Top 5 Reasons Developers Don't Use Drupal

Jeff Whatcott ponders why Drupal isn't dominating the job postings for social app PHP developers.  He guesses the main problem is lack of awareness and understanding of drupal among the greater developer community. With this line of thinking, the obvious fix would be outreach and education. Personally, I'm skeptical that the developers who choose systems other than drupal do so because of lack knowledge, or awareness. I think its something far less rational

I. Our API is Only as Powerful as the Developer's Knowledge of It -- When I developer first starts poking around the hood of drupal, they'll probably be totally unaware of how hook_menu works, what the formapi is, how our template engine overrides, etc... If they took the time to read up on all the documentation, they'd probably become a drupal convert. Unfortunately, developers are lazy, and prone to thinking anything they don't totally understand is "crap".

II. Developers Hold a Deeply Held Believe that *their* tool is the best -- Converting a Rails developer into a drupal developer is about as easy as converting a Muslim to Judaism. Ever tried to convince a Rails developer that drupal's modularity gave it a huge advantage for building complex applications that would have to grow over time? Yeah, I stopped 3 years ago too...

Oh, btw, RoR sux. lrn2theme. Drupal FTW!

III. Developers Often Don't Form Opinions From Experience -- Most developers like to sound smart. So when in doubt, they naturally look to the opinion of someone else who they think is smart. Making matters worse, developers have a tendency to think people they agree with are the smartest.

IV. Anti-PHP snobbery. The snob factor is huge. PHP's reputation among the elite opinion leaders in the development community is about as good as most people's opinion of communism. Making matters more difficult, PHP5 took care of most of their gripes, but nevertheless, they continue to quack the same anti-php song, and that hurts drupal.

V. Drupal Doesn't Speed Up Development for Developers Who Aren't Drupal Ninjas -- Learning drupal takes a lot of time. If time is short, and developers aren't familiar with the APIs, even I'd recommend against Drupal.