Drupal and OpenAtrium

For the last few weeks, I've been researching online collaboration platforms: Drupal and Open Atrium.

I do not understand why people want to work with those. Bending my head around dozens of different modules is a crime. For drupal, you need to understand Views and CCK (the content creation kit). Clicking something together sounds nice, but the whole thing is impossible to put into version control.

Off course, there is another module that takes care of that: features. And features allow you even to install a module into OpenAtrium. Now, not so fast. You also need to understand spaces, strongarm and half a dozen other modules.

Each of these modules sounds great, but comes with another complicated configuration screen with dozens of options - each of which may or may not be the one that you need. Documentation is scattered, bugs are common.

Now, I can follow someone's tutorial with a few dozen steps. But actually creating something new myself? Sadly, after three weeks, I still deem it impossible.

After almost three weeks, I still have not build my own custom content types for an Open Atrium site. It's just too damn hard. It might work for the people who bulit it (developmentseed), but I think the complexity of understanding someone else's framework is too high.

Don't even get me started on PHP. I am praying to be able to change to python/django.