or at least that's what one could think. Today's program: Drupal 4.5.2. Nice package, I especially like it because there's now also Kubrick as a theme for Drupal and because it's quite powerful while still being reasonably manageable. But every time I deal with it again after a longer break, I fall into the same pitfalls: for example, enabling translations. It's great that translations exist. But when there's not even the slightest hint on the website about what you need to do, you end up feeling pretty stupid. Ok, yes, you just have to activate the locale.module. But where on earth is that documented? In the x-th hierarchy of the administration menu. Equally annoying: a database connection for PostgreSQL is included. Unfortunately, it's only usable from PHP 4.3 onwards - older versions aren't supported, even though Drupal runs from 4.1. After I've edited everything to use the old function names, it still doesn't work: apparently a default value was missing for the uid column in the sessions table. After I set that, PHP hung when accessing the site. Ok, fine, use MySQL instead (but I don't like MySQL...). Alright, now I'm in, I also have Kubrick as the layout and German translations. Ok, part of the system in German - but there are tons of missing strings. So I know what I'll be doing again soon. Great. Just as great as the default value for the file directory, which is simply "files". Which doesn't work if you want to allow users to upload images, because then "files" and "pictures" get concatenated without a /. And no, the / can't be before "pictures", it has to be after "files". And that with Kubrick the menu in the right column obviously has to be selected as "links" when activating blocks - I probably don't need to mention that separately. And the fact that the manual is anything but up to date - sorry, but that's just ridiculous. It still talks about directory structures in places that don't even exist anymore. No, the settings aren't in sites/default/settings.php - they're in includes/conf.php.
Ugh. This is such a nice project. And the whole system is really powerful and stable. But the documentation is really a joke. Sometimes I get the feeling that people aren't documenting Drupal at all, but something else entirely.
Still, it's nice, so I won't complain too loudly. Others don't really do much better either. Still - it could be so nice if the reference to the online manual would actually help instead of confuse...