The thing about Drupal

I have not been feeling the Drupal love lately. Drupal seems hell-bent on making my designs as difficult as possible. I thought this reflected either a technical failure on Drupal's part, or a profound lack of getting-it on mine.

This weekend I was poking through an old Django “Hello World” project that was haunting my home computer and I realized the problem has nothing to do with either Drupal the Framework/CMS or Paul the Developer/Designer. The problem has to do with the slashes in the previous sentence.

Drupal isn’t a set of tools in the same sense as an MVC framework (e.g. Django, Rails). Drupal is a set of solutions to an ever-growing set of problems. I know just enough web development to be frustrated with what Drupal wont’t let me do. If I were a more technically-limited designer I’d be amazed at all the out-of-the-box functionality. Instead I see mainly that my problems aren’t the ones Drupal solves, or that Drupal’s solutions aren’t my solutions.

Unless Drupal 7 is just balls-out magical or until my job entails 0% Drupal template coding, this problem will bug me. Add it to an ever-growing list of crap in my life I can’t change and thus need the serenity to accept.