[coyotos-dev] Issues with Drupal

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

Well, it looks like we are in a serious world of hurt on the Drupal
thing. I found out this weekend that Drupal doesn't handle SVG or any
other vector format in anything like a sensible way. This means that we
cannot use it as a CMS for anything that (a) needs to be able to go to
print, and (b) includes diagrams that cannot look like shit in print.

The "needs to go to print" part is a known weakness of Drupal, but
coming from the OSDoc experience I was pretty sure that I could solve
that by building the world's ugliest XHTML->Latex transform via XSLT
(which is basically how OSDoc does it).

Speaking exclusively for myself, I prefer xfig to SVG, mainly because
the renders and the editors for SVG are both so cruddy. XFig is
primitive, but you can render it consistently. SVG not so much, because
you are tempted to believe that you can trust the browser, and you
simply can't. The stuff that comes out of InkScape that gets called SVG
really has to be seen to appreciate how bad it is.

It gets better: Drupal can't embed external content to save it's life.
Ironically, Trac (which is very explicitly NOT trying to be an SCM
system) does much better here.

Trac, of course, intentionally does not have a notion of a "product" in
it's bug tracking system. Seems really silly to use a system whose main
feature is its bug tracking stuff when it doesn't do the kind of
tracking we need. We'll only have to disable it and resort to bugzilla.
Sigh.

I had a long chat tonight on IRC with one of the core Trac guys. I don't
like what he had to say, because (bottom line) it isn't going to solve
our problem. On the other hand, I do respect his point of view: there is
a niche that Trac serves very very well, and they are trying to keep it
simple.

I have put two blog posts up on our Drupal site about this:

http://dev.eros-os.com/content/we-don-039-t-need-no-stinking-architecture
http://dev.eros-os.com/content/still-search-cms

It is becoming pretty obvious that we are going to need to compromise in
the end. Drupal can serve for community support, but we are going to
need to maintain parts of our site in static form. I can't tell you all
how much I hate that. I hate the idea of an inconsistent look, and I
hate the idea of all of that static content that is just that little bit
harder for people to comment on and improve as a community.

If you know anything about CMS systems, have a look at that second Blog
entry and tell me what you know about.


shap