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

Question

Drupal is very much a "Do Everything" CMS. There are modules that allow you to add almost any functionality, which is great. However, it feels like a lot of the features (v5 and v6) seem scattered around and unintuitive for the user. As a developer, I'm left with the feeling of having patched a site together using bubble gum and string.

For example, to add text to the default search box (that disappears when clicked), you have to either add some jQuery code OR override the theme. I've also found the menu system more complicated than it should be.

Am I the only one with this opinion? What things (if any) would you change about Drupal's core?

Answer 1

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 2

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.)