The Blog of Xangis

I love Drupal. After all, I run almost all of my websites with it.

However, it’s a HUGE PAIN IN THE ARSE if you want to do anything custom — as in anything that falls outside the list of standard modifications, modules, and themes.

I’m not sure whether it’s a case of too little documentation or too much documentation, but the fact is that there really isn’t much in the way of good plain-English explanation of how the parts go together. Either you’re a core developer on the Drupal dev team, or you’re some idiot webmaster who doesn’t know PHP from PPP, and little in-between.

I have a book on the way, Pro Drupal Development, that I hope will help, but right now it’s a big pile of frustration.

I’m trying to do something simple — just create pages that will let a user enter a few numbers and do a calculation, mainly financial calculations such as future value, NPV, IRR, etc — simple calculations with established formulas, but I’m having a pretty hard time getting from here to there. I can do it in PHP outside of Drupal easily enough, but cram it into the Drupal framework and everything gets messy.

I have a post on the Drupal forums that, at the time of this writing, doesn’t have any responses. Maybe I’ll get one, maybe I won’t.

I have to wonder if those who use Joomla or Mambo have much trouble…