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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Additionally, if you're doing the build/buy/etc decision for any project which is going to need a CMS, you're not competing just against "Do it ourself in Rails, which we like", you're competing with "Download WordPress and get 80% of the way there for free."

WordPress is not the world's best software, but the ecosystem is fairly compelling, and it solves a lot of customer needs very, very quickly. (An off the shelf theme for tens of dollars or custom theme for hundreds gets many projects 100% of the way there.)

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I'm actually going the other direction.

Our current implementation is a Drupal 6 site, and we are gearing up for a re-write in Rails.

For us, we find the 20% that isn't easily achievable to be a real pain point, and also that at our scale some of the design decisions in Drupal are pretty painful (20k+ users, 500k+ nodes).

Could you clarify on which design decisions prevents you from scaling to these numbers?

I'd like to know as well...the bottleneck with those numbers is likely to be the database, not Drupal, so if you switch to Rails and keep the same database, not much will change.

The DB setup in Drupal is very join heavy - on the new site many things that are joins in Drupal will be single table - many things drupal offers one-to-many on we only need one-to-one, so can avoid the join.

Plus, with the modules we're using we're more or less forced to use MySQL.

Rails site will be using Postgres.

So basically, because default Drupal's database schema is too normalized and generic you experience problems.

As for Postgresql - you are going to write new code anyway - either in Rails or patch Drupal modules to work correctly with Postgresql. So this one is definitely not a deal breaker.

I would advise also to look into option of upgrading to Drupal 7 and using its DB stuff. While it is still join-heavy by default, you have more power to manipulate schema and for example to have flat tables for your content types or store some stuff in MongoDB. And all of it with still Drupal's flexibility and mostly configuring stuff instead of writing it.

We've made the corporate decision - after many bad experiences - to purge PHP from production, for the sake of our sanity.

We are not doing this lightly. The current codebase has ~2.5 man years invested in it.

I strongly endorse this idea. The faster and more completely the development community moves away from using PHP in production, the better. I've started telling people not that PHP is bad, but that PHP is the avatar of technical debt. No matter what you personally do with PHP, the creators of the language and the other participants in the PHP ecosystem make it impossible to create a significant project in PHP without taking on ruinous amounts of technical debt - some of which takes the form of critical security problems! Python and Ruby, despite their faults, are more secure by default and have better security teams.

So in summary, I bet that purging PHP was tough, and I think you made the right choice.

From my experience technology is a big factor, but not ultimate. Ultimate factor is community around particular project. I truly believe Drupal community at this point is just right mix of following standrds and being focused on innovating in the same time. Whenever you custom code - you loose this huge leverage otherwise you could have by re-using existing UI/code/architecture (where architecture might be first and most important in the list.)

Anyway, I truly wish you luck with you project, but I would advise not to drop any particular technology just for sake of dropping it.

(I am not PHP fan, I am Drupal and Drupal community fan)

More importantly, the consumer knows that if they use WordPress they can fire their current programmers and find someone else.

Most people have heard of WordPress. Some have heard of Rails. Almost no one has heard of Django.

Rails is only like 2.5x as common as Django where I am.

e.g. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/ruby%20on%20rails.do vs http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/django.do

That is absolutely not even close to true unless you are talking about solely non-technical types, who have no reason to even consider FRAMEWORKS like Rails and Django vs CMSs like Wordpress. Instagram, Pinterest, NASA, Disqus, Mozilla, The Onion, Washington Post, NY Times, PBS, etc. all used Django heavily.

Just because YOU don't use it, doesn't mean it isn't popular. You committed a social proof. Django is far more popular in many circles than Rails. As Rails is far more popular in others.

There's a difference between big sites using a particular stack and people (thinking mainly pointy haired boss MBA types) having heard of it.

Lots of people have heard of wordpress because they have probably visited blogs with URLs that look like something.wordpress.com and they may have used it to write their own blog.

Some people will have heard of rails because it had huge hype at around ~2006 and very vocal advocates including 37s who were known through other avenues because of basecamp and because they blogged a lot.

Django on the other hand you may well not have heard of unless you have some knowledge of python or MVC frameworks (or read HN).

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