My One Year Drupalversary, My New Site, and Why Drupal Doesn’t Suck

Today marks my one year anniversary as a registered member on drupal.org. To mark such an august occasion :0) I’m here to debut my new blog, David (in words).

Now for some history. A couple of years ago after watching a movie, I surfed around the web to find out more about the movie and the actors. One of the sites I came to was powered by Postnuke. I liked what I saw and decided that I’d use Postnuke on my own site. As such, my first CMS powered website was up. Now, Postnuke worked for me… mostly. I had some struggles with things (like modules) but I really liked the design. At that time, I did look at other CMSs, including Drupal. I believe Drupal was on 4.1, the website was a pale red color and very… flat. And all these foreign words like “node” and “taxonomy” were being bantered around like I was supposed to know what they were talking about. So I skipped over Drupal. As time went on, my Postnuke site just wasn’t a fit for me anymore. Plus, the module system kept failing on me for some reason. So I went to look for another cms.

I decided to go the blog route, and played with Wordpress 1.2x (I believe.) It was nice. I looked at Xoops (which I like) and Xaraya (seemed bloated… and I couldn’t (didn’t want to) figure how ‘hooks’ worked.) So back to opensourcecms.com I went and rediscovered Drupal. This was about a year ago, and I believe 4.5 was just coming out. The new theme Bluebeach was put up for the site, and Drupal actually looked decent. (Packaging counts.) So I downloaded it, played around with it, and actually liked it. Sure, it took some getting used to, but once you realized node was just a piece of content, a vocabulary was just a section and a term was just a category, things began to fall into place.

Not everything was rosy, of course. I gave up on drupal a couple of times. One time was because the mail function just up and died on me. I’m pretty sure it was because of a non-core module, but it was annoying. And I thought that Drupal would be overkill for a blog, but with the added functionality (being able to scale up later) it actually made sense.

I don’t want to sound like a dupal cheerleader. It’s not perfect. No CMS is. If they were, there’d be no need for bug trackers (or issue trackers). And there would be an absolutely perfect CMS for everyone who wants one. But the world doesn’t work like that. Drupal meets my needs, and apparently the needs of a lot of other people.

Why Drupal Doesn’t Suck
Every tried to use a Swiss Army Knife? First of all, they come in different sizes with different tools. But ever tried to use it for a task? Usually, the knife blade is too small to cut with, the scissors aren’t long enough, the corkscrew isn’t strong enough, and somehow you managed to lose the toothpick. The knife is a multi-purpose tool; and with most multipurpose tools, it can do a lot of things, but it can’t do anything well.

Content Management Systems are the web equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife. You have a news/blog system, a forum system, a photogallery, a project management system, etc, and you want them to all work together. So you get a CMS that pulls the different parts together and makes them play well with one another. However, they don’t always work all that well together, and the more you add on, the larger your “knife” becomes.

Let’s take Postnuke for an example. The first thing you notice is the news system. That module is part of the core. (And it works well.) Then, in the same package, you have the FAQ module, and the Review module, and the Weblink module (among others). Each one has a different functionality. Now if you want a forum and photogallery, you have to install modules for those. See how your knife is growing? And what about content management beyond the news? Pagesetter is what you may be downloading. Your knife is getting pretty heavy now, but nothing really works well together. If you write a review, it’s just a review. It can’t go into the news. A forum item is just a forum item. That’s it. (Pagesetter can help with this, but it’s a separate module from the core.)

Now you have Drupal. Each piece of content in Drupal is a node. If I write a node called “My Pet Rock” it can be a story, but it can also be a FAQ item if I wanted a FAQ on my favorite things. But it’s still a node. A forum topic is still a node, and can be treated as such. An image (from the optional image.module) is a node. And all you need to do is change the settings on the vocabulary settings page. (Yes, it’s a bit more complicated than I’m making it; I still have a test site where I try different things out before I do them on my live site.) Yet you can make things as simple as you want, or as complicated as you need, but your content is still a node. By using the book.module and/or menus and you’ve got your FAQ, Best-of, Favorite, Review, whatever.

(I don’t know if this simplicity was planned from the beginning, or just happened out of sheer luck, but it’s nice.)

Some Random Thoughts:

• When 'you' say that Drupal isn’t fully featured out of the box, remember Joomla/Mambo doesn’t even come with a commenting system. That's seperate.
• Functionality of CMS is in the hands of a select group. They’re the gatekeepers, deciding what goes in and what stays out. If they’re not going in the direction you want them to go, help them out by contributing code. Remember, it’s free. There's no Drupal Corp. that sends out paychecks. You don’t own them and they don’t owe you anything. They’re doing this because they want to, and as a contributor here says, he’s doing things for himself, and if it helps other people out, great. If nothing works, find something else. Seriously. Not every system works for everyone. Find one that meets your needs. Everyone will be happier.
• Drupal does take time to learn. Like anything. Give it time. And a test site helps, too.
• You don’t need a degree in Computer Science to use drupal. Until a couple years ago, I thought PHP was a degree they gave doctors after medical school. You can run a Drupal site for quite a while without modifying it much. After a while you may want to play with things, but you can learn all that coding stuff the best way: trial and error. (Of course, you do that on a test site…)
• That being said, a little php or css or mysql learning isn’t going to hurt you.
• Mambo/Joomla’s admin system may look nice, but it’s not functional. Adding menu items is a chore, as are a lot of things with them.

silverwing
www.davidinwords.com