Talk:Drupal/Archives/2010/September

Slate article and performance/scalability in Criticisms

I think the wording introducing the Slate article is slighttly misleading. It implies that the recovery.gov Drupal site had to be rebuilt due to deficiencies in the software, at a cost of $18m. From what I've read the case was that Drupal was chosen for phase 1 of the project (due to Drupal's rapid prototyping, ie quick to get something built initially), and a different tool was chosen for phase 2 of the project. The phrasing in the article isn't supported by the Slate reference imho.

could you document and correct this? --Replysixty (talk) 18:44, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

+1 that the Slate reference to recovery.gov should be deleted. The Slate article's credibility falls due to its use of the Post_Hoc,_Ergo_Propter_Hoc logical fallacy. The relevant documentation comes from the Section 2.3.3 of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board's RFP for the new recovery.gov site, Dated 2009-06-15. This section described the required construction of a Business Intelligence back-end that performed ETL on data from many different government repositories; the new recovery.gov merely acts as a front-end display for the back-end data. The author of the Slate article did not do his homework; anyone who bid on this RFP (including my company, Acquia) would know that the cost of satisfying section 2.3.3 requirements far outweighed the cost of implementing the web front-end display of the data. While Drupal could have been used to do this display, the winner of the RFP was more comfortable with ASP.NET, and so used it to provide the front-end (the latter data arising from personal conversations with the winning bidder). Sections 2.5.3, 2.5.6, and many other sections specified added requirements that caused the final pricetag to reach the $18M mark - and which had nothing to do with Drupal per-se. I'm going to take the action to delete that reference for now; if others disagree, please discuss here.--Batsonjay (talk) 21:12, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Also again imo the whole performance/scalability criticism section as it is should just be removed as there is no supporting reference. The only reference which even discusses Drupal's performance is a personal blog which concludes that 'Although I can't say Drupal is fast, I think it's fast enough.' All the other references are ways of improving performance. There are plenty of examples around of high-performance sites running Drupal, though it's not a trivial task (and wouldn't be for any CMS). Eg http://developmentseed.org/blog/2008/oct/23/improving-drupals-performance-boost-module-uns-millennium-campaign —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.196.57.249 (talk) 13:18, 31 March 2010 (UTC)