Why I switched to Drupal

gap_tooth_clan · **Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:38 pm

It has been a while since I have been on this site, mainly due to the fact I have switched content management systems all together.

I really love the simplicity of CMSMS but found it increasingly difficult to manipulate to my needs.

However I was pretty happy to keep coding with the system until my company decided to switch to Drupal.

I revisited the cmsms site today to see what news was abound for the project only to discover the dropping of cmsms 2.0 which I feel is a great shame.

After working with Drupal for a fair amount of projects I love the ease of use, the learning curve, the community, the ability to easily hook into core functionality and change it anyway that you feel you should be able to.

I feel that it may be helpful for you guys to know some of my personal bug bears with the system for your future development.

Both wordpress and drupal use a singular content item in the data base to create all content items and then extend from there.

User logins handled from templates, this should be a core feature not handled in the template

Database templates, I hate these, lack of version control equals bad times for developers

smarty as a whole is a pretty bad idea, you can still mess up a site with smarty

CCK on drupal is an amazing feature and there are similar features available on wordpress and joomla. CMSMS was going to have ORM which would have been a great asset to developing quicker.

I really did not enjoy creating sef urls in cmsms, they were painful to say the least.

I did love the menu templating system, really easy to use

The speed to which I could create a site, still can not make a drupal site as quick

fr0z3ng33k · **Joined:** Thu Mar 03, 2011 4:47 pm **Posts:** 59

Well I am new to using CMSMS even though I've been on it for 6months, it's still very new to me and since I don't do HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc the terms are difficult to understand. I tried Drupal before taking over our site which uses CMSMS. I liked some features but they weren't good enough to make me stick with Drupal. The only complaints I have to piggy back is the time it takes for forum response / help. I also don't like that CMSMS tutorials aren't updated to today's versions and since I am new to all of this when i need specific help it's expected that I already know the beginning steps so people in the forums give me help from step 4 instead of step 1 (just an example). I am sure I am not the only one on this, but I am determined to master CMSMS since I enjoy it. I believe the CMSMS community will miss you just like any user that leaves. Best of luck with Drupal!

jwaiv · **Joined:** Mon May 16, 2011 1:21 pm **Posts:** 10

All down to what you need I suppose, I tried Drupal too but still prefer CMSMS. I'm no expert and CMSMS just seemed to suite me.

hasanen · **Posted:** Sun Jun 12, 2011 5:17 pm

Here is my few thoughts about this subject. I spend more or less six months to decide which system would be better for me. Within that I time build my sites theme 2 times with both systems (drupal and cmsms). Both indeed have their own pros, but in the end I figured out that comparing these system isn't that black and white. The way I see this is that cmsms is for basic websites (as its name says) and drupal to bigger systems. If cmsms would have all the features what drupal has, would it be simple enough to build site in 5-10 minutes? In my opinion, no it wouldn't.

I don't mean to moralize or anything, and I apologize if my text seems to be like that. English isn't my native language so there might be mistakes. I just wanted to share my thoughts why I like both system and I will be using both in the future, depending the projects nature.

M@rtijn · **Posted:** Mon Jun 13, 2011 10:14 am

I want to point out that this forum is not a place to discuss which CMS is best.

In this forum we shall all agree that CMSms rules and it is the way to go

uniqu3 · **Posted:** Mon Jun 13, 2011 4:02 pm

There doesn't exist that one and only "BEST" cms and you simply can't compare any system due to different factors.

Best cms is always that cms that you choose to use for your or clients current needs.
If you want a social protal go with software that was built for, if you want forum go with forum software and so on...

For my clients and most of the work i have to do CMSMS suits me best and is a time saver compared to some other "alike" systems where Drupal just doesn't fit in.

gap_tooth_clan · **Posted:** Mon Jun 13, 2011 4:07 pm

fr0z3ng33k

I am not entirely slating CMSMS, I have used it extensively, and perhaps my needs outgrew the system, it is very easy to begin mastering a cms

jwaiv

I guess you have to use what you can get into, I was forced into changing and I have a pretty good Drupal developer sat next to me which makes things easier, Drupal is daunting to start with, even jus adding content, is not a simple thing like CMSMS, but when you know how to use something it becomes much more powerful. Same as CMSMS, from when I first started building sites with it, everything was much more difficult, but now I would not struggle to manipulate it to my needs.

hasanen

Yes I agree with you, CMSMS can take a site from HTML to CMS in a very short amount of time, I feel that where my work lies at the moment, clients start off with a small site but over time it becomes bigger and needing more powerful features, so the initial pain of setting up a site in Drupal for me does eventually pay off.

M@rtijn

It was not my intention to say if one CMS was better than another, I was merely pointing out my reasons for leaving CMSMS and pointing out some really awesome features of Drupal that could really help push the development forward especially since the amazing features listed in CMSMS 2.0 are not so likely to arrive on the scene now.

gap_tooth_clan · **Posted:** Mon Jun 13, 2011 4:16 pm

uniqu3

No I believe there is no one solution, I like to use Wordpress and for a more powerful ecommerce solution I use Magento.

It was a shame I had to leave CMSMS but in doing so, I have found features on those other CMS systems that CMSMS would really benefit from.

I probably can not imagine myself using CMSMS for another site as I feel that any site I do build eventually I will want to extend it beyond the bounds of CMSMS, and there is no way to alter core operations with out changing the code of the core of the site which is not the best programming method

fr0z3ng33k

One other niggling bug with CMSMS is the forum, when you receive less than helpful replies from especially one of the senior members, I am sure you know who I am talking about ;-)

but this should get better as the community grows

gap_tooth_clan · **Posted:** Mon Jun 13, 2011 4:18 pm

uniqu3

Nice site btw

uniqu3 · **Posted:** Mon Jun 13, 2011 5:05 pm

gap_tooth_clan wrote:

uniqu3

Nice site btw

Thx

atz6975 · **Joined:** Thu Jan 14, 2010 4:43 pm **Posts:** 24

uniq3 : why not merge you CMS blog with CMSMS site!

What I mean is that CMS lacks a friendly simple tips & tricks ALIVE site...and yours just looks like that.
If I'm not wrong you have other editors updating the site with you, so you are not that far from what should exist on CMSMS.

Anyway, nice work and thank you.

uniqu3 · **Posted:** Tue Jun 14, 2011 10:43 am

@atz6975

With this question we got far off topic now

We never discussed about it with the rest of CMSMS Team, but to answer your question from my point of view.
There are actually many tips and tricks here, for one the Forum and for other WIKI, indeed it is sometimes hard to find correct answer but answers are actually here.

Then merging both would also mean allot of work like following CMSMS corporate identity design with blog, importing posts, comments... And for this kind of work DEV Team simply lacks on manpower, time and support.

And there is also that one problem that most of CMSMS community isn't that social, i have called out few times that i am looking for volunteers on my Blog but didn't get any response except from those who i contacted directly and Blog like this can only live from Guest posts, i lack on time for some time now to write a decent post again.

Why I switched to Drupal

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