I used to really hate Drupal.

That's probably a surprising thing for me to say. I'm the lead developer of Observer.com and Politicker.com, both of which use Drupal heavily. Observer.com was a very early instance of a high-profile newspaper running on Drupal, and it was built by Moshe Weitzman, a very early instance of a core Drupal Contributor. I saw Moshe most recently at Do it with Drupal in New Orleans where we shared the floor at a case study of Observer.com. After our presentation, he asked me to share some details of my transformation from a Drupal hater to a Drupal lover. I hope this might be of some use to other programmers coming into Drupal for the first time, and to the Drupal community as it continues to mature.

How I came to Drupal

I am a propeller head of the usual origins. I was a nerd in high school, a nerd in college, and am still a nerd. I've been writing software since I was 11 or 12; seriously since I was 14, and professionally since I was 18. I worked as a freelancer while I went to school from 18 to 21, then a landed a very corporate IT job at a massive conglomerate for awhile (very custom Java, Oracle, Spring, Hibernate... not pertinent to this discussion). After that drove me predictably insane, I took a contract job at American Public Media, an NPR syndicate in St. Paul, Minnesota. Even though I was only there for three months, I learned a lot about agility, scale, and teamwork in software from them. I learned that cowboy coding is risky, that clear expectations are critical, and that improvisation is usually intolerable. These were the first developers I really respected, and they had nothing very nice to say about Drupal. They rolled their own CMS, which in my understanding is quite good. More power to them.

After my gig at public radio was up, I went to work for ArcStone Technologies, where I fairly quickly became the lead PHP developer. I didn't have much respect for the rest of the shop, which focused almost entirely on ColdFusion development and Windows deployment before my arrival. I'll admit, I led with my ego because I thought they were stupid for using CF and Windows. I mostly wrote software in PHP from scratch until I had built my own framework. "Build your own framework" you say? "only idiots do that!" Yeah, I already mentioned my ego problem. Still, I had some fun, learned a lot about web application architecture, and ArcStone made some money. No real harm done. I'm not alone here--many web developers have written their own frameworks and many more have tried and failed. At any rate, I was young and needed a sandbox, and ArcStone needed technical talent in the LAMP stack to help them through some transition pains. I made some good contacts for them in the Minneapolis developer community and made a couple of good friends as a result.

I left ArcStone for the East Coast planning to do some consulting for awhile; I had agreed to continue working for ArcStone as an hourly employee and found some work of my own. In October of 2007, I was staying with my girlfriend in rural Connecticut and doing freelance work while I looked for a job in New York City. It didn't take me long to go on a handful of interviews. I was offered every job I applied for, but I only actually wanted to work for The Observer. This was based on how much I liked their team and an idealistic streak that makes media more appealing to me than a financial services firm or a consultancy. I resolved to put aside my slight notions that Drupal was bad, and give it a shot.

Why I hated Drupal

A couple weeks into the new job, I went up to Boston to meet Moshe Weitzman. I liked him from the start--he's friendly and down-to-earth. But the more I dug into Drupal, the less I understood why it was so popular. I started in Java and used PHP like Java, and my other languages of choice are Python and Ruby--it wasn't until after I learned Drupal that I started seriously playing with Lisp and Erlang. "Where are the objects?" I asked Moshe. He directed me to this post about Object Orientation in Drupal which is an interesting exercise in Drupal Apologetics, but I only became more frustrated. If you take that post seriously as Drupal Gospel, and you take Object Oriented Design seriously as a practice, you're not likely to come out very happy. I was enraged to learn that the Drupal community thought that they were doing Object Orientation (they don't really think that, at least not in this sense), and they thought they were doing it better than it was written in PHP (they don't think that either). So I thought Drupal's core developers were misguided egomaniacs.

Aside from my philosophical dissonance with the design of Drupal, I was struggling to make things work properly on Observer.com. I inherited a good bit of chaos, some from Moshe, some from Barry Jaspan, some from our hosting provider, some from a prior employee, all mixed into one source tree. SQL queries were written against CCK fields, an unspeakable evil was perpetrated by storing the published date of an article as a varchar field then sorting it... long story for another post, but I've got more. Anyways, it wasn't their fault. Individually, their decisions made fine sense, but layering change over change with tight deadlines takes a toll on most frameworks. I couldn't have done it; their facility with Drupal made short work out of a litany of very tough challenges. Still, Observer.com made me think that Drupal was a mess of spaghetti code.

Then our servers started to crash under the burden of too much traffic. We got into fights with our hosting provider, who thought we should take the Drupal route to caching our content; there are a couple of contrib modules that take static snapshots of pages and then serve them from cache; fastpath_fscache requires a PHP process to serve the content, Boost just uses mod_rewrite. I admired the elegance of Boost's solution, but we couldn't get it working, and in retrospect, it wouldn't have protected us that much anyways. So I thought that the Drupal community was averse to non-Drupal solutions, that if it can be done, it can be done in Drupal. On this point, well, technically HTTP Acceleration *can* be done in Drupal via the aforementioned modules, but not well enough for a site like Observer.com. Most Drupal developers realize this. Those that don't--take it from me. Drupal is not an HTTP Accelerator. This is the case with a lot of things--you can Do it with Drupal, but if you run a site as large as Observer.com, you'd better think more carefully about every byte of code you deploy.

