Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
I’ve started using Drupal on 2007. For about 9 years I visits drupal.org almost on daily basis, I released a module, I suggested some patches, participated to local events and so on. I’ve started working on Drupal with Drupal 5 and I ended on Drupal 7 with a long time on Drupal 6.
In the meantime, Acquia was created to support Drupal development and make some money from the project and for the project in a typical open source scheme, free software accompained to paid services.
This is my report based on those years.
Flaws
On my journey to Drupal and beyond, I enjoyed the community but I’ve seen many issues in those years:
Too much security flaws in core and contrib.
Too much bugfix to fix these flaws: maintaining tens of website without Acquia automatic update services become a challenge (and it’s the reason you want to pay for it).
Contrib modules are frequently poorly designed and maintained.
Issues remains unfixed forever or are automatically closed without being actually fixed on both core and contrib.
Any major version released can be totally different from the previous one, requiring extra efforts for nothing.
Drupal inherit all the PHP problems and try to overcome them with internal functions replacing some of those from the language accompained with the good Drupal API documentation.
The result of these issues together is that you cannot use Drupal without a dedicated Drupal team to take care of fixing components. Even two people are not enough to develop and follow couples of Drupal websites, not to mention a lone developer.
I’ve talked with other developers that used Drupal and other applications to design and publish websites and their assumption is easy: if you have a small team, you cannot use Drupal. Not anymore. Maintainance would be overwhelming.
Following this fondness for big teams, the release of Drupal 8 confirmed how low is the power of the community become compared to core contributors and Acquia (where many of them now works). They deliberately moved this open source software from a multipurpose Content Management System usable from small and big firm to a software that has the Enterprise world in his mind and forget the others.
This was a shock for many small developers and enthusiasts.
GTFO
I’ve read about Drupal enthusiasts that suffers the same uneasiness of mine after long-time Drupal and PHP development.
Here’s a list of theirs experiences along with the number of years they used this software:
Some of them migrated to Django like me. During this journey I’ve discovered a wonderful language like Python and his tools and documentation. I’ve also discovered how deep you can customize the framework to do the job, concentrating on the important things.
You cannot tell the difference without using another framework like Django or WordPress, just to pick some very different beasts. You need to compare Drupal with others to try the difference.
Try and choose
While Drupal try to overcome PHP language, Django uses only a fraction of the power of Python and it’s not the best tool on the Earth for building website like I supposed Drupal was.
This means that I can move for example to Flask when I have to build small of focused web applications, or to Kivy when I have to make a desktop and mobile app using the same language, the same Python packages, building my own classes to share when needed.
This is actually a change of perspective, to choose a language before the framework to easily switch from one to another in case the project go wild.
Upgrading an existing application using a well designed framework is straightforward compared to the major versions migration on Drupal. During the last 7 years, Django preserved much of his structure making simple the maintainance and the upgrade of websites. Virtualenvs surely helps, but the whole design supports the developer in his duties. This is not an unique feature of Python and Django, but it’s what it lacks to PHP/Drupal.
Here’s and example of how a framework built in Python can scale and how to migrate between major versions of the language here, even a very big website can be feasible when the framework design works in your same team:
Decreasing popularity
Another reason to think about leaving Drupal is his decreasing popularity. It seems naif but it’s a very important matter for open source software since a weak community leaves bugs unfixed and create less contrib modules.
Here’s the popularity in Google Trends of Drupal compared to Django between May 1st, 2007 and December 31st, 2017:
Golden age for Drupal was long time ago, at the time of Drupal 6 and early 7. Decline followed the effort to build Drupal 8 in 2012 and the outcome of this transition is better described by this graph:
Drupal was a credible WordPress competitor back on 2008 scoring a 1:3 ratio in Trends at the time of Drupal 5. On January 2018 with Drupal 8 as major version it’s passed to 1:10.
Drupal failed to become the alternative for WordPress and actually was surpassed by niche, low-level alternatives like Django. Because by now:
Who wants to build web applications uses Python/Django, Ruby on Rails, Javascript/Node.js, Java, C# and so on.
Who wants to build website with a great backend still using PHP uses WordPress.
PHP as a declining language
If it’s not enough, here’s the TIOBE index for PHP language compared to Python from 2002 to 2018:
These are simple indexes, but you can find other evidences about the usage crisis of the couple Drupal/PHP. Take another index like PyPL, read some of the experiences listed above or read this good picture of Drupal development cycle. Find as many sources as you want, the conclusion is the same: Drupal is now a declining framework written in a declining language. Who still uses PHP go for the winner WordPress.
