By schadenfreude on

Hi there-

I'd love to get some opinions on this -- I've started playing around with Drupal this weekend with the idea of using it on some new sites I'm building but I think I may be over my head.

I'm much more of a web graphic designer than a programmer or webmaster - I tend to think in terms of pages rather than databases. I recently set up a tikiwiki/cms groupware site but it did not come naturally to me at all. I've barely gotten my first test install of Drupal completed on my own site, and now need to go learn how to set up a cron script.

My dilemma: I've got two sites for small businesses that I'm going to be working on over the next month. They're each both going to be about 20 pages or smaller, contain info about the companies' products, services, specials etc. Something like this site in terms of content: http://www.ultimatetoday.com. Each client wants to be able to update one or two pages on his site on a regular basis to list sales and