January 07, 2008

Donate a penny for RedState! (needs $25,000 to move from Drupal to Django)

Our friends at RedState have issued an urgent plea [1] for $25,000 so they can upgrade their site from Drupal to Django. In the spirit of helpfulness, I urge everyone reading this to donate a penny if PayPal allows it. But, only if the transactions costs exceed the amount you donate.

In the plea, Erick Erickson implies some sort of liberal conspiracy that's prevented them from getting help or something; at least one person calls him on it in comments, and Kos says he offered to conduct a "technology swap" when they had previously used the Scoop system:

...they could have all of our improvements if their developer helped with some patches and whanot. I saw this as a way to spread out the costs of improving the platform amongst various sites.

But that doesn't fit their narrative of being "censored" by those crazy liberals.

So in other words, as ludicrous as their charge was -- that they were being censored because no liberals offered to help them -- IT'S NOT EVEN TRUE!

(Other "liberals" weigh in here and here). I'll also add that Drupal is an open source system, and it has a very active user community. In the Drupal forums, no one knows you're a dog, a liberal, or a GOP hack. If they needed help, there was nothing preventing them from asking questions in those forums, and I don't think they'd find too many people who'd turn down money as long as it was coming from at least a semi-reputable source.

Furthermore, Drupal is written in PHP, a very widely used language. And, it's infinitely extensible. It's very easy to completely change everything Drupal looks and acts like simply by writing add-on modules and themes. And, while it would be almost never needed, the core code can be modified at will since it's open source. Any server issues can be handled as discussed at the RedState thread, and Erickson admits that that wasn't even the issue. While Drupal isn't by any stretch of the imagination as well-designed (in an object-oriented fashion) as other APIs (such as as some of the Java APIs), much of that can be mitigated by writing your add-on code in an OO fashion. (If you're reading this as an individual post, some of the sites to the left are Drupal together with custom modules I developed.)

In other words, there's no reason I can see for them to switch from Drupal. While Python is an attractive language, and Yahoo has used it for years, and Django may be less kludgy than Drupal, switching over rather than simply writing a few add-on modules doesn't seem all that necessary.

But, don't let that stop you from sending a penny, just as long as it costs them money.

[1] redstate.com/stories/miscellanea/redstate_has_a_real_need_for_your_help

Posted to Bloggage at January 7, 2008 04:59 PM