What is to be done?
If you read this, probably you’re asking yourself how to leave Drupal. Start to use another language and framework to suit your needs and then try the difference. If you still want to use Drupal, using another language and framework will surely help you to write better code.
Last months I looked for a tool to shape my community on Twitter to follow interesting profiles and to increase my followers.
I had bad experiences using integration from third party (app) so I wanted this tool to be able to create my own app on Twitter without 3rd party involvment for better security and privacy.
Since I wanted real new followers and I don’t want to violate Twitter policies I looked for a tool able to select and filter users from my network, choosing only those whom are relevant to follow.
I wasn’t looking for a new, fancy SaaS website with a monthly fee to pay, and I want to handle many accounts at the same time without additional costs.
I wanted a tool able to run on my own PC and with the full access to the source code to avoid my data to be stolen and to understand its inner mechanics.
Well, that tool doesn’t exists at the time.
So I decided to write my own.
The fancy app
When I start to develop a full-featured Twitter app for desktop with a user interface running on my local machine. I started to add icons for the actions, tables to list users, buttons to do actions, a lot of checkboxes to select users and so on.
The result was a good-looking app that works. But when I tried to filter and select users using some criteria it all became clumsy.
As a programmer, I started to feel my own application as a cage.
I wasn’t allowed to search for users on my network for multiple or complex criteria. I wasn’t able to merge, diff or intersect different set of users.
Then I realized that what I was really looking for wasn’t an app but a brand new scripting language to manage social networks.
The programming language
I started to look for open source solutions able to create this new programming language for social media management using Python 3. There is a small bunch of instructions to add to this programming language but I want it to be efficient and well-designed.
Here comes in help TextX by the professor Igor Dejanović, a parser build on top of the ArpeggioPEG. Among all formal languages and parsers, Parsing Expression Language (PEG) seems to me the better for my purpose and the most modern approach to parsers.
The grammar of this new language is written on a single file and can be graphically represented using DOT language. Then TextX use the grammar to parse the language using a Meta-model where the language comes to life.
.ows language grammar
To handle the Twitter management I used the solid Tweepy by Joshua Roesslein and to query the social network SQLAlchemy and SQLite.
Scripts are launched by command line and an interactive console with history is available to manage your Twitter account using the scripting language using the Python Prompt Toolkit by Jonathan Slenders.
JournaKit Followship .ows
All these free software / open source tools among others are the construction blocks used to create this bare-bones social media managers’ tool for Twitter.
A simple scripting language to manage and expand your network of followers and friends with complex queries, running on my PC, registered with custom application on Twitter and executable on many accounts at the same time.
Its name is JournaKit Followship .ows and it’s available on Gumroad. The complete application, the source code and a comprehensive user manual are provided allowing you to master the .ows language.
This is the first application of the JournaKit suite aiming to help journalists and writers whom use the web to share their works and to discover new sources and contacts.
Comment this article or contact me privately if you want to know more about it.
Looking for error in web pages can be very boring. I’ve tried some online tools but they seems too old, unsatisfying or premium only so I go to a 3 days programming marathon and I put online a brand new tool to do the job I need.
Go to Spellcheck This! and paste the URL address of the page you want to check and get the page checked for Deutsch, US English, Español, Français and Italiano.
The tool try to understand the language of the page and then return the result highlighting in different ways typing errors, names and acronyms on paragraphs, heading tags, tables and blockquotes.
It’s very far from perfect but it speeds up the spell check job. I’ve already spotted and fixed some minor errors on Wikisource and Wikipedia on very long texts.
In the past it was difficult to get MySQL working on virtualenv without using system packages. Now you can have a real separated environment with simple steps:
This command will install a new virtualenv inside a new directory myproject created by the command itself.
Activate virtualenv:
source myproject/bin/activate
Upgrade setuptools
pip install pip --upgrade
You can now install MySQLdb, inside the package MySQL-python:
pip install MySQL-python
Now do a simple test trying to connect to an existing database:
python
import MySQLdb
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", # your host, usually localhost
user="chirale", # your username
passwd="ITSASECRET", # your password
db="chiraledb") # name of the database
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT VERSION()")
row = cursor.fetchone()
print "server version:", row[0]
cursor.close()
conn.close()
Tested on CentOS 7, Python 2.7
Tip: If you are starting to create a database doing all the dirty work alone you’ve to give SQLAlchemy a try. You can use like an ORM or a lower level as you wish.
If you have a virtualenv on Windows and you want to add MySQLdb support via mysql-python, read this before spending hours of your life to figure why it doesn’t and it will never work.
