Drupal and the carpenter: Drupal can do you harm?
Back in the days when I lived in South Africa, I had a good friend, a quite young Sangoma, he told me an ancient wisdom (Though I guess he actually made it up himself) “A good carpenter never blames his tools for a broken table”.
The explanation is twofold: A good carpenter does not have bad tools, a good carpenter is a good carpenter because he knows how to choose his tools. But if, with those good tools, his table still breaks, he will blame himself, either for trying to build a table that is too hard for him to build, or for simply not doing his job well. That is what made him a good carpenter: He leared from his mistakes.
In a recent discussion on a Drupal mailinglist, about a post where Drupal is presented as “not the best choice for all cases”, the fingers qickly pointed at the Drupal page ‘is Drupal right for you’. Drupal is presenting itself as too good, to which I agree, I brought this up a while ago already.
Someone claimed, in this discussion, that «Highlighting weaknesses is not very useful as it’s frequently the limitations of the users ability to use a tool that are the real weakness.»
This is my point exactly, but there is one point to mind: marketing. uggh.
In Europe we have some laws to protect you from ‘too much marketing’. If I sell a client a site that (my promise) will generate millions of € in banner clicks, yet I deliver a site that can never ever do that, most courts will grant that client most of the claims. But worse, and therefore a bigger showstopper for marketeers-gone-wild, is the fact that angry clients, in big numbers, will bring your sales down. Commercial companies need to find a balance between their promises and the reality.
OSS needs not bother about both, does it? Drupal can claim to be the cure for all war, or to be your golden goose. In the end, that might backfire, but we don’t yet really know that. After all, no-one got a real chance to prove that all the claims Linux adepts make, that it is much more stable, much more secure, much better architectured then another OS, are untrue. Some people jokingly state ‘if you are not happy with Drupal we will happily refund you’. No-one got a real proof that the claims made by some of the ‘holy OSS believers’ are true, when they state that OSS is far better then the alternative, other then some general consensus and a growing (happy) userbase.
Back to Drupal: I beleive Drupal is not ready for doing everything. Drupal can do a big lot. It can probably do most, in shortest time, with biggest security, of all CMSes we know in 2006, yet that is far from ‘all’. Joomla does certain ‘stuff’ much better, maybe not under the hood, but in the end, it is ‘better’ for certain projects. The fact that, just like Joomla!, much more people create websites with Wordpress, indicates that Wordpress is a better choice for certain other projects too. That wordpress can be deployed a lot better in certain projects.
Back to the very beginning: Drupal can do startups a lot of harm. Sure. And so can do Word, or even Textmate. The problem is, in the end, why people chose to use it. If people choose some tool for wrong reasons, then it will do them harm. And that might backfire on the community. Its up to us to tell people when Drupal is not a good choice. And after that we can point out all the bad carpenters one by one, and tell them how bad they are, and why are bad carpenters.
Finally!
In reference to the ‘wisdom’ referred to in the start of this post, this is something I’ve been saying for years myself! When mentioning the inadequacies of a piece of equipment in company - usually a pub’s own sub-standard pool cue, perhaps after the ubiquitous foul shot? - one is often jeered with the comment, “a bad workman blames his tools!”. Of course, the only correct retort to this is, “and a good workman knows good tools from bad ones”.
In reference to the real subject matter, I’ve been searching for a decent OSS CMS for years, and I’ve tried a lot. Mostly my criteria were that it had to be extensible and accessible. Drupal fits both of these very snugly, thanks.
Detractors of this system have a right to complain; it is difficult to use. I myself have been poring over all aspects of it for a couple of months now and I’m still a good way off a full understanding of its workings. This, however, can only be a good thing, given the fact that I’m convinced I’m making the right choice - it means that there is a lot going on under the hood.
My personal feeling is that in time Drupal will rise higher and higher in people’s estimations, as long as the release system is stabilised, the documentation is kept thorough and up to date, and modules are properly maintained. Given the advent of the distribution system, we can but hope that this will soften the learning curve for less technically able users, who currently turn to ‘softer’ products, like Joomla[!].
Carpenter saying
The carpenter may well not have invented this: the saying is along the same train of thought as a french one, at the very least “les mauvais ouvriers ont toujours de mauvais outils” (bad workers always have poor tools), which has the same twofold explanation.
Ah... Refreshment!
A nice refreshing change to the usual, insular, “Drupal-is-great” chat-cloud that envelops the community.
I would consider myself amongst those that drank from the exhuberant “sales-puff”, only to find that in practice, many frustrations were experienced.
The (historical) problem Drupal has is documentation… and then up-to-date documentation. There is plenty to dazzle and entice, but it’s only when opening-up, that the cracks appear.
… but you’re sold so you carry on. Then there’s another frustration… before you know it, a month has passed. You’re now locked-in because starting anew (with another solution) is now both cost, and time-prohibitive.
‘Don’t blame the tools’ would be true except for the fact that no one starting-off with Drupal has experience with it to make the comparison.
To live in self-congratulatory mode all the time is as harmful as the opposite (Concentrating on flashy-chameleon-eyecandy interfaces doesn’t make Drupal a stronger platform if it only invites a larger user-base complaining more about the same old fundamentals).
Don’t take your eye off the ball Drupal.
Completely agree
And I’d add that with this lack of definition and this trying to be ‘everything for everybody’ Drupal can harm itself too.
Going back to the carpenter’s story, which I like :-), you don’t buy yourself a set of carpenter’s tools if you only need a table. Either you buy a nice table or you hire a good carpenter.
Well, maybe if the carpenter’s tools were free, too many people would go for them instead, many of them hurting themselves for sure.
Or, looking it from the other side, you better know whether you are in the business of manufacturing good tools or selling convertible furniture.
Cheers,
Right. Toolmaker or carpenter
Sure. You make my point a bit clearer: Drupal is a good tool if you know why it is that. But Drupal is not a good tool for many people whom, as Typo3 says: a bycicle.
It is up to Drupal to clarify the usage and usefullnes of its tools. From there on a carpenter will be able to choose wether or not the tools are good for the job, or whether they may need to be build (sometimes stuff does not exist) or whether another toolkit is better.