I just spent a day to do my Drupal theming. Drupal is not so easy to work with, but it is not difficult to get into. The good thing is, you can override everything, because that “everything” is object. It is require you must be familiar to OOP concept. Drupal is what we call the best of PHP Object Oriented Programming. Lucky me, I still remember what OOP really are, and my work with Drupal is so far so good.
In my opinion, a good developer is not a high skill programmer who can working fluently with all modern programming languages, such as Python, PHP 5 or ActionScript 3.0…, but a engineer with a good knowledge about programming, and can list out the pros and cons of (not all) modern programming models. This engineer doesn’t have to code and code throughout his working day, but has to know how to assume that what will he have if he do thing in a different way, and has the passion to check if this assumption is right or not. This engineer must know how to organize his working process, and this process should be adapt with two options: teamwork or work-alone. Drupal was created by an engineer like that, he is Dries Buytaert. The success of Dries with Drupal is a good case study for who want to learn how to do thing methodical. It is not the way Drupal works, it is the way Drupal support its developers the ability to collaborate with each other or work-alone. Bang, now you can say that Drupal is one of the top CMS of the world without no doubt.
And Drupal also is a very reason what makes me named Vietnamworks is one of the leader of our Web industry. Do not ask me why, figure it out yourself and I guarantee that you will in love with it, just like me.
Drupal is not so “OOP” actually. If you understand how it works, you will feel that it look like … Windows
Anyway, Drupal is criticized a lot for its lack of usability, so don’t be so happy
I have been in love with Drupal for a year. The problem is that the more i try to find out about it, the more foolish i am.
As known, Drupal code is easy to understand since it’s chronologically made with OOP in mind. That’s what i love. Meanwhile its community is very wide, which is the most important thing for the beginner or who just wanna get involved with it.
I should get my feet wet with Drupal again when freet time comes..:)
AFAIK VNW doesn’t use Drupal anymore.