The typo attitude.

Typo comes with a big (quite polite, actually) red warning sign telling you to keep out, if you are not willing to learn. They tell you its going to be hard, and tough, and above all, that there is a big chance you don’t need TYPO3 at all.> Do you really need TYPO3? That is also a question you have to answer as fast as possible. Lets say you want to go from your home to the supermarket. For this purpose you would be really frustrated if someone told you to fly down there in a big jumbojet, right? (…unless you live in Australia) You would have to spend a lot of time learning to fly it. And you would be frustrated and unable to see the point. Because you would need only a bicycle to get there! Its the same with TYPO3. Many websites really don’t need a CMS like TYPO3. But some sites do! The most important thing you can do to not waste your time here is to figure out if TYPO3 is what you need - or if it’s too much.

I miss this fairness and self-knowledge in Drupal. A huge amount of our users might be better off with movable type, or another, more focused CMS, yet we present ourselves as the solution to every-ones problems.

I think that we, the Drupal developers, should be fair to ourselves and to our audience. And just tell them clearer and more often, that they need a bicycle. And not Drupal. We should recognise that Drupal is not for everyone, and that it probably will never be. No installation system or usability team is going to change that.

It is the power and the flexibility that cause the complexity. That is a choice that Dries made long ago, and it is a good choice.

The result is that we have a fabulous system, but one that is just not usable for personal-blogging-from-the-box. Or for a simple three paged brochure. We must recognise that this is not something bad, but just the way it is. And therefore we must be fair about it, and tell more clearly that Drupal is not for everyone. Drupal: Gnothi seauton