zahnster

At work, I’ve been using the Drupal Content Management System more and more. Since we picked it up as our ‘de facto’ standard for CMSes last year, it’s been an interesting journey to get over the Drupal learning curve and start to become a Drupal expert.

For those who are not in the know, Drupal really is a powerful CMS with huge potential. It can be modified and tweaked till it’s almost impossible to identify as an out-of-the-box (and open-source to boot) CMS. There are hundreds of pre-built modules which you can install for custom functionality, and with the huge, supportive user-community behind it, Drupal looks to set the standard in open source CMS solutions.

I’m currently wrapping up my fourth Drupal site, and along the way I seem to keep running into the same issues – things I wish Drupal could do that they just fall short on. I figured I’d make a list and post it on here, because there’s still so much I need to learn about Drupal that perhaps these answers already exist! Half of the reasoning behind this blog is to get feedback from the developmental community. Go ahead, Drupal fans, help me out here:

1. CCK nodes in Drupal need better overall support for multiple file uploads. Right now to create file uploads on content you need to create a file upload box for every attachment – it can become quite ugly when you want to create a content type that can have multiple (like – 9) uploads.
2. While Drupal 5 did a great job at allowing you to have a separate admin template, there’s still issues with it – I would think that the content creation page would fall under the administrative section and thus be displayed with the administration template, but instead it uses the primary site template. Since everything I have created for clients has called for a custom template, it becomes extra work to style the add pages so they look good with all of the form fields.
3. When you create a custom view, it becomes difficult (read: impossble) to be able to create a custom display for it. Now, there is the Template Wizard, but that seems to require that you create your custom views using the list / table type, as when you do Full Nodes for your view type you don’t have options with the Template Wizard like you would otherwise.

I may have had my problems with Drupal at first, but the more I use it and learn the ins-and-outs, the more it’s growing on me. They’ve come a long way since release 4, and if they keep improving like they are, the future is looking bright.