[sf-lug] Which CMS ? Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PHPNuke or PostNuke?

[Adrien Lamothe]

The other one _does_ manage to escape the typical
looks-like-every-other-Drupal-site look, but what you don't get to see is how much hard slogging through major PHP hacking -- and money to pay for it -- went into that accomplishment.  I'm betting:  a lot.

Absolutely. If you want a custom look then you have to do some custom programming. Ruby on Rails web sites also tend to look remarkably similar. I'd rather hack Ruby than PHP (I've been working extensively with PHP the past two years and have done a little Rails work), but Drupal is a powerful content management system so that may be reason to use PHP.

I've encountered companies who decided to go with PHP because of the availability and relative low cost of PHP programmers in comparison to Rubyists. My experience is there are a lot of PHP hackers who write very sloppy, undocumented code. Of course, people can write bad code in any language, but the steep Rails learning curve seems to have so far screened out bad programmers. PHP is quite good for what it is and is very fast. Ruby is better suited for complex "enterprise class" server-side systems and that is how it is being embraced by corporate IT. A lot of companies are starting to use Ruby to integrate with and control Java applications, in an effort to salvage something from all the work put into those Java apps the past several years. By the way, 18 years ago it was said 50% of all corporate software projects ended in failure; a recent study states that now 85% of all corporate software projects are failures (I'll look for the article and post a link to it here),
 which is funny because I've been speculating recently that the failure rate has risen to around 80%. IT departments really have become ticks feeding on their hosts.

- Adrien




       
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