Drupal

When Great Ideas Meet Bad Code: A Look at Drupal

How to April 15, 2011

Working with Drupal for half of year and constantly tuning it for better maintainability, code consistency I came to the idea – Drupal is going to be a toy, a pretty popular but only toy, unless they decide to rewrite everything from the scratch. Studying Drupal 7 I find the CMS wasn’t really refactored. They dramatically improved administrator panel, included CCK/ImageCache into the core, added file handlers and Unit-test framework. However it’s still a mess of coding styles and approaches. You can enter any module folder and you’ll find bunch files with no concern separation. View components, business logic, helpers, domain entities – all can be met in the same file. I understand that laying strict requirements on modules would affect the army of contributors. But anyway with Drupal 7 all the modules must be rewritten. Maybe the committee just can’t agree on a structuring strategy. As for me, it must be like that.

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Beyond the Basics: Enhancing Drupal’s MVC Architecture

Drupal November 10, 2010

I’ve already described an approach of using MVC in Drupal . It wasn’t bad for the beginning I hope. Though in real life you face requirements which hardly can be fulfilled with such a simplicity. In, more or less, complex application you ain’t going to be satisfied by the only controller (page controller) to serve the whole bunch of components presented on the page. So, let’s assume we have a page full of components and each of them can behave differently. It means we need controllers and views for them. Reminds of Java portlets, doesn’t it? Such components are often referred as modules in IA, but I don’t dare to call them so in this context to avoid any confusion because of Drupal modules. So, let’s go with widgets.

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Drupal Meets MVC: A Smarter Way to Build Websites

Drupal July 1, 2010

If you ought to build a new site and don’t have time to develop a CMS, you’ll likely take an open source solution. And likely it will be Joomla or Drupal. They seem as most popular. Actually they are similar in many ways. Both provide basic content management frameworks, extensible through plug-ins and customizable via themes. Both focused on block-designed sites which can be often built without any programming at all, just using downloaded theme and configurable set of extensions. So it’s personal what to choose. I prefer Drupal. Its component model seems clearer to me. The documentation is much more explicit then Joomla’s and gallery of ready-to-use modules is really impressive.

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