I’ve built upwards of a dozen sites using Xaraya and a few using Drupal.
Most of my experience with Drupal came a couple years ago, but I’ve been messing with it a bit lately to see where things stand with its development. I’m finding that Drupal’s theming and user management are much improved from a couple years ago and are now just about on par with Xaraya.
I still have a slight preference for Xaraya, in part because it does some things in its core for which Drupal requires add-ons. Also, Xaraya has been doing those particular things — flexible template-based theming and granular user privileges — for a little longer. That’s not a knock on Drupal, which strikes me as a very good CMS these days. I just tend to favor something that’s built from the ground up to do what I want.
Though theming in Drupal is — with the advent of CCK and contemplate — apparently just as flexible as Xaraya’s blocklayout system, I find Xaraya’s XML template code more readable than the PHP in Drupal’s templates. Since I spend a lot of time looking at code, the readability of templates can impact how easy it is to do my job, and the likelihood of mistakes. Also, the less I have to type, the better.
Just to provide a very basic example, I find this…
#$title#
…nicer to look at than this…
<?php print($title); ?>
The advantage becomes more significant when templates are complicated and contain conditional logic, loops, etc.
Here’s a slightly longer comparison, though still pretty simple:
<xar:if condition="count($this) gt 5">
<p>
<a href="#$the_url#">#$this[0]#</a>
</p>
</xar:if>
vs.
<?php if (count($this) > 5) { ?>
<p>
<a href="<?php $the_url; ?>"><? echo $this[0]; ?></a>
</p>
<?php }; ?>
For me the XML/HTML mix is easier on the eyes than the PHP/HTML mix, especially since the former has less intermingling of angle brackets. Note that in the Xaraya example, PHP functions can be used inside the condition statement. Xaraya uses two-letter comparison operators instead of the normal PHP operators.
See also this related post.
More Xaraya blocklayout syntax examples at www.xaraya.com.
This thread might be a good read for developers interested in finding out more about changes to the blocklayout compiler in Xaraya 2.0. Much of what is described in the thread is over my head. Release of Xaraya 2.0 is still a ways off as of this writing.
