2 things for the Drupal adoption

Drupal is one of the most powerful CMSs in the world. But it’s hardly a beginner-friendly CMS.

It offers a different concept of programming compared to conventionally used languages — bringing in a number of issues that makes this CMS even harder for beginner developers to deal with.

The community is important for Drupal evolution. If skilled developers want to expand this community, these issues must be fixed. If beginner developers want to be a part of the community and be more successful, they’d better speak up about the problems that make a learning process harder than it should be.

The first issue is in the documentation: some of the functions lack description or don’t have a correct one. It’s an impactful and serious problem and it won’t be solved fast. There is a vast number of functions with extensive options and possibilities, but a lack of information in documentation basically hides them from an inexperienced coder.

One more problem is functionality. Sounds weird, but it is. There are a lot of possibilities. More than you can use. Some of the features have functionality that is significantly different from what stated in the documentation.

Let’s consider these aspects in details.

What can one say about the parameter? It’s options, and it’s an array.

The documentation says:

There’s no example of how to use it. There’s no info on what options can be applied here and how to use them. This documentation is not clear — it contains a generic text.

There you can read about the function all that you need:

What can you do to make the documentation better? In my rather humble experience of a Drupal 8 beginner (I have 6 years of experience in development, though), everyone can do the following:

Anyway, if you have an idea what a standard documentation should look like, submit your idea on drupal.org!

A lot of efforts were invested into releasing the 8th version of Drupal. Yet, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Documentation says:

But if you try to use this code you won’t see your value in the field, you’ll see a NULL there.

You can try it another way like this:

It won’t work either.

Apparently, this is the proper way of using it:

You can’t set your value in the field any other way, but the documentation says otherwise and it is downright misleading.

Also, there’s no way to change the date format.

As it can be seen from the documentation of this function which is automatically constructed from source code comments, the Drupal core is not finished. If a product is still a work in progress then devs are expected to at least mention it in the documentation — that would somewhat be fair.

It’s as easy as falling off of a log.

That`s all about functionality. You can look for other flaws yourself.

With all that being said, it’s hard to deny all the possibilities provided by the Drupal CMS to a web developer. So it’ll be delightful to see all the flaws fixed and this great tool being more beginner-friendly.
You can create issues about it on drupal.org. Once it is created, you can follow on this issue to show how it is important.

Let’s make Drupal more developer friendly.

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