The Necessary Death of Open Source CMS Fanboyz

It seems everything is getting polarized these days and the open source CMS arena is not much different. "Dear Drupal: Season's Greetings. Love, Smashing Wordpress" communicated a message that should be important between open source projects ("Hey! We're on the same side!") but didn't get as much traction as it probably should have. When we're in our code caves we have a tendency to go with what we know. The comfort zone begins to define our solutions when the inception of any true Open Source CMS was found outside a comfort zone. This is necessary frrom an economic standpoint; people are getting paid to build and maintain internet and intranet sites with these projects - and who signs the check should have the control.

As someone who has worked with Drupal since 2003, I've reached stage 4 with it: Playfulness. Sure, I'm not a well known Drupaler, but I've been around and I know my way around the back end better than most. I can toss Drupal on shared servers, servers and now the cloud. There's a wealth of information available from the Drupal community regarding doing everything with it, and should I have more money than time I can always head to a Drupal Camp somewhere. Frankly, there's little Drupal can't do. I even run it on my local machine for handling some documents - something I pioneered on an intranet back with Drupal 5 for a company in Trinidad and Tobago.

But that doesn't mean it is always the best choice. Because I can do something with Drupal doesn't necessarily mean that I should do it with Drupal. In some ways, Drupal is a liability to itself - as any other project is.

A few recent posts in the blogosphere highlight this; it's no secret I've been getting my Wordpress knowledge up to speed (OpenDepth.com will be running Wordpress within the next few months) and so I've been following the Wordpress community as well as the Drupal community. The post, "Wordpress Has Left The Building", has caused quite a stir in the Wordpress community. The best response to it from within the Wordpress community seems to have been, "Missing The Point of Wordpress Entirely". And this morning I read something of worth from within the Drupal community regarding the same post: "A Cautionary Tale for the Drupal Community."

The hard reality is that if you're working with just one CMS, you're limiting your solutions. Sure, as I wrote above, I can do just about anything with Drupal. With enough time, energy and money I can do anything that needs to be done - but we're not in an economy where everyone has gobs of money to throw at something. In the same economy, there is increasing need for shorter development times (time to market) and decreased recurring costs. Make no mistake, there is an economy around these open source projects that, if failed, hurts the project itself.

As an example: Drupal can do a simple blog presence quite easily, but over a period of time there is a history of breaking backward compatibility that effectively translates to planned obsolesence to users. A person or small company doesn't have as much to spend as the larger companies and so the updates deemed necessary for Drupal may not be those deemed necessary by the user. Wordpress wins here, at least at the time of this writing, though it has its own flaws. Conversely, if it's a mega-site with all manner of functionality required, Drupal is typically the better choice - again, at least at the time of this writing. I'm also looking into Node.js)

The needs of the market are dynamic. The open source projects tend to accomodate that as best they can in their plans, but they cannot and should not be used as definitions for what the client needs - that flies in the face of what open source truly is great at: Options. Solution providers, such as myself, have to look at the options and advise the client accordingly as well as develop and maintain the sites. That means not being a fanboy of any particular technology. We have to be familiar with as many as we can. They're just tools, and as attractive as it is to use a sledgehammer for everything it's not always the right tool.

Specialization, after all, is for insects.