Thank you for the detailed response. Feel free to quote me about Drupal :)
It sounds like you have experienced just what I'm afraid of: I will spend
all this time making a Drupal site with the intention that it will be easy
to inherit, and then my theoretical successor scraps it.

Josh Welker


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Christian Pietsch
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 10:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Very frustrated with Drupal

Hi Joshua,

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 09:47:06AM -0500, Joshua Welker wrote:
> Thank you all for the responses. I hope my original email did not come
> off as too abrasive.

No worries, I find it a fair depiction, and I share your Drupal pain.

> The issue for me is that I am having a hard time figuring out what
> exactly is the use case for Drupal. Do you want a dead-simple website?
> Use Wordpress. Do you want to add some complex custom apps? Use a
> framework. Do you want the worst of both worlds? Use Drupal.

Right. May I quote you on this? I prefer static site generators such as
Jekyll for dead-simple websites and blogs.

> If I get hit by a bus, not only will someone have to relearn Drupal
> and all its modules, but they will also have to wade through my
> spaghetti-code efforts at patching functionality into Drupal.

After I decided to leave a project where I had developed a Drupal intranet
site, my successor scrapped it and started from scratch using Owncloud.
And I do not blame him. I would have preferred using something other than
Drupal, too, but was not allowed to at the time.

(In case you wonder how Drupal and Owncloud can fit the same purpose:
The goal was to develop a Virtual Research Environment, and nobody knows
for sure what this is supposed to be, so there is room for
interpretation.)

> Right now, my framework choices are narrowed down to Ruby on Rails,
> Laravel (PHP), Django (Python), and Flask (Python). For anyone who has
> used these, do you have any insight into how maintainable your
> projects are and how easily they are managed/inherited by others?

In my new role, I inherited some Flask applications, and I find
maintaining, debugging and extending them pure joy. If you have to use
Perl instead of Python, use Dancer instead.

I also tried Django, but it I feel it forces me into a corset that is a
odd re-interpretation (or misunderstanding) of the MVC model.

Cheers,
Christian

--
  Christian Pietsch
  http://purl.org/net/pietsch