What is your opinion about Drupal?

Question

PHP

To begin with, a small, let's say, preface to the question, in order to immediately weed out some possible answers.
I actively use 2 content management systems - Drupal and 1C-Bitrix. Also familiar with WordPress and Joomla.
All of these systems have, of course, their advantages and disadvantages, but still, of all of them, I like Drupal the most.
I would like to know the opinion of people who also had the opportunity to compare different solutions , which system they like best and why, as well as get answers to a number of questions.
So the questions are:
1) Why is it considered that Drupal is difficult to themize? Personally, I just override all the standard templates for regions, blocks, etc. and I clean the code there, eventually getting rid of all the theming problems, since I myself indicate what to output, in a very specific form. Of course, this can remove many useful features like contextual links, but if they are needed, who prevents them from being included in your own code?
2) Is Drupal really slow? Is it slower than the same Bitrix?
3) This question is for those who have dealt with online stores on Drupal: is it worth doing online stores on it at all? My opinion is that it is more convenient on Bitrix, but I had a very short relationship with Uberkart, it is unlikely that I understood it well.
4) If you have dealt with forms on the site, tell me how best to implement them, so that you get some analogue of forms in Bitrix - with mail templates, setting up questions, etc. etc. Here I had problems with the theming, that is, I would just like to display, for example, a block with a form on which there is a ready-made layout and the standard Drupal markup for this reason does not suit.
5) There are people who compare Bitrix infoblocks with Drupal nodes. As for me, nodes in a pile with taxonomy break infoblocks to smithereens. Who has a different opinion and why?
6) Did you really find Drupal difficult to learn (as programmers, of course) in comparison with other systems? I believe that it is enough to understand the philosophy of hooks, which is not very difficult, and then it will go like clockwork, especially with detailed documentation on drupal.org (do you know enough English to read technical documentation?).
7) How did you theme the breadcrumbs and pagination? In my opinion, the Drupal developers were very wrong by not implementing them through template files. I understand that you can bring them into templates manually, but, you see, this is not the best solution.
8) And finally: what CMS do you like and why? Drupal is especially interested in NOT.

Answer 1

1) Why is it considered that Drupal is difficult to themize?

Drupal is difficult to properly themize. It's hard enough to understand the whole system from theme functions/files, preprocess/process functions, theme sugestions, render arrays, various pre_build/after_build/post_build callbacks, theme wrappers, caching, etc. Nagovnokodit directly in the template of a great mind is not necessary.
Drupal, like any other CMS, is slower than highly specialized systems due to its redundancy. Naked Drupal 7 on an average machine generates pages in ~100 ms. Decide for yourself whether it is very slow or not.
If there is no good skill or money for the corresponding developer, then it is not worth it.
Popular - Webform . That's right - Entityforms .
No. Some Symfony 2 will be an order of magnitude more difficult.
They are implemented by the theme functions theme_breadcrumb and theme_pager. Functions are not much different from templates - they can also be redefined, processed and used via theme('...').

Answer 2

First, I totally agree with @andead . Thanks for the great answer, man!
I will allow myself small additions as a Bitrix developer.
Correctly theming and Bitrix is ​​not easy. Another conversation is that leaving $_SESSION in the Drupal template is 100 times worse than leaving the same thing in the Bitrix template. The theming process of both CMS should be controlled by a programmer who understands the system.
In Bitrix, each “block” (part of a page) can be independently cached based on user group IDs, directory filter values, and whatever. A wrapper $this->StartResultCache()like Our Father in any code and in standard components out of the box. As a result, the page is quickly assembled from caches for people with a session, authorization, etc. In Drupal, you need to strive for the same, but for this you have to write your own cache plugins for Panels , shamanize with Expire and even ESI and understand all the subtleties of Drupal caching ( drupalace.ru/tags/cache ).
Bitrix has all sorts of performance panels and quality monitors out of the box. In Drupal, this is an "enterprise" service :)
Infoblocks are much more powerful than just nodes out of the box. Experience with both >2 years. You can compare entities in Drupal and infoblocks in Bitrix. Here already Drupal (together with the Entity API , of course) looks much more serious and flexible. Bitrix looks stupid when you need something strange, but Drupal allows you to return anything.
Webform / Entityforms is much simpler than Bitrix in terms of the actual forms, you just need to get used to it. But the email subsystem in Drupal is weaker. In Drupal, if they do something, then only on a universal scale :) As an example, Message Stack :)
After 2 years, I find something new and very cool in Drupal or thanks to Drupal. I can not answer this question, because. keep learning :)
I will take this opportunity to promote the Path Breadcrumbs module , which I am proudly co-maintainer of. It is overridden theme_breadcrumb()to add support for Rich Snippets: drupalcode.org/project/path_breadcrumbs.git/blob/c...
With the help of the same, hook_theme_registry_alter()you can force breadcrumbs to be themed through a file, not a function.
I like Drupal more because of the quality of the code and the community.

Answer 3

I have not seen anything as simple and powerful as Drupal. This is love at first sight.
Before getting acquainted with Drupal, I was not very willing to use all sorts of "api add-ons" i.e. frameworks and libraries, in particular, because they did not allow you to write less code (and, therefore, make debugging faster), but only structured it, made it more declarative. Anyway, I didn't want to have anything to do with PHP)))
But what Drupal allows is unimaginable. The only restriction that is imposed on the programmer is the structure of the database, and this despite the fact that you can completely, very flexibly, use the existing structure, and create your own tables / views, linking them to existing entities and getting the same thing if your structures were not were used, i.e. the ability to use downloaded modules for "completely own" functionality.
I don't know if the procedural style is a disadvantage. Those. so far I see the advantage of simplicity, which, moreover, does not impose restrictions on the use of OOP. But with the advent of Drupal 8, I see the same split that was when Python 3 appeared. now there are two independent, though compatible languages ​​- Python 2.* and Python 3.*
There are also significant drawbacks - a scanty amount of documentation. But in general, you can figure out what the function does by looking at its source code, which is not a problem at all, because it was made in the best traditions of UNIX) There is a tough consequence from here - Drupal is not for morons . And the administrator settings are not very simple, so it’s better for the end user to create a “page with everything you need”)

Answer 4

Twice I tried to make friends with Drupal - it does not grow together, with grief in half I completed the sites on it and swore to contact. I have not yet seen a single CMS in which everything is so unfriendly and illogically arranged (for a programmer and layout designer).
For stores, I definitely prefer Opencart.
For everything else ... of the common ones, Joomla is more convenient for me. It lends itself perfectly to any customization. In addition, it is very easy to clean and optimize, after which it just flies.

Answer 5

if for an online store - look towards opencart, smart, modules, MVC. I like it very much.

Answer 6

I have not worked with Drupal, but such a serious project as league of legends has a site on Drupal.

Answer 7

Regarding mail notifications (if anyone else even looks at this question): you just had to dig into the Rules module, which provides, in particular, the functionality of sending mail and, in my opinion, even at a steeper level than in Bitrix. Although, probably, it will be more difficult for mere mortals to understand it, but let's be honest with ourselves - when do users (customers) set up such functionality themselves? It's always the programmer who does it anyway)