Actually I had planned to use this site for testing and comparing the features of all the major CMS, I had been working with before, including Drupal. I remember well, that Drupal had allready been quite confusing, when I first downloaded it for a student job a couple of years ago. Though I was hoping  it couldn’t be as bad, when a test install on XAMPP for Windows worked well and the new version appeared to have a more organized structure.

But since the very first moment I tried to install Drupal on my current public webspace, everything tunrned out to be a complete mess. While YaBB, phpBB, WordPress and a bunch of other web tools, were in all senses easy-to-install and smoothly running, even though the server space is rented, Drupal fails all the way. Even doing a minor security upadate of Drupal is driving me insane!

I was eager and  full of ideas for several tiny web projects I came up with in order to keep practicing my programming skills, but all I eventually practiced since then was doing hopless attempts to fix drupal. 🙁

Drupal has turned out to be the most user unfriedly web application I came accross up to now. If you are user and neither owner, admin or root of the web server as well, you’re damned… and you are  officially out of target group for user support too!

Without direct access to your remote server’s command line admin tools, you’ll be facing the following:

• Ftping Drupal folders, because you can’t unzip them after upload, almost inevitably breaks your FTP connection
• Not beeing inside of the owner group of the server’s php execution progress, will pervent you from using the web download and update tools, which could cirmumvent the first problem
• Even if Drupal is uploaded with your user id,  it will write php group  ‘nobody’  files and chmod them to owner only read & edit.
• On the other hand, using drupal modules and template zip extraction tools, will generate tons of subdirectories drupal is not allowed to read and you are not allowed to chmod
• This happens even if PHP is configured to always run as your user id not as ‘none’ and hence you have no chance to invoke another script running as ‘nobody’ to clean up the mess drupal left
• Drupal finally sticks to your webspace until you beg your server provider to eliminate it manually

Until then I’ll be busy enough with doing the required software updates. I feel I am allready develpoing some sort of drupal phobia, making me reluctant surfing my own pages. That means no drupal practice, no need to blog about it and time to eliminate drupal experience from my CV.