Drupal is cool, no doubt, but The Venture Skills blog has an article about creating a Digg like site with no programming.
The article is pretty much on point. It is quite possible to make a Digg-ish like site using an opensource CMS and a handful of plugins. Of course the article doesn’t discuss making your site scale like Digg. That requires getting some smart people like Elloitt White and Timeless and a bit of database sharding not to be confused with the embarrassing act of sharting like Sandy Lyle in Along Came Polly. I guess it justs goes to show what can be accomplished using LAMP with a bit of data layer tuning and the liberal use of gradients. Having well structured data in an RDBMS can drastically reduce your need for OO programming techniques and allow you to write more simple (and perhaps elegant) procedural code in languages like PHP. Thus allowing one to rapidly design cool sites like Digg while simultaneously reducing time to market and increasing ones bank account exponentially, Ka-Ching! Makes you wonder why you spent all that time learning Java or C++ huh?
Nice article,
When we wrote the Post on using Drupal to make a Digg clone we did so to show the power and functionality of the Drupal system and how the modular system works. The title was an in house joke as one of our marketers who was learning PHP at the time was undergoing some Drupal training.
The article is purely discussing functionality and not scalability, a proof of concept at most, it has however attracted a large group of people who want to deploy it live this is a shame because (and also our fault) they are simply imitating not enhance or doing anything new.
However while I doubt Drupal can survive the mass usage of Digg, it is used regularly on some pretty big sites on the web include the Onion and while a lot of very specific programming is required to scale to a very high level it has done well both in tests and on live sites.
Ultimately I think it is a good solution and a good basis for those who need a mid level system and we are still fans and developers of Drupal systems, their is a lot of discussion on scalability within the Drupal and wider community if your interested a couple of links for you. http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance
http://2bits.com/articles/drupal-performance-tuning-and-optimization-f or-large-web-sites.html
Interestingly one of the largest debates with Drupal at the moment is if its time to adopt a complete OO model for the entire core, one of the reasons against (apart from the fact only PHP5 supports OO style classes fully) is that its felt it can’t scale well on testing.
Hi Tim, Thanks for the comment. Adding ventureskills to the blogroll. Doing a bit of Drupal investigation too, that’s what led me to your article, very interesting stuff indeed. I agree Drupal has as an impressive and expanding group of users
http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites?page=5
If you have any linkage on the Drupal/PHP5 debate please pass it along. I think the shift away from using heavier OO languages like Java in web applications is an interesting topic. The LAMP model is giving Java a lot of competition (maybe even winning) especially due to the rise of popular social networking and user driven sites like Digg, but what’s the next evolutionary step RoR, Django/Python? Languages like Java that were designed to be OO from the ground up put a significant emphasis on encapsulating and loosely coupling objects so as to provide abstraction between the business and presentation layers of an application. If your application doesn’t have a lot of business logic much of the rational for using a language like Java goes out the door.
So with less time spent on OO design the natural shift has been toward performance and the UI. The only rub being, how efficiently can you extend and reuse the code that you have already written. Of course OO programming is not limited to OO languages, anything written in Java can be implemented in carefully crafted OO ANSI C or perhaps with PHP by making good use of PHP Design Patterns but I would be interested in knowing how much Digg and other similar sites encourage reuse and extensibility in their designs.