LC Server style survey: co-mingle code w/HTML?

[Richard Gaskin]

Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami wrote:

 > FWIW Drupal is not free!

Drupal is absolutely free:

https://www.drupal.org/about/licensing


 > horror story, no in-house expertise, smart but "secretary" level user,
 > had to hire drupal support, 3rd party module dependencies, developers
 > disappear, core engine transitions to new versions, modules
 > incompatible. Drupal support company bids astronomical $'s to get a
 > module working the latest version of Drupal…before you know it your
 > annual maintenance $ fee start climbing into numbers we can't possibly
 > sustain. we finally had to exit Drupal.

Don't use what you don't need.  But don't call free software "not free!" 
when it in fact is.  They're among the strongest GPL advocates in the 
CMS world, and beyond "free as in freedom" Drupal is available at no cost.

As with Wordpress, Joomla, MySQL, LiveCode Community Edition, or any 
other free software, you can choose to hire developers and you can 
choose to pay for premium add-ons.  Those are your choices, not Drupal's.

WordPress is an excellent choice when you're making fairly common types 
of sites, brochureware, blogs, etc.  You can extend it beyond that, but 
at a certain point you're writing custom code.

Drupal's building blocks approach means a greater distance before you're 
writing custom code, and working with a leaner core when you are.

Drupal tends to be popular among major universities, government 
agencies, and large organizations with deeper needs than most. 
Developers expert in Drupal tend to also have a depth of experience in 
managing larger-scope projects with more complex requirements. It's not 
surprising to find the average Drupal consulting rate reflects that depth.

But if your site doesn't need to take advantage of the things Drupal 
does especially well I wouldn't recommend it, any more than I'd 
recommend using LiveCode for a custom app when a spreadsheet will do.

My advice for most people is: choose WordPress unless you have a 
specific reason not to.

And if you have a specific reason not to, consider Drupal among your 
options.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com