A few questions about Drupal

Vadim Barsukov, also known on the websites drupal.ru and drupal.org under the nickname "vadbars", answered questions about the work of drupal.ru, cms Drupal, Drupal6.



- So, the first question, probably most interesting for Russian-speaking cms users now: what happened to  drupal.ru ? .masterhost, infobox, who is to blame?


Honestly, I know no more about this than everyone else. After some intrigue with promises of a speedy recovery of the server, an announcement appeared on the site: “After the air conditioner crashed on the provider's site (
masterhost.ru ), the hard drives and the power supply of our server malfunctioned.” I’m sure that Alexander Grafov’s team ( Chuvash.org server /Roleplay.ru, on which the site drupal.ru is located ) is doing everything to get out of deep out and I wish them every success in this.

But these repeated accidents on the Internet themselves (for example, recent interruptions with ICQ) lead to philosophical thoughts about how defenseless our Network is and how thin the film of civilization is that separates us from the Stone Age. :) The Internet, created as if the communications network is invulnerable in the event of a nuclear war, easily becomes the victim of a broken computer fan or an overheated air conditioner in the server room.

Well, if you look from a pragmatic point of view, then these “man-made disasters” push me to thoughts that another forum member on drupal.ru well expressed  under the nickname
V.Kh .: “Still, I come to the conclusion that having your own server is
problematic. Replacing disks, replacing a server, etc. Shared is better if there were
no these restrictions. And if you take anything, then the best, probably
, is VPS / VDS with the highest possible values, but not your own
server. ”( Http://harzah.net/node/866 ).
I am also for such a division of labor between hosters and web developers (I apologize for the excess of foreign words :).

- The question must have been asked more than once: why Drupal? What are the pros / cons for you now has this cms.


A lot of copies were broken in the “religious wars” on the topic of which is better: Joomla or Drupal, WordPress or Drupal ... "Who will win - a whale or an elephant?" Comparison tables of CMS functionality, various benchmarks and performance tests - all this can be found on the Internet on the Internet a sufficient amount. I will not once again talk about technological features and the ideology embedded in Drupal, although they are, of course, wonderful.

I want to say now about another aspect, psychological. For any master, it is important that his tool is not only powerful and effective, but also convenient for him. After all, sites are made by living people, with their addictions and features. Programmers or web developers go not just to make money for survival. People express themselves, they want to say something to this world and get glory, love and attention in response. And the choice of a tool (be it a CMS or a programming language) says a lot about who chose it. One is looking for simplicity and opportunity to create a website “at the touch of a button”, while the other wants to put the construction of their sites under full control. To build a site as a building - brick by brick from the "zero cycle" to the weather vane on the tower.

Drupal successfully balances between these extremes. What attracts me to him is precisely this combination, on the one hand, the ease of assembling typical sites from ready-made “cubes” -modules and, on the other hand, the ability to constantly set yourself more and more complex tasks and perform them thanks to the incredible flexibility of the internal structure of this CMS (the famous Drupal taxonomy). It brings pleasure - the opportunity to feel the whole process "at your fingertips" and feel how your skill level is growing along with the sites.
Someone at  drupal.ru successfully compared other CMS with kits for assembling cars, and Drupal with a car factory. :)

One cannot fail to mention one more thing that impresses me in Drupal - it was originally conceived as a means of creating human communities, and not just as another tool for producing websites as sets of some texts and pictures. Even the slogan on
drupal.org sounds like this: “Community plumbing”, which can be freely translated as “Master plumbing”, organize the interaction between people. And this very precisely corresponds to the essence of the Internet as an intermediary between people, as a “living environment” of a modern person.

- Knowing that you are an active participant in drupal.org ,
it would be foolish not to ask: what awaits us in the Drupal 6 release? When will he see the light? If there is information, share what the main emphasis is in the development version.


As far as I know, none of the Russian "Drupallers" are directly involved in the development of the Drupal core - we are still ahead ("yes and no one is behind," as one friend of mine says :). But the Russian Drupal community is developing very quickly, new interesting people constantly appear with their ideas and energy to realize them. Who knows, maybe by the seventh or eighth Drupal, we can offer the main idea for the next release, as it happened now with the task of improving the multilingualism of Drupal. It was proposed by a young Hungarian programmer and became the main "chip" of the future version.

