I want to like Drupal, but despite a fair amount of effort I haven’t been able to get over its shortcomings. Four years ago we had a need to create a web-driven resource library serving dialect training mp3s to students. I did some research and found a really great model powered by Drupal. I’d heard a bit about the system, and after researching it sounded like a good fit for our needs. But as I started digging into a test implementation I found myself feeling a little overwhelmed, so I hired a consultant to serve as a technical resource. We continued that relationship over the course of 2 months, with weekly phone conferences which were really training/technical consultation calls. I got the application up and running, and even expanded its functionality over the last year with the help of a really dedicated student worker. Now I’ve done a fair amount of PHP work, and extensive work with other open source systems like WordPress — and this student worker also had a really strong PHP background. Neither of us ever got to the point of really liking Drupal, or feeling like we wanted apply it to any other projects. Why?
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. It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising. Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments. And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting. A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy. Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions. I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead. But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book: Read the rest of this entry »