So I suffered from a preconception that Drupal was bad, that its developers were egomaniacs, that it was impossible to write clean code for Drupal, that it was unstable, and that its community suffered from a delusion that the only right way is the Drupal way. Yet, remarkably, I'm still here, writing this post, on my personal Drupal-powered website.

Why I love Drupal now

The community! I've had more fun writing software for Drupal because of its community than for any other reason. It's active, vibrant, and it likes to meet in person. I've gone to Boston a couple times, New Orleans, and various events in New York in the year I've known Drupal. Because Drupal is so large, if you don't get along with one member of the community, no worries, there are 299,999 more for you to meet. Drupal's community will make you happy, unless you have a heart of stone.

"Software that makes you happy?" Yes, software that makes you happy. Drupal is software that likes you back. Only a few months ago, this thought would have really disgusted me. I'm an efficient and intelligent programmer,, I would have thought. Software shouldn't make you happy, it should just get the job done. Aside from that fact that most of the time, Drupal does get the job done, and getting the job done should make you happy, Drupal has so many built-in conveniences that you can spend more of your time doing what makes you happy. Like today--I built this site and customized this theme (it's "SuperClean") to my preference in an hour, giving me three full hours to respond to write this post. And if you like writing software for Drupal, you can get an added happiness bonus by contributing back to the community. I will say that Drupal isn't the only software that makes me happy--Django makes me happy too, but I haven't gotten to know their community quite as well.

There is elegance in Drupal. Drupal's API feels more Aspect Oriented to me than Object Oriented--you define hooks that you want to interfere in the process at various points. If Drupal were purely Object Oriented, we couldn't get nearly so much for free. Not to say that Drupal isn't at all Object Oriented, I just don't buy the "modules are singletons" argument. Sure, modules are like singletons, but if you wanted to make a singleton in PHP, this isn't how you'd do it. And in fact Drupal will take advantage of more Object Oriented features in Drupal 7. In Drupal 6, Views in particular allows for some very powerful customization via object inheritence. There are few other frameworks out there like this--Drupal has done everything possible to be as useful to me as to the user who hasn't ever written a line of code. I think it's good to have novice users on the system. It makes us more conscious of usability, documentation, and general politeness.

Only a year ago, I thought it was insane that Drupal doesn't use objects and classes. Now I find myself hoping that Drupal doesn't overdo it; they could really alienate and confuse some of their users if they aren't careful. These days, I'm looking to be a more active member of the community--not just another user. Can there be better proof that I'm cured?

Advice for the seasoned programmer new to Drupal

On Drupal's Technology.

1. You can build inelegance into any framework. Don't blame the game--blame the players.
2. It takes a smarter developer to do deep customization of Drupal than, say, Django or Ruby on Rails because Drupal's patterns are unique to Drupal. But unlike Django or Ruby on Rails, you don't have to be a developer at all to use Drupal.
3. There are bad contrib modules that don't do what they claim to do, but it's your fault if you install one of these. There are only a few modules which I trust explicitly. Every other module, I read the code before I install.
4. Drupal isn't the right tool for every web application or CMS. But most of the time, it will serve you well.
5. Drupal is just software. It's easy to install and customize, which makes it easy for non-programmers to use, but it uses complex design patterns, which makes it extremely powerful. It's written in PHP, a common programming language that's easy to learn, and it runs well on most common operating systems and database servers, which makes it more accessible to programmers of all stripes. Normal rules apply. You'll adjust.

On Drupal's Community.

1. Even if you've been writing software for a long time and feel you truly understand Drupal, don't expect the community to embrace you immediately. Drupal's community is built on a web of trust, where your credibility is a function of your longevity with the project, the utility and perhaps the cleverness of your contributions, and some factor of the sum of the credibility of your connections. Yeah it's a do-ocracy, but you have to start from zero. March in with guns drawn and prepare to be shot. Even if you're right.
2. Read. Study. Lurk. Then offer your help to whoever will accept it. To achieve Drupal happiness, focus on helping people, not boosting your ego.
3. Don't believe everything you read on Drupal.org or #drupal. There are as many opinions about Drupal as there are Drupal programmers, and they can all post all their opinions on Drupal.org if they feel like it.
4. There are a lot of people who use Drupal and are convinced that they are right about [pick your issue]. I'm occasionally guilty of this too. Just ignore us and make up your mind for yourself.
5. There are more novice programmers here than you're used to, but this is a good thing. Drupal's ease of installation and promise of a quick, custom site makes it an attractive target for novices.
6. Drupal's community is just another social graph. It has a mission, which makes it more rewarding. It lives on the Internet, which makes it global and accessible. It enjoys a pint (or two, or however many I had in New Orleans) in the real world every now and then, which makes it way more fun. Normal rules apply. You'll adjust.