There will be many improvements in the translation of the site interface: automatic download of translations along with installed modules and design templates, the ability to highlight language versions into separate subdomains (for example,
ru.yoursite.com/page ) or use prefixes (for example, yoursite.com/en/page) etc. In addition, there will be new opportunities to support multilingual information posted on your site. The same message can have different translations, which will be automatically displayed depending on the language chosen by the user. This could be done earlier with the help of third-party modules, now it is significantly improved and will be included in the kernel of the system. Localization support has become better: date and time formats are more flexibly configured in accordance with national standards, support for writing from right to left (for Middle Eastern languages),
etc.

The installer is being improved. It has become more logical, more beautiful (support for design templates is included) and more convenient. It can display messages in the user's native language. Drupal generally has a very interesting idea of ​​“installation profiles”, which allow the developer to create various scenarios for the installer as they gain experience. This significantly reduces the process of deploying almost ready-made sites of various types (corporate site, electronic store, school site, portal or virtual community,
etc.). In addition, developers can share these profiles with their colleagues, which improves cooperation and the division of labor between them. This is important because website development has long ceased to be the work of a single artisan, it is a collective work and joint creativity.

Important changes will occur at the system level: the menu system has been rewritten (they promise faster work and a more logical construction), work with recording system events in the logs has become more flexible (you can organize notification of the administrator by e-mail or SMS, you can choose which events to record in the log) redesigned interaction logic with the database when creating tables (this allows Drupal easier to port to other databases, e.g. Oracle or SQLite) and others.

expected numerous changes in the user interface in the control File Research Institute, nice theming improvements in the design ... - you name it. Therefore, of course, we are looking forward to the new version. The exact release date is still unknown, but the “founding father” Dries Buytaert says, it seems, about the “code freeze” in a month.

- What are your favorite drupal projects?


Of course, the favorite is drupal.ru . And not from a technical or design point of view (there is still a lot to be done in this regard). This is a place of communication, and the communication is so interesting that you "sit down" on it like a drug. Imagine how we are now when
drupal.ru is not available? :)

Naturally, if we talk about projects created using Drupal, we can’t but mention the offsite - drupal.org . It demonstrates well all the strengths and weaknesses of the Drupal system. The excellent scalability and flexibility of the structure of a large portal is combined with the complexity of the help system and increased server requirements. To the merits of

drupal.orgwe can also attribute the fact that they are trying on this site to make maximum use of Drupal's new products and “features”. As an example, let me give you the possibility of organizing "groups", that is
. a kind of subsites that only certain categories of visitors have access to. At  drupal.org, this is used to organize discussion groups ( http://groups.drupal.org/ ) for discussion and joint development of various areas of Drupal development or organization of collective events. It is fashionable, modern and “webdvannolno” - no wonder Google, as they say, looks in the direction of Drupal'a. :)

Drupal is often blamed for neglecting the external, designer side of site building for the sake of internal logic and performance. Indeed, the standard Drupal design templates (“themes”) look poor, despite the excellent features of the “theme” provided by the engine. But recently, Russian designers (for example, garamond from
drupal.ru ) have proposed new convenient and beautiful themes. And this, I believe, is our Russian contribution to the international Drupal. There are more and more beautiful Russian-language sites - http://www.drupalsites.net/countries/russia . Of course, here it is especially necessary to name one more “patriarch” of the Russian Drupal - the site http://designcollector.ru/ .

- What can you wish / advise to developers who just decided to switch to drupal?



I will not deceive - the "threshold" for entering Drupal is quite high. It is necessary to get used to the ideology of the system, to get used to the terminology, in addition, there is no complete and detailed documentation in Russian so far, and with the change of version the API,
etc. can change . etc. But the presence of difficulties, maybe this is for the better - you will have something to do when you enter our fraternity (by the way, it can also be called “sisterhood” :) - we have quite a lot of women and girls participating in our forum).

But the main advice is this - do not be afraid to ask questions on the forum: our community is very friendly and willing to share its knowledge and skills with beginners. An explanatory answer to your question will help everyone, including those who come after you. And they will look like a guru and will interview you. :)

As it was said in the film “The same Munchausen” - “Join, gentlemen, join!”

- Thanks for the answers to the questions. By the way, yesterday the problems with hosting drupal.ru were finally resolved (I don’t know everything yet)! So a holiday has come on our street. And you, Vadim, would like to wish success and good luck in future projects!