Drupal 7 : training wheels or serious development solution?

Question

I'm thinking of moving away from Drupal and am interested in the insight of others.

I got into web development using Drupal a few years ago. What I liked about it is that I could put together some advanced functionality pretty fast using contributed modules, with very little knowledge of php or mysql.

However I soon realized that if I want to customize anything in a drupal site, if I want it to look professional, it is necessary to code (unless for something very simple like a blog). On my first drupal site I spent 90% of the time to cover the last 10% of what I wanted to do. By the time the site was looking like what I wanted, it was so slow from the loads of modules, the custom templates, and the various hacks, that it was literally unusable on a shared hosting. So I moved to a dedicated server for this hobby site.

Today I'm at a point where on a given site, I use more custom modules that I do myself than the contributed ones. I really only use views and maybe 5 core modules. I realized that many modules can be replaced by 3 lines of php. The problem is that many times I find out that for some reason, drupal does things its own way, the documentation on php.net is not working but the one on drupal.org is scarce, often you search until you spot that comment from someone "in the know" that will let you solve a basic problem. I find Drupal gets in the way rather than speeds up my workflow.

My takeaway is that Drupal is good for prototyping, or if you are in the business of making a lot of sites for customers (not for yourself) and don't really care whether the site scales. Sure some big organizations can turn drupal into anything they want (whitehouse.gov etc.), because they can put the man hours into mysql query optimization, a cluster of servers, and so on.

But my opinion today is that a lone developer with one server and an average level in php/jquery is better off using something else than drupal to build his web application.

Answer 1

This sounds a lot like a lack of experience if you ask me.

I think everyone will agree that Drupal has a very steep learning curve, but that's because it is very powerful once you know what you're doing, particularly when used as a multisite, which sounds like it might be better for you.

I would say stick with it, you might well be right on the lip of that uphill struggle!

When I started out with it years ago, I was bewildered by the terminology and the fact that there were a million ways to do everything. You know what, I'm glad I stuck with it, it's a great system and can be very good.

If you want to learn faster, put more time into helping others over at drupal.org, it's the fastest way to learn!