Why are people building social apps in PHP without Drupal?
Check out this chart of job trends in the number of job postings that mention the words “social” and “php” or “social” and “Drupal”. It comes from Indeed.com.
social php, social drupal Job Trends social php jobs - social drupal jobs
There are currently 816 social app building jobs mentioning PHP skills and only 89 mentioning Drupal skills. As you page through the actual job postings (see links below the chart), you see evidence of lots of social publishing application development going on out there, but a lot of it appears to be heading down a path of custom PHP development.
So what’s up with this? Drupal is the killer social publishing system. It’s built on PHP. It saves a ton of time over building a custom system from scratch. Why are so many people who are friendly to LAMP and PHP in particular decide to reinventing the wheel? Which of the following do you think it is?
Without real market research, it’s anybody’s guess. My personal guess is that # 1 and #2 are the primary reasons. We have a lot of work to get the word about Drupal as a social publishing system. If they think Drupal is just another CMS, why would they consider it for a social publishing project or any web site that includes social aspects? It’s not obvious.
The space between the blue Drupal line and the orange PHP line represents untapped potential for the Drupals professionals everywhere.
Here’s a version of the chart that includes additional technologies for comparison.
social php, social drupal, social joomla, social rails, social jsp Job Trends social php jobs - social drupal jobs - social joomla jobs - social rails jobs - social jsp jobs
The good news is that PHP dominates the market for web dev jobs that mention the word "social" both absolutely and in terms of . But Rails and JSP are definitely strong and growing. Joomla is… not so much.
I think people are building social apps without drupal because its not the only framework out there, nor isit anywhere worthy of being crowned ‘social app creator’ as social apps have been there way before drupal. Also drupal has no modular support does it? Nor does it follow any particular design pattern.
Hi Josh.
Drupal has been around since 2001, so I think it’s grown up together with social applications. See the Wikipedia entry for history.
Drupal has over 1800 contributed modules
Here’s a thread about Drupal and design patterns.
Hope that helps.
While Drupal is a very good for social communities, there are still many who are reluctant to move away from what they already know best whether it is Ruby or building from the ground up.
I think the issue really comes down to:
Marketing and buzzwords
PHP has been around for a long time, and there are a lot of clients that have heard of PHP/MySQL/LAMP, etc. They know that they need someone adept in one or more of these buzzwords to build their widget, and in order to run the widget on their own server. They may not know why, but they know that this is the technology that should be used.
Drupal, on the other hand, doesn't have the same kind of 'brand name recognition' that PHP or Rails have, nor should it necessarily. Drupal has not been 'marketed' as a development platform. The goals are different than, say, that of Rails or CakePHP. Personally, I think that using Drupal vice one of these other frameworks gives a developer a greater edge when developing a widget for a client. As a simple example, in your standard PHP (or Ruby or JSP) framework, I may have some plugin/module/etc. that allows for a login/authentication box. This code may have some basic functionality that (on the surface) seems to do what's needed, but what happens when you need to consider granular permissions. Oh right, I have to write that functionality. Create a table, relate it to users, determine how I'm going to enforce them, etc...
Yes, you can write a blog using Rails in 20 minutes, but will it have all the functionality of the Drupal 'blog' module? 'blog api'? No way.
So, let's consider the other 'marketing' issue that I see:
Perceived value of performance over development costs
I recall a discussion I had with a potential client that wanted everything done with PHP. He was technical enough to get something like Drupal installed, but didn't really know where to go from there. He had some social network application built for him using PHP (no framework), and it was (mostly) fast. The DB tables were simple, the PHP code was a mess, but the application was responsive. It was a nightmare to change anything, but that wasn't his concern.
This particular person was so hung up by the fact that a simple PHP application with a simple database could outperform Drupal on the same hardware that he wasn't open to any suggestion. The problem here, of course, is code maintainability, and time-to-market. Any feature he wanted on the PHP site had to be hacked into the application, since there was no solid framework to build from. Everything was done from scratch. Using yet-another-example, if you had to add blog functionality (and I actually did in this case) to this PHP application, you have to consider everything about the blog posting. Comments (add/delete/edit), XSS issues, categorization, embedding images, etc. It becomes a huge mess!
So, this is site performance versus time to build. Drupal can be optimized, and in the right hands and hardware, will perform just fine. Look at some of the huge Drupal-based sites out there... SonyBMG, WB Music, etc.
To me, I'd rather spend the time building the unique aspects of a client's site rather than building (and debugging) basic functionality that you get from just Drupal core. Add in the multitude of modules, and it's a no-brainer.
No PHP developer in their right mind (obviously the guy in my example above was not one of these) would build a piece of software, be it web-based or standalone, without using a framework. If we can get more people to look at Drupal as the CMS Framework that it is (via marketing), you will see an increase in adoption.
I'm not saying that this is a goal of the Drupal community, or even a necessity for it to continue to flourish, just that this would be one way to gain visibility from the potential developers out there. Everything you do with an application is a piece of content, whether it's a blog post, or an advertisement. You can't maintain building sites without a good framework. Thus, why not use a framework that is based around the management of content?
Anyhow, I guess that's my $0.02 (or is it $0.05?)
Well,
I think the stats are simply not really an answer or an underlining of your question. Many people may build social apps with drupal, but they do it themselves. They dont have to hire specialists.
For example, I did it myself and built a community site that has the power to connect international volunteers from Germany all over the world - and its fantastic! We are growing steadily and will set up our first Brother/sister (multisite) in some weeks. Drupal is the ideal solution for us. No need to hire a specialist (I think i will become one myself eventually)
I think Drupal does _not_ have a problem those days. A top reputation and very wonderful community.
I know people choose proprietary software because they think you cant buy support for free OpenSource software. But with all those commercial Drupal companies coming up - I am sure that will change!
Drupal can feel daunting, mainly due to lack of documentation but.. it can be done and it really pays off. We created WikiSAP , the web2.0 community for SAP Italia, using a combination of standard modules and hooks magic. Here is a list of steps and modules for anyone interested in doing something similar: Developing Social Networking Applications with Drupal
Ciao!
Post new comment