Portland (Oregon)

Cross posted from the ubercart forum, where I am not getting a response

So I'm currently building a drupal store framework along with a simple theme to enable me to create future ubercart stores with greater ease. I'm working (and have largely completed) building a generic theme that shouldn't require much further work to complete. However I've run into a hiccup. I've read of it in a few places online, and the solution is generally "I just said screw it , and it reinstalled, so all was good"

I tried posting an event, a "Drupal Themes" class we are offering at Portland Community College, and got "Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted." I posted an event a month or so ago about our other Drupal class, and had no problems.

What did I do wrong, and what do I need to do to be able to post this event? Suggestions???

thanks,
John

Hello,

Well, after many months of working in my free time (what little I've had lately) I finally converted my custom php CMS over to Drupal. Although not totally finished (as personal projects never are) I thought I'd share with the local Portland Drupal Group my progress. The main motivation for the website was to highlight my career and personal interests (like most personal websites no?).

Attention Drupalists of the Pacific Northwest and beyond! We know you have brilliant ideas, in-depth knowledge, wonderful experiences, and tried and true lessons you would like to share with the Drupal community. This is your chance! Today we are inviting you to submit your session proposals.

Submit your Proposal Here Before August 6th! - http://pnwdrupalsummit.org

Something troubles me and I'm seeking other opinions. Some of you likely have heard about a Portland-based CMS called concrete5. I did a lot of due-diligence before deciding to use Drupal myself, but regardless of that decision my job requires that I be aware of and agnostic about some other good CMS too. c5 being local made them doubly interesting. As a result I looked at c5 a couple of times, reading reviews, talking to their people, watching videos, etc. The short version is, c5 started in 03 as a proprietary CMS and moved to FOSS in 08. Fans of c5 often call it a very nice, easy-to-use little CMS good for small/simple sites, with limited add-ons (modules), about half of which you have to pay for (similar to Joomla).

My concern stems from the conversations I've had with their people and the public statements they make on email lists and on their website. Their commentary is framed in unsubstantiated and inaccurate "Drupal and Joomla suck" language, more than in "this is what makes us great" language. In general, the more someone talks down a competitor, the more threatened by that competitor you know they are. However, as I understand it, it's generally considered really bad form to badmouth other FOSS projects, particularly at the organizational level, and it is certainly bad form to negatively misrepresent them.

For an example, read concrete5's About page and you get:

"Systems like Drupal and Joomla were designed by and for developers. Building and maintaining a site in Drupal or Joomla is pretty complex and intimidating for someone who can't program computers. Imagine having to call a consultant every time you wanted to write a new Word document. How useful is that to your business?"

Now we can all see some truth in this as Drupal has been harder to learn than many and UX has been an issue, but even taking this into account, I feel that at best this is misleading, possibly just uninformed, at worst it is blatant dishonesty. I'm wondering if I'm just being too literal or something, but let me explain how it appears to me. All CMS are designed for end-users, not developers, but c5 make it sound as if their rivals wrote CMS for use by only programmers, which is illogical. Being designed to make it easy for programmers to extend and having mediocre UX is very different from being designed for programmers. They make it sound like only coders are able to use Drupal and Joomla, which again is a falsehood as both have many site-creators with no coding skills. I myself was introduced to Drupal by my wife, a designer, and she was introduced to it by another designer. Yes, to fully get Drupal's power you need some code, and theming involves some PHP, but my understanding is that C5 shares this limitation. The 2nd last line seems diabolical, implying that only a coder can change Drupal and Joomla content, i.e. that they are not CMS at all. They then go on to have a similar go at Wordpress.

So, am I overreacting? To put it in some perspective, this all came to the forefront for me after even worse comments came up during a conversation on the PDXPHP list, where c5's CEO, Franz, said things like, "it's just as powerful as both (Drupal and Joomla)," which to me it clearly is not, given that they have 157 add-ons (modules), a tiny fraction of what Drupal and Joomla have. In a subsequent email, he also said the following, "Sure, there's over 3000 add-ons in Drupal's marketplace but many of them straight up don't work, and the majority will have compatibility issues if you have more than one installed. Their add-ons are intended to be used by site developers, not site owners, so you're taking a gamble any time you see something you'd like installed." The only shred of truth I see in that is that there are indeed many modules that don't work and I definitely think we need more quality control there, but even then he makes it sound like a much bigger issue than it is. Aside from that it seems like a collection of outrageous falsehoods to me.

I'd really like to hear some of your thoughts on this.