dougvann

Authored Comments

Well said.
If some one has the budget to build out the exact UX and UI they invision then they could spend that money on overriding whatever specific, Drupal native functionality needs overridden, OR they can pay to build it out from scratch on any language of their choice.
In the early days we saw Drupal adoption because it was "free." As time went on we saw Drupal adoption because Drupal was "powerful."
Those who have boldly stated the UX and UI issues of Drupal have also stated that no other CMS has solved that issue.
At the end of the day we are left with [what I see as] the clear conclusion that when an organization embarks down the Drupal road, they're going to benefit from the tremendous volume of code and functionality that some one else built AND the organization will have immense control over their content and the site functionality.
This sounds like a "WIN" to me. ;-)

Mickey,
You're so right. .NET was not the main issue. If this project would have been done in straight PHP and with the same volume of custom code it would have been just as equally difficult to make changes to the site.
My point was that "rolling your own" while it gives you some degree of freedom, also ties you down to your own sense of best practices. Without having the time tested best practices of Drupal, the NYSE projects were heading full steam ahead into a world where nearly every solution was custom and that was the BRUTAL part I was referring to.
There are those [not saying you are one] who laugh at the plug-n-play modular aspect of a high quality enterprise CMS like Drupal. Those that laugh are the same that seem NOT to understand why a project like NYSE moved over 50 sites off of .NET and they don't understand why the State of Georgia dumped Oracle, Java, and Vignette to adopt a solution built [of all things] on PHP. They assume some slick sales guy sold someone a bill of goods, when in reality Drupal [not the custom .NET solution NOR the Java, Oracle, Vignette solution] is empowering these large scale [may I call them ENTERPRISE?] users to truly be masters of their content and the pages that render them.
My message is clear. If any one is out there and considering a large scale project and you're thinking about putting a dozen .NET developers on the project, HOLD ON! Likewise if the licensing fees of Vignette look tolerable because the technology behind it sounds big and impressive and fast... HOLD ON! There's so much more to consider.

Caveat....
When Drupal is your hammer everything looks like a nail. I've seen a Drupal project fail that should not have been Drupal at all. Fortunately, I came in after the decision was made. I want to be clear that I don't think every single site on the web should be Drupal.
LOL