Drupal - How did I forget

2005 Jan 28 at 23:06 » Tagged as :

While I was going through Hotscripts trying to track down that elusive perfect CMS, the name drupal completely slipped my mind.

Drupal is a name that is often proposed along with PHPNuke and Mambo when the question 'can you recommend a good CMS?' pops up in mailing lists and forums. I was not too keen on phpnuke because it has had a few security problems in the past, but decided to download and give drupal a go.

The installation document wasn't very encouraging, it does not work with PHP 5 but I decided to give it a try anyway, only to find dozens of error messages such as:

strict warning: var: Deprecated. Please use the public/private/protected modifiers in /var/www/html/drupal/themes/engines/xtemplate/xtemplate.inc on line 42. appear all over the page.

Apparently the drupal engine is overriding the php.ini log setting and displaying the errors and warnings in the browser instead of writing it to the apache log file as it should. The configuration change is not in the .htaccess file (which is rather lengthy) but cleverly hidden somewhere else.

The fact that drupal uses Xtemplates isn't very good news either. PHP does not need templating engines.

Had this been any other Content Management System, I would end my study here, but many people whose opinions I have come to respect think very highly of drupal, So I am going to give it another chance, even if it means I have to switch back to php 4.