if ( preg_match('/<\!--more(.*?)?-->/', $content, $matches) ) {I ever wrote a post with an HTML comment in it that happened to hit on whatever random content markers Wordpress has decided to use. (Oh wait! That just happened to me while I was trying to publish the above code fragment!)I mean come on.
Fair enough, if you're only talking about writing code, but when you take into account building a community of developers and users, I don't think that starting from scratch would be easier than modifying Wordpress.No, because 'fixing' it would break all the existing themes and plugins. Wordpress themes aren't just CSS files, you make a theme by replacing the php code that runs in 'the loop'. Take out the loop, and the old themes won't work anymore.
Hmm... well... I don't know about that. I've learned that my perception is not widely shared in the Drupal community, but my perception is that the reigning aesthetic in the Drupal community favors complex and elegant solutions over efficient ones. Where "elegance" in practice means turning as many pieces of data as you can (including aggregator feed items and images) into nodes, adding whole new layers onto the top of the system to totally change how it works (e.g. Panels/CTools/Context/etc.), and trolling the contrib list to actively discourage people from creating independent modules that overlap even slightly with any other module.One of the difficulties of describing the Drupal community (my own statement falls prey to this as much as yours) is that it is not a monolithic group. The Drupal community - even the Drupal development community -- ranges from hobbyists tinkering on a nerd blog to small web shops building business sites to large companies building, say, whitehouse.gov or grammy.com. That's a real challenge, and even nailing down what constitutes 'Efficient' for that wide range of needs is tricky.
The reigning aesthetic in Drupal-land seems to me to be that solutions are better on the one hand to the extent that they require more modules, and on the other to the extent that they break the elements of a page up into more discrete nodes.I think you're confusing the artifacts with the underlying principle. Reuse is the dominant aesthetic in Drupal, and for better or worse that has evolved into a UNIX-like system of APIs that work together to provide functionality. What's missing at the moment is a tool like apt-get, and a public emphasis on providing user-friendly second-tier tools on top of those reusable building blocks. Systems like 'Features' -- which bundle multiple APIs and modules into self-contained features like 'Photo Gallery' or 'Podcast hosting' -- are a big advanced but they're not fully baked yet. The ability to create reusable distributions of Drupal -- already customized for particular use cases -- is also promising but it's a pretty young feature yet. Products like Open Atrium, Managing News, and Tattler are interesting examples of where that can go.
If you were just learning to deploy Drupal and you posted on the forum "how do I give my users a simple way to add an image to a web page", dollars to donuts half the responses you got would involve installing and configuring Image Cache and integrating some kind of nodereference browser with IMCE. The idea of using the image dialog in your WYSIWYG editor to just insert an image at a given point seems anathema to some drupallers....And the other half would tell you to ignore those engineers and use IMCE! ;-) Which group is right depends on what you're doing and what you need. The problem isn't that Drupal people like complexity, it's that people who need more robust tools than something like WordPress end up moving to Drupal. Natural selection ends up populating Drupal's forums with people who need tools that are, by definition, more complex.
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posted by schmod at 12:39 PM on June 17, 2010