A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

Webmaster Discussion
, , , , ,
#1

Hi all,

I don’t often post, as I rarely feel I have much useful to say. But I thought I’d share a recent experience with you. Many of you promote our flagship site RateTheseGuys.com and have noticed I haven’t been emailing you promo packs for it lately. Unfortunately a surprise tech issue reared it’s ugly head and knocked the site for six, so we’ve had to rebuild it from scratch. Here’s the story…

When we created RTG, we went with a CMS web designer who recommended using Drupal to create the kind of back end we were looking for, allowing for voting and comments on all videos, a certain amount of design options, and to enable different searches. There were two lessons from this:

  1. We will never, ever make ourselves technically dependent on freelance experts again (where we have a choice). We had to re-hire him so many times…

and

  1. Fucking Drupal!

What happened, well over a year after we launched, was that the Drupal system (for which a custom script had to be written to work with CCBill in creating member accounts), suddenly refused to accept CCBill’s new member creations. Old members were fine, but new members found their passes weren’t registering. While we investigated, I manually created passes for each new member, keeping them satisfied. Then the real bomb hit… the Drupal CMS back-end decided to block all members; old members, new members, manual created passes, the lot!

CCBill had no idea why. Our CMS expert web guy had no idea why. NetworkSolutions, who were hosting RTG, had no idea. With everyone lost and members frustrated, we decided to build a whole new site using just basic html site.

The site is now processing with CCBill new members as smoothly as ever, old members have been ported over, and all videos play great. And we’re back open for business! Phew.

So my story is; beware relying technically on experts where you don’t need to, try to keep possible problems under control by training yourself up fast or keeping things very simple.

If any of you have had similar experiences, I’d like to hear them.
Wayne

#2

Re: A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

Well … whatever you do, don’t go with Joomla. It’s another CMS that sounds like Drupal with another name.

I ran a portal site called Gay Porn Pig that was a combo blog, review site, and link list. Like you, I got involved with a freelance designer who recommended I go with Joomla. Same sort of story … it would solve all of my problems and make running the site so much easier – it would even make me coffee and toast every morning, you know the story.

At first everything seemed fine. Joomla was a giant pain in the ass to use. God knows who put the thing together, but it wasn’t anyone who actually works on a site. Click here and stand on your right foot and click over here were the standard protocols to do anything. I’m sure it all made sense to the techs who designed it, but God bless anyone else who could figure it out. I needed a whole day’s training with the freelancer to figure out how to do my daily work. And then were several more emails and phone calls over the next few weeks.

Then once I got into it came the “no it can’t do that” and “oh yes, there’s a module you can buy that will do that.” Once I was into it for a while, I found that Joomla really slowed down my site. “Oh yes, Joomla is a bit of a resource hog,” I was told.

After about a year of running Joomla, I was trying to sell off a different blog of mine. Someone contacted me and said, “I don’t want the blog, but have you ever thought of selling Gay Porn Pig?” I hadn’t thought of selling it, but he offered me a nice price and I so hated working on that site and didn’t have the heart to start over with something else and migrate all the data (well migrate would have involved cutting and pasting every page by hand into something else) so I sold the site and started over.

Like Rate These Guys, I missed the ease of running a static html site. Yes, things are a bit more cumbersome when it comes to updating, but honestly, these do-everything-under-the-sun CMS’s seem to come with a whole host of problems of their own.

#3

Re: A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

[QUOTE=dzinerbear;126669]Well … whatever you do, don’t go with Joomla. It’s another CMS that sounds like Drupal with another name.

I ran a portal site called Gay Porn Pig that was a combo blog, review site, and link list. Like you, I got involved with a freelance designer who recommended I go with Joomla. Same sort of story … it would solve all of my problems and make running the site so much easier – it would even make me coffee and toast every morning, you know the story.

At first everything seemed fine. Joomla was a giant pain in the ass to use. God knows who put the thing together, but it wasn’t anyone who actually works on a site. Click here and stand on your right foot and click over here were the standard protocols to do anything. I’m sure it all made sense to the techs who designed it, but God bless anyone else who could figure it out. I needed a whole day’s training with the freelancer to figure out how to do my daily work. And then were several more emails and phone calls over the next few weeks.

Then once I got into it came the “no it can’t do that” and “oh yes, there’s a module you can buy that will do that.” Once I was into it for a while, I found that Joomla really slowed down my site. “Oh yes, Joomla is a bit of a resource hog,” I was told.

