I have been developing for Drupal for 5 years, with a portfolio of many large scale projects. I am also the author of some popular Drupal modules.
With all that said, in my experience, Drupal offers zero TCO or ETA advantage over Django or Symfony on any medium to large project. A lot of the great things you may hear about Drupal are coming from either (a) Non-developers or (b) People who have staked their careers on Drupal.
A few reasons why Drupal cannot be taken seriously include...
Drupal is not RoR or Django, so don't compare apples and oranges. First, a Drupal view is not equivalent to ORM. A Drupal view is on a higher level. It takes drupal content, lets you slice, dice and display it. Maybe you meant CCk. As to not using PHP as a templating language, you can always use the smarty engine if you want, but then you are just adding another layer of stuff that could break or cause security issues.
Now, Drupal is not perfect, but what it does it does well.
The problem is that Drupal alone does almost nothing unless you add on a large number of low quality, poorly documented modules which often are incompatible with each other.
You can not get anything worthwhile done without raising a sweat.
-- The First Law Of Thermodynamics
Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously (Score:5, Informative)
I have been developing for Drupal for 5 years, with a portfolio of many large scale projects. I am also the author of some popular Drupal modules.
With all that said, in my experience, Drupal offers zero TCO or ETA advantage over Django or Symfony on any medium to large project. A lot of the great things you may hear about Drupal are coming from either (a) Non-developers or (b) People who have staked their careers on Drupal.
A few reasons why Drupal cannot be taken seriously include...
1) Lack of unified model
This comment is bunk (Score:1)
Drupal is not RoR or Django, so don't compare apples and oranges. First, a Drupal view is not equivalent to ORM. A Drupal view is on a higher level. It takes drupal content, lets you slice, dice and display it. Maybe you meant CCk. As to not using PHP as a templating language, you can always use the smarty engine if you want, but then you are just adding another layer of stuff that could break or cause security issues.
Now, Drupal is not perfect, but what it does it does well.
Re: (Score:0)
The problem is that Drupal alone does almost nothing unless you add on a large number of low quality, poorly documented modules which often are incompatible with each other.