I’m disappointed in Drupal. It looked like they were doing great things with the 7.0 upgrade, and I was looking forward to it. I have 7 different sites running Drupal 6 right now. As soon as 7 was release I upgraded this site to it. That process was not as seamless as I would have hoped.

for the 8 months prior to 7.0, it seemed like every plugin author has added a compatibility pledge to their listing, saying that they’d have a working version on the day 7.0 was released. This made me even more eager to jump in. Unfortunately not everyone was onboard.

Prior to the upgrade there was no easy way to test whether your plugin has a 7.0 compatible version available. I could have visited the nodes for ever one of my plugins, but there is no easy way to find links to those pages, even with the module installed. So would have had to go to the drupal site and do a search for every one of the 20 or so modules. And the names are fairly generic, so sometimes it’s hard to find the right plugin, or nodes discussing the plugin flood the results and you have to spend a while digging through to find the right node.

So I just went for it and upgraded, and what a mess it was. half my plugins broke, so I had to install alpha or beta versions of those. If they were available, many times there wasn’t even that. So, I lost a lot of functionality including core things like MetaWeblog API support. For months I’d check on the nodes for those modules, hoping for an update. Few came.

I have a lot of time and knowledge invested in Drupal, but things were handled so poorly that I’ve given up. Usability even went downhill in 7.0, with some setting taking me months to find. This site is now running wordpress.

What a difference! Whereas the Drupal experience is clunky, disorganized and rough, WordPress is a joy to use and install. the UI polish is an order of magnitude greater, and really makes it feel like the developers care about your experience. Plugins actually have ratings, so you can compare them easily. Installation is trivial, and the number of classy professional themes available is staggering.

In short, I’m pissed that I waited so long.

I’m building a system whereby each practitioner can customize their intake form. I’ll provide a wide range of sections that can be added/removed and re-ordered. This is obviously a bit of a challenge. I still haven’t figured out how I’ll handle validation, I’ll probably have to write something custom.

Today was a big push in that direction. I build a nice UI with jQuery drag and drop to re-order the modules. I still have to build the adding modules part, and saving the new order to the DB. I’ve laid the groundwork there though, by changing the model relationships. Initially Users had :has_and_belongs_to_many relationships with FormSections. But that didn’t let me save the order in which the FormSections were saved. So I fleshed out the FormSectionsUsers model to be fully fledged with id and order columns, and some indices. Then I changed the relationshop to :has_many, :through.

One thing that’s so easy to miss in the Guide is that you need :has_many definitions for both the target of the association, and for the association model itself. Don’t forget the asterisked lines below (from the Association Guide):

class Physician
***has_many :appointments***
has_many :patients, :through => :appointments
end

class Appointment
belongs_to :physician
belongs_to :patient
end

class Patient
***has_many :appointments***
has_many :physicians, :through => :appointments
end