Anyone here having much success with Drupal? Some guys I worked with tried it on a client project last year, and it seemed like it took then longer to hack modules than it would have to have build it from scratch. Is there just a high learning curve?
I've used it as a replacement for our ancient bespoke directory system. So far it has been pretty good. Most of the issues I had where in trying to reproduce some aspects of our existing site such as urls. We haven't gone to the next phase where we try to take advantage of it to introduce new features like user voting yet.
The documentation is a little on the light side and you have to learn the language of 'drupalese' before some things start to make sense. The fact that most of the core developers of Drupal don't speak English as their native tongue might play a factor
I've found there is pretty much always some sort of hook to add you code to change things to work without having to mess with the core source code which is nice. Some of the modules may need some code changes but of course nobody is forcing you to use them.
I think it is easy to underestimate the amount of work required for a project whether you are coding it from scratch, using a framework or using something like Drupal. With Drupal (or to a lesser extent a framework) you probably won't notice all the time being saved by having the 'basics' taken care of.
it's not awesome. It's acceptable and you can get a job done with it as far as I can see.
The author hypothesises that people choose plain PHP over drupal because they are scared off by the many configuration options. I'd say it's a case of Drupal having a lot of crap that you don't need.
I'm not sure what the problem was, but Drupal is not the correct solution.
I'd hypothesize from your post than your experience with drupal is relatively limited.
If by 'lot of crap' you are referring to things like a user account system with a detailed permissions, a flexible taxonomy system (categories, tags..) or perhaps the wide rage of modules that are available then I'd have to disagree. I personally have reinvented the wheel enough times to believe that coding up yet another user account system isn't an efficient use of my time.
I'm not sure what your problem is. But I say Drupal is a viable solution to a high percentage of web site requirements including many social sites.
it depends how you define your problem. if you have some degree of control on the price+specs equation Drupal is one of the best solutions I came across
