You are hereDrupal - the gratest yet bad CMS
Drupal - the gratest yet bad CMS
Drupal is one of the best CMS (content management systems) in existance. It is fast, very popular, fairly well supported, reliable, secure, and free. It is because how easy and fast one can setup a site using this CMS and because of all the avaliable modules that Drupal became the #1 choice for content management. I've followed the project since its early versions and have always loved it. Yet, i find serveral big issues from which it suffers - and they are the same items that brought it so much popularity.
You see - all modules for Drupal are contributed by pogrammers/developers from across the globe. They write a module when they have a need for something that is not avalible from a default installation. Unfortunatelly what happens is that after a developer writes his plug-in, he often fails to maintaint it's development once he got it working, or after he gets bored with the little project. At the end - every version of drupal suffers from lack of modules when a new version of CMS is released. And what's even worse - the module that one has been using for a long time on version 5, are not avaliable for version 6, because the person who wrote it is not getting paid to maintain his software. At the end - we have a system that is only perfect if you never upgrade, or if you are a programmer yourself. This is clearly frustrating for all the non-programmers. Unlike Plone, which one can slice and dice even without knowledge of any scripting languag, Drupal is very PHP heavy and has very few built-in tools to achieve any kind of customization. Yet, it is the best system for casual bloggers who only need some basic functions.
Love it or hate it - but that's how free software works.
I, much like you, have been working with and following Drupal for years.
I'm a Web (PHP-primary) Developer... I moved to a position where I am the sole developer from a position as a Lead Software Engineer of a Web application built entirely in house with a large team of developers and designs.
In my new position (with a content publisher), I need to provide my company with a CMS that is easy for anyone to publish multimedia content into the right places... Additionally, I need this system to support the migration of over 10 years of content across unlike environments (postgreSQL proprietary CMS to mysql drupal).
All of that aside, I have my own ambitions for features and functionality. Being the only one who can write code, I am constantly in search of short cuts while maintaining elegant code throughout the whole lifecycle.
Drupal's CMS and working with 3rd party modules allows me to easily accommodate requests without adding a lot of dev time behind the dev and implementation as it would with a completely custom Web app.
There's lots of talk about Drupal as a framework in the ranks of Zend, CakePHP, et al. It seems hard for many to see past it as a CMS because they aren't necessarily looking at how the Drupal codebase can be leveraged in actual development, but rather how it can be leveraged administratively (through heavy use of third party plugins... views, panels, taxonomy, rules uber cart.....)
I don't think Drupal is the right fit for a non-programmer or casual blogger... they should stick to Wordpress or some other alternative (you mentioned Plone).
For the adventurous Webdev novice (especially an individual with front-end web development/design experience) Drupal is a great ride... start out with the administrative panel, install a theme or two, then build/customize your own theme (maybe start with Zen Base theme)... then go to a site like http://gotdrupal.com/ and start going through the tutorials... way more enriching and interesting than throwing up a Wordpress blog!