An uncon talk at PHP North West 2012, challenging some of the myths found outside the Drupal community.

1. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Drupal Haters?
You’re all
hypocrites.

2. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
I work with Drupal.

3. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate

4. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
LETS TALK ABOUT PHP.

5. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Ewww, you use PHP?
I thought you were
cool!

6. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
All the APIs are
execrable.

7. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
All the PHP code I’ve seen
has been messy,
unmaintainable crap.
Spaghetti SQL wrapped in
spaghetti PHP wrapped in
spaghetti HTML.

8. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
The term “good PHP
programmer” is
considered an oxymoron.

9. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
SOUND FAMILIAR?

10. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
WHERE DOES THIS ATTITUDE COME
FROM?

11. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Low barrier to writing or re-
deploying code.

12. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Lots of tutorials, which omit
best-practice in order to
simplify the example.

13. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT.

14. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
The language you use is
much less important than
the platform you build on it.

15. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
There’s a long list of sites
that bust that myth…
…Facebook?

16. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
DRUPAL IS BAD…MKKK?

17. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
• Not OOP
• Learning curve is crazy
• It’s SLOW
• Simple, naive

18. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Not OOP?
• Drupal uses a coding-pattern we call hooks.
It’s essentially an implementation of the
observer/visitor design patterns.
• The menu-router is basically a front-controller.
• It’s not MVC? The business logic is decoupled from the
presentation logic through the theme layer…it’s not
MVC, it’s PAC (Presentation-Abstraction Control).
• The implementations for database, caching, and other
tasks are pluggable.
• Modules such as panels use DI.
• (Oh, PHP isn’t OOP either, right?)

19. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Learning curve is crazy?

20. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate

21. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate

22. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Learning curve is crazy?

23. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Learning curve is crazy?
• A Cessna is a simple plane. Small, single-prop,
it’s a plane to learn on. When you’re qualified,
you can fly pretty much any small single-prop.
• When you qualify on an A-380, you’re certified
to fly an A-380. You can’t fly another airbus on
that licence. You can’t fly a Boeing.
• You need to re-certify for each different plane.

24. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Learning curve is crazy?
• PHP is a simple language. When you can write
PHP, you can work with any small, simple PHP
framework or site.
• When you’re knowledgeable and experienced
with Zend Framework, can build great Zend
Framework sites. You can’t dive into a Symfony
project. You can’t dive into a Drupal project.
• You need to re-learn for each framework.

25. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
It’s SLOW?

26. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
It’s slow?
• Drupal is expected to work out of the box on
shared hosting.
• It uses the database as a cache. I know, right?

27. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
It’s slow?
• We already know how to make sites perform:
memcache, varnish, APC, CDNs…use them.
• Learn which Drupal configurations have a
material impact on performance.
• Learn how to leverage the caching APIs in the
modules you develop.
• Benchmark and profile.

28. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
It’s slow?
• You’re all professional developers.
• You already have the knowledge and
experience to know how to make a platform
perform and scale.
• Drupal already supports the same standard
practices and tools that you’ll find in the PHP
community.

29. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
It’s simple, naive?
DB
You’re
expecting
Web this?
server

30. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
HA Proxy HA Proxy Last year, I
worked on
Zeus Zeus
this Drupal-
Varnish Varnish
based
Web Web platform.
Memcache LDAP
SOLR ESB
NAS/SAN DB (master) DB (slave)

31. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
DRUPAL: THE GOOD PARTS.

32. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Who’s using Drupal?
• The White House
• Warner Music
• Turner Media
• Al Jazeera
• Twitter
• Apple

33. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Who’s building with Drupal?
• Global SIs: Capita, Capgemini, Accenture…
• Acquia – founded by Dries.
“America’s top one-hundred most promising
companies” – Forbes.
• Ixis – PHPNW Sponsor

34. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Joining the Drupal community
• DUGs
NWDUG meet on the first Wednesday of every month
in Manchester.
• Camps
Drupalcamp NW: 23-25 November 2012.
• Conferences
3 Drupalcons in 2013: Sydney, Portland, Prague.
• IRC
#drupal-uk, #drupal-support

35. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate

36. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
WHERE IS DRUPAL GOING?

37. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Drupal release schedule
2 01 2
2008
2009
2 01 4
2007
2 01 3
2 01 1
2 010
Retired
Drupal 5 Jan 2011
Drupal 6
Drupal 7
Drupal 8
Expected
mid-2013

38. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
What’s happening Drupal 8?
• Configuration management
• Web services
• Design
• Multi-lingual
• HTML 5 http://groups.drupal.org/
• Mobile drupal-initiatives

39. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
What’s happening in Drupal 8?
• Integrating a number of Symfony components
• HTTPKernel and caching kernel
• Twig
• Composer?
• YAML configuration

40. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
FINAL MESSAGE

41. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Before you jump on that bandwagon
thinking nothing interesting could
possibly be done with Drupal,
remember the FUD levelled at PHP.
You might be missing out on
something great.

42. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Picture attributions
• Haters gonna hate eagle
Eric J. Lubbers
• Cessna
Photobunny
• Drupalcon Munich group photo
Drupal Association

43. Drupal Haters Gonna Hate
Thank you!
 Marcus Deglos
 @manarth
 http://deglos.com/
 marcus@deglos.com