You can define custom content types with custom fields using the CCK plugin –
BUT! you need a second plugin (“contemplate“) to define how they display, and that’s not obvious.
Even with that plugin, there are aspects of article display you still can’t change. I call this the “System wants to insert random crap effect“. It’s prevalent in most poorly thought-out systems.
Also, default URLs are yucky– if I’ve got a content-type called “projects”, entries should have urls of the form “/project/name”, like every other CMS, not “/node/112″. Sure, the latter is easier for the developers to implement… but really, who made that decision?
I still don’t understand why Drupal is so popular when many other systems “just get it” right out of the box.
[update] Here’s some code that Drupal produced today:
<div class="field field-type-text field-field-people">
<h3 class="field-label">People:</h3>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item"><?php print $field_people[0]['view'] ?></div>
</div></div>
What?!
I’m hoping the thousands of tiny unpolished spots on Drupal will disappear as I try to catalog them.
- The HTML thrown up for “blocks” smells oddly like 1999:
<div class="block block-block" id=block-block-1">
- The Biblio module’s Install file has this mature warning:
NOTE: THIS FILE IS NOTE[sic] UP TO DATE!! (what do you want for nothing 
?)
- Because the Drupal.org search feature connected with the navigation, I’m never sure if I’m searching the forum I’m in or the whole site. So I usually start searching for Drupal answers with Google, but Google’s index of drupal.org is much worse than Drupal’s index
- One of Drupal’s favorite pastimes is wrapping ALL YOUR STUFF in divs and spans. Which means a lot of tracking things down and hacking at the php source. Contrast to the sparkling clean output Textpattern, where you can cleanly see and edit every single query or wrap in the admin section (which is beautifully mediated by a tag-style interface that saves us from having to actually write the SELECT statements).
- There is a block element (block as in Drupal block, not DOM block) that I’m trying to track down. Its configuration page offers no clues as to its location within the management interface.
