Since listening to Garrett Coakley speak at the first Geek Night on the topic of Drupal, I’ve been sniffing round that open-source CMS. He kindly came to speak to us again, and very inspiring it was too. We’re now having a deeper look at it, seeing what it can do, what are its strengths and weaknesses; that sort of thing.
Drupal is certainly very interesting. Its notion of presentation is remarkable in that, at a certain level, all content consists of homogeneous nodes, whether that consists of uploaded files, images, blog posts, taxonomy categories, or embedded YouTube videos. In addition its API for templating, both as a library of functions and as a workflow that one can hook into, probably rivals WordPress in its scope and power. At the same time, though, the implicit homogeneity makes it hard to structure fundamentally heterogeneous sites; and the API hooks are very difficult to unravel: frequently you’ll want to get at a function some ten levels deep, and probably three of those levels can be overridden by your own code, but which, and how?
I want to mention more at a later date, to do Drupal justice, but suffice it to say for now that the complex hierarchy of the hook-in workflow is almost entirely opaque in PHP, a language that provides rather terse error reporting, without the function debug_print_backtrace(). Well worth a look if you’re debugging spaghetti-code, especially when all you can see is the White Screen of Death. Sprinkle it around as the gentle British rain from heaven: lightly, but often.
