Comments for CloudEngine Blog

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Marco Telles

Marco Telles — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 05:42:05 +0000

Hi Juliette,
I quit to “pure” programming when by indication I used Drupal, but… recently I feel tedious and your post tells exactly what I think.
I just have to add how is very tedious to become a “installer man”, “configurator man” and “search man” of modules and blocks when we could be writing beautiful lines of code, algorithms, etc.
Thank you for your (old) post.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Prem Goyal

Prem Goyal — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:10:01 +0000

Great Post…..Thanks for you valuable directions…

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Curriculum Design Technical Journeys: Part 1 « JISC Curriculum Design & Delivery

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:35:55 +0000

[...] the flexibility and level control they felt they needed. Juliette Culver has written an excellent blog post about their decision process and [...]

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by george kyaw naing

george kyaw naing — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:25:02 +0000

I like this very much.
“any time taken learning more about Drupal is time that would have needed to come out of the time allocated to development of the site. In contrast, you could read all the CodeIgniter documentation in a day and I haven’t yet known a PHP developer who hasn’t been able to pretty much hit the ground running with CodeIgniter.”
This reminds me of Bruce tate’s “Faster, Lighter Java.” Bloated documentation is a big drag on productivity.
Thanks a lot.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Sorin Tudor

Sorin Tudor — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:09:48 +0000

New entities api Drupal module it’s a good alternative to MVC codeigniter programming style Please look at http://www.trellon.com/content/blog/creating-own-entities-entity-api
On the other hand Bonfire Codeigniter extension implements Drupal like RBAC auth., themes.
Drupal modules already cover CI extensions facilities.
CI with his extensions will cover drupal and drupal modules facilities.
Drupal already shine. CI shine enough. Present is drupal best friend. Future will be ci best friend.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Amitav Roy

Amitav Roy — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:40:14 +0000

Well I personally feel that Drupal has its own target. Not all sites require CMS. Drupal is very handy when you want to make websites with a very strong back end where the end user is going to do a lot of work. If it is a simple blog with not much to add from functionality point of view, then I guess Drupal will be an overkill. Even wordpress has lot of things which are sometimes not required.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Jason Kirst

Jason Kirst — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:46:52 +0000

I’ve tried using features more than once for migrating configurations, and both times have ended up returning to making a list of changes on dev and repeating them upon deployment to production.

There are two main problems with using the features module: 1) Not all modules, including core modules, support features, which means that you end up having to either patch those modules or keep track of those settings separately anyway, and 2) on a complex site or even simple web app, simply managing and refactoring the features hierarchy and configurations themselves can turn into quite a bit of overhead.

Don’t get me wrong: I think features is great and the guys responsible for it – developmentseed – are super-cool. But I’ve hardly found it a panacea for the drupal configuration migration problem.

Furthermore I can certainly relate to the whole “last details are agonizing” issue the author points out! To be fair, those “last details” are typically the toughest for _any_ software project – but the amount of code one has to deconstruct and wade through with drupal can make it especially frustrating.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Franko

Franko — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:17:41 +0000

Thanks for sharing. Great article!

Right now, I’m in the situation to tearing my hair out trying to solve some configuration problems in Drupal so I can get what I want. I was building websites in my custom CMS (asp.net) for three years. After that, I spent another two years configuring Drupal websites. And you know what, when I look back – I spent the same amount of time for Drupal website like modifying my own CMS engine to build web sites.

Tweaking that multilingual options, combining all those modules, patching some of them, staying up to date with new versions… I’m tired of that. Analogy with reshaping a car to get a boat is absolutely beautiful. That is exactly what I’m doing last two years.

This problem was the reason why I started to search for another approach how to build web sites more easily and faster . I think that taking a small and elegant web application framework (like CodeIgniter) and accept some Drupal approach how to handle content (blocks, menus, regions…), is the way to go.

And I hope I will enjoy writing code a little bit more then I do now. And finish my project much faster.

Thanks again.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by cloudengine

cloudengine — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:44:27 +0000

Thanks for the info on the features module, Ryan – will definitely take a look at that next time I work on a Drupal site. Would be very interested in any more info on how these issues have been addressed as I’m not interested in Drupal-bashing here, just working out what it is suitable for and what it is not.

Comment on Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter by Ryan Cross

Ryan Cross — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 02:25:49 +0000

Just a small note to say that the issues have you have raised are well known and to some extent have been addressed.

I would particularly point out the features module, which allows you to take all of the configuration from the database and export it into code so that you can do all your updates via a simple code update.