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Five things I dislike about Drupal

Mon, 08/02/2010 - 11:06 — pascal.vree

I've been using Drupal for a while now and as a developer there are a few things I really dislike in the 6.x distributions.

  1. Command Line support for Windows with Drush & SimpleTest is way to weak (with Windows based systems, you can't start the drush shell with core-cli for example)
  2. Having installed a bunch of modules and Drush, admin/module pages start to slow down (because they iterate over all the filesystem locations before showing the installed modules list)
  3. Most modules install their own jQuery version, while there is a perfectly good way to use the Core Version (there is no way to registrate the external css/js files you want to use or provide yourself)
  4. Modules like coder, devel, theme devel, simpletest should've been within the Drupal Core (how can I ever code with quality if the checks are not mandatory)
  5. It's hard to create a continuous integration system (hard to manage a systems exporter and combine it with an auto installer; with some work you can do it but damn, it's just asking to much off a simple developer whom want to dev)

Now I know most off these points are being fixed within the 7.x distribution; I'm still wondering what I could do in order to make those frustrations go away. The Drush, Simpletest integration with Windows can be fixed by using cygwin and it's possible to install those quality measurement modules like coder yourself. And surely it's not to hard to create a multisite environment with a core drupal installation within a VCS like perforce. There're several solutions out there that will make it possible for you to export a Drupal Website Definition to a dump file, which can be imported within a clean Drupal Install. So yes, I can circumvent those five nuisances ... but that still means a lot of work in order for a sysadmin.

At least for the jQuery part there's no real solution, for it seems it ain't possible to register the "external" js or css dependancies you have. It would be great when the Drupal Guys could provide us with such a feature when they launch number 7.x.