Mad Computer Scientist

You know those little headers that say “Authored by at 10:00″? So far, I haven’t had a Drupal set up in which they were actually wanted. I googled it and the best suggestions I had come up with were to add display:none; to the info’s class in a custom CSS file. Not bad, but it seems a little clunky. Someone on StackOverflow almost had it right when they suggested making changes to the settings of a specific theme. Of course, not every theme (including the ones I have been using) have this option. It turns out, though, that the settings can be set globally by going to Administer -> Site Building -> Themes, then clicking the “Configure” tab. Simply uncheck whichever node types you want to disable the author information for under “Display post information on”.

Much cleaner.

I was having some issues with the ordinarily awesome KCacheGrind (it kept crashing, so I couldn’t do anything with it), so I decided to look for another profiling tool. I finally found and installed Webgrind (http://code.google.com/p/webgrind/) and I must say that it is excellent. It appears that, after installing, you must ensure that Xdebug spits out its profiling data with a certain naming convention, or Webgrind will fail to pick it up. This is actually kind of odd, since there is a configuration option in Webgrind which is supposed to tell it what the naming convention is going to be. I could really see Apache/MySQL/PHP/Bespin/Webgrind as being a really cool environment to set up for distributed coding. But, that is a discussion for another day.

I have been setting up a couple of Drupal sites of late. Side work. The kind of thing that doesn’t write papers or change the world, but puts a little money in my wallet. For one of these, I have been working on a fairly deep customization of one aspect of Drupal (I haven’t decided whether I will write it up or not) and, in the process, I came across this blog entry: CMS battle: Drupal vs Joomla vs Custom Programming, on a blog named Paranoid Engineering (I sympathize with the title, if nothing else). The article itself was a fairly simple comparison of Drupal and Joomla which are, almost certainly, the biggest open source content management systems.

The table of features head to head is not terribly interesting. For the most part, the two have feature parity and, where they don’t, you can extend them. The first thing I found interesting were the author’s general opinions of the two:

“After test-driving them both I’ve came to these conclusions:

• • Joomla is bloated, Drupal is minimal
  • Drupal is easy to use and intuitive, Joomla is confusing

That was more than enough for a minimalist like me.”

Oddly enough, those were my thoughts exactly when I used them. I got a chance on a contracting gig a ways back to use Joomla and I found its hierarchy of concepts to be confusing. When confronted with something confusing, there are two possibilities:

1. It is something knew, beyond my current knowledge and learning it will be an eye-opening experience that will teach me something, even if I don’t use it or don’t like it. At least, my mind will have been stretched.
2. It is garbage

Unfortunately, I felt that Joomla, by and large, fell under #2. I did not feel that I learned some grand cosmic ideas once I got past that initial confusion. I believed that someone had erected a large number of unhelpful, artificial barriers. Drupal (which I learned later), divides content into blocks, which you can assemble on pages. That is it, in a nutshell. There was a lot more classification in Joomla.

Moreover, I definitely fall in the minimalist camp. I would rather take something small and build it up into what I need than take something large and try to strip it down to what it should be. I used to be a Gentooer (and, if I could take a few weeks to set up my machine, I might very well be again; at this season of life I simply do not have the time), but I found the initial time compiling inconvenient. So, I tried Sabayon. Well, Sabayon had the desktop and essential apps compiled, which meant that I could at least work while upgrading everything. The problem was that Sabayon had a lot more on it than I wanted, so I tried to take the fluff off–and I broke the machine. Badly. I was running Gentoo again soon after. The moral of the story being that it is easier to add on than take away. So again, I would tend to agree with the author.

One commentator also remarked that they did not like Drupal because:

“What keeps surprising me about Drupal, is that they still stick to an outdated procedural programming style. PHP is moving more and more to OOP. Trying to force a programming style on a platform that’s moving in a completely different direction is a weird choice to make.”

Personally, I think this is a little harsh on Drupal. According to Wikipedia, the Drupal project began in 2001. Also, by Wikipedia, PHP 4 was released in May 2000. However, most servers are not running the latest release of a language (don’t shoot the messenger, it’s true) so writing in PHP 3-isms in late 2000 and early 2001 seems quite reasonable and, while PHP 4 had some OOP in it, I can tell you that it is second rate and actually pretty lousy. Frankly, if I had to write PHP 4, I wouldn’t use its OOP. I know this because I have deployed code to servers running PHP 4 and had to backport the PHP 5 style classes. PHP 4 is just not a good environment for OOP, PHP 5 is okay and we’ll see how PHP 6 does. Once your code is heavily procedural, fully OOPifying it would be a rather non trivial amount of work, if not a rewrite. And, of course, Joel on Software tells us not to rewrite.

The comments were probably more educational for me than the post. The commentators mentioned a few alternatives to the usual Joomla/Drupal dichotomy. The three I noticed there were:

1. Typo3
2. SilverStripe
3. Modx

Of the three, the only one I had heard of was Typo3, SilverStripe and Modx were new ones. Typo3 aims to be, in their own words, an enterprise level content management system. Modx, on the other hand, really caught my attention. It is not so much a CMS (although it has one) as it is a framework to build CMSes. The approach is interesting because with Drupal, Joomla, or Typo3 you take the base CMS and add a lot to it. You customize it. The idea of simply expediting a custom rolled solution certainly has some appeal over stack and restacking the blocks/modules/plug-ins/add-ons (or whatever the heck else they’re called). I didn’t spend much time looking at SilverStripe, but it does appear to be a very well polished CMS.

If all this sounds like a ramble, well, it is. It is a rambling exploration of a series of things I stumbled across. If anyone has any thoughts regarding the CMSes above or one that I have omitted, I’d love to hear about it/them.

In all the cool geek sites, you hear PHP put down as a matter of course. Its inferiority goes assumed by most of the audience. Every once in a while, you see someone decide to defend it, which leads to a nice old flame war, but that’s about it. The irony I find is that few of PHP’s defenders really do a good job defending the language. The extreme is this one guy, whose defense of PHP runs: “I like it. It does everything I’ve ever wanted it to do.” Not much of a defense. Leaving Turing Completeness aside, the defense says nothing. Anyone can say that about any number of languages and you could never prove them right or wrong. If PHP can do everything you ever wanted to do, then at least half a dozen other languages can (C#, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, C++). Why PHP? What you usually find with this kind of defender is that it was a language that they picked up at some point, for some reason and they do not know enough about other programming languages or even PHP itself to be able to give an adequate reason.

The charges against PHP are that it is sloppy, inconsistent, encourages laziness (and not the Larry Wall variety), and lacks some of the cooler features of other languages. Guilty as charged. All of those things are true and have been rehashed many times. As a disclaimer, let me say that I agree with this point of view. For web programming, you are better off with Python than PHP. But, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. If I were going to argue for the use of PHP, what would I say? Well, I would begin by pointing out that PHP is fast. Maybe not out of this world, I funrolled my own loops, and wrote my web framework in assembly fast, but it is fast. PHP is also very easy to deploy. If you set up a Python WSGI application or a Rails application on Phusion Passenger, there is a fair amount to set up in the web server and get running. Not unbearably so, but PHP wins as, in most cases, you copy over the source and you are good to go. There is a ton of library code available and many fine, large applications (obligatory Drupal and WordPress references here) written in PHP. There is an abundance of cheap hosting that has PHP set up by default (Python is starting to gain traction as GoDaddy has started offering Python over CGI in their deluxe Linux packages), which, in many cases is important. Sure, if you are personally developing a large Enterprise application, it seems reasonable to expect someone to be able to configure a server for it. On the other hand, if you are running a small business and just want a CMS to run your web site on, you do not need anything more than cheap, low-level hosting. In this case, the business is not the developer and does not hire the developer, but if you are writing the software and want this small business owner to use it, than there is a definite advantage here. WordPress would probably never have caught on if it were not written in PHP because it would be too much work for a lot of people to set up and too much work for most hosting services to support.

There are some notable, often-cited reasons to use PHP left out. For example, many have argued in PHP’s favor because there are many developers which means that it should be easier to fill any new positions in the case of departures (an obvious concern for open source and closed source teams alike). The problem with this argument is that, while it is true that there are a very high number of PHP developers, the problem here is that a very high percentage of them simply are not any good. They picked up a bit of PHP and HTML, but were too lazy to learn enough to be truly excellent developers. The end result is that this is more a problem than it is a solution, because there is a lot more chaff to sift through in the hiring process. It certainly is not obvious that you are better off this way than, say, Lisp. There are few Lisp coders on the market, but, as a rule, they are better coders. The very bottom of the barrel have not even heard of Lisp and, if you try to get them interested, you encounter the Blub phenomenon: they cannot comprehend what a more powerful language would even look like.