHP for years and have recently tried out some developing with Python. Python frameworks that I have explored are Django, Web2py and Pylons. I started with Django and really like it. Also Pylons looks really nice. Web2py has some nice ideas but the concept feels somehow weird (development happens on browser). When I had an idea of this blog I had feeling that I would get it up and running in shortest time if I use Django. Then I started look for ready to use Django blog app and found Byteflow. Installation on local machine was quite easy but installation on server I had some problems.