After about a year of running Joomla, I was trying to sell off a different blog of mine. Someone contacted me and said, “I don’t want the blog, but have you ever thought of selling Gay Porn Pig?” I hadn’t thought of selling it, but he offered me a nice price and I so hated working on that site and didn’t have the heart to start over with something else and migrate all the data (well migrate would have involved cutting and pasting every page by hand into something else) so I sold the site and started over.

Like Rate These Guys, I missed the ease of running a static html site. Yes, things are a bit more cumbersome when it comes to updating, but honestly, these do-everything-under-the-sun CMS’s seem to come with a whole host of problems of their own.[/QUOTE]

Here is my 2 cents as a developer / coder. I don’t work with either Joomla or Drupal, nor do I take on any work that involves either one of those two.

  1. Graphic designers, love to use both, since they can not code and both of those CMS are free and clients get really woo and awwwwed easily into going with with. Tell a client it can do this, that, jump up and spin around, and they bite. Pretty much, both those systems are used by graphic artists to pretend they got coding skill and extort lots of money out of people.

  2. Both are wayyyyyyy over bloated. Weather you use all the features or not, they have a problem of still loading all the core features.

  3. While Wordpress is a blank canvas, that you can extend to work the way you want it to work, with Joomla and Drupal, when developing plugins, you pretty much “bend” it to get what you want and make sure you don’t bend it too much that it snaps and breaks.

Really, there is no one CMS out there that gives you 100% of what you need. But as a developer, I do like Wordpress for their “Blank Slate” approach vs. cram everything and hope for the best approach of the other two. If you want 100% of what you want and can’t find a pre built solution, pretty much your going to have to have one built that suits your needs. But at the same time, really I don’t think there is that much of a system most pay sites need. Nothing a simple database and some PHP logic added in could not work.

#4

Re: A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

There’s nothing wrong with Drupal as a framework. I’ve developed around it for years. Great for small and midsize enterprise. I’ve also did work in developing java based CMS’s for large enterprises. The direction Drupal 8 is going is interesting. Far more object-orientation and more integration with graphical UML engineering…
I suggest it is a programmer issue rather than the CMS.

#5

Re: A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

[QUOTE=gumdrop;126681]There’s nothing wrong with Drupal as a framework. I’ve developed around it for years. Great for small and midsize enterprise. I’ve also did work in developing java based CMS’s for large enterprises. The direction Drupal 8 is going is interesting. Far more object-orientation and more integration with graphical UML engineering…
I suggest it is a programmer issue rather than the CMS.[/QUOTE]

Well everything has been going object oriented ever since PHP 5. My point is, way too many “Experts” ie Graphic Desingers con people into using it without any PHP programming knowledge at all and it is way too bloated for creating a bunch of html pages when you have no need for its other features. Even the so called “experts” don’t build addons and plugins correctly for the system and end of clashing with the core.

#6

Re: A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

Speaking as a freelancer, blogs just should be done in Wordpress and maintained/updated at minimum 1-2x a month. I’ve installed a plugin which also specifically notifies me if there’s a security update. The client can do their posts/updates and manage the front end on their own, and creating a child theme is very easy.

Anyone can install Wordpress but for most of my clients they don’t have an urge or time to learn the skills needed to tweak performance and such. Freelancers claiming to be WP experts are a dime a dozen and quite a few just suck.

And as the client you have to commit to the couple of hours a month of my time to keep things up to date or else there will be nightmares.

I’ve tried Drupal several times and absolutely hated it. It is also best if you basically hand me the system right after minimal OS install – their can be surprises lurking if the host has put in conflicting repos and does repo installs of things that should not ever be installed from repo like PHP.

#7

Re: A cautionary tale. CMS fuckups. Drupal. Stress.

Sorry to hear about your troubles Wayne. Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile:

I know a thing or 10 about design and PHP, but am always learning consistently. Therefore, I surely don’t profess to be an expert. I don’t believe there is such a thing. One is always learning and thus, cannot be an expert if that is the case.

That being said, I definitely agree that Drupal and Joomla are horrific resource hogs and a complete mess in many regards. Wordpress has a lot of cons and while I currently use it for a small pay site I own and run, I’m currently scripting my own CMS for it and it’s leaps and bounds faster and more efficient.

I agree that taking control of your own sites in as many aspects as possible is a great idea. Perhaps a coding ‘mentor’ for some help whenever you need it, IF needed. But learning how to code yourself is the way to go. Or have someone you trust wholeheartedly learn at least. And this would include, at the very least, basic HTML, css, and PHP.

My 2 cents