"Jesse", a blogger who apparently has just one article and either wants to build a reputation for a new venture or simply wants to be anonymous (hard to say which) posted a fairly long article on his site called 4 problems with Drupal.

I read this article, and I started out a little annoyed. It makes some false or at least misleading assertions. I immediately commented on one obvious one, and then as I thought about it, I felt a need to address the entirety of his arguments, because they are, in all, flawed.

This started as a comment, and it blossomed and became a full fledged blog post. I was responding to someone who, not wanting to defend people who didn't deserve it, did want to point a little to the otherside. And I'm basically in agreement with him.

I don't really have a problem with the initial email I received. I was a little frustrated because I got a bunch of them at once (and oddly, I've gotten more since I posted this) and I realized that if I didn't try to ebb that flow a dam was going to burst. But the real issue to me was his response to my brush-off.

I understand that Drupal is pretty difficult. I spend a lot of time working to make it less difficult and more flexible. Good UI is *hard* and I haven't really created a good UI for Views, merely a passable one. I respect that. But people who follow my blog know that I've been very interested in Drupal's administrative UI and trying to make it both easier to use and more flexible. Sometimes those are the same thing; sometimes they are not.

This message, with the email address removed out of courtesy, was received this morning. I left in the original he replied to as context.

You get the emails because you created the module. Are you surprised?
There's not great of documentation on how to expand your module, there's
no FAQ, or anything of the sort.

Unfortunately, that's just another thing wrong with drupal. Besides being
overly hard to learn / use, and new (non-backwards compatible) versions
every 6 months or so, there seems to be a huge lack of support for
modules.

I suppose it's an obvious symptom of lacking basic features straight out

As of today, requests for support via email (i.e, my contact form either here or on drupal.org) will be denied.

I’ve received four of them today, and I’m appalled. Normally I do what I can to help people who email me, but this is starting to snowball out of control. I’m not your technical support. There are channels for that. There’s the drupal.org support forums. There’s #drupal-support. If there are bugs or you think there are bugs, there’s the issues queue. But emailing me directly is rather rude. I’m sorry that my software is confusing, I really am. But honestly, would you rather I stop working on it entirely because I’ve run out of resources for it? And yea, usually if I’m in the IRC and you ask me there (publically) I’ll help you out.

It’s clear from Dries’ blog entry that the future of Drupal is going to lean more and more towards enhancing the User Experience. Drupal excels in functionality, but it is often lacking in terms of being able to actually accomplish the minutiae of setting up a site.

A quick look at all of the stuff I’ve contributed to Drupal since I started will suggest that I also consider the user experience very important. I am big on configurability; very little of what I’ve written has actually added new functionality. The bulk of it has simply made it easier to configure things to be the way you want. Dashboards simply make columnation easier. Views make collections easier. Nodequeue makes a specific type of categorization easier. The very fact that node queue exists and that people choose it is an indication that taxonomy, while very powerful, is lacking somewhat in User Experience.

All that aside, that isn’t what I’m here to talk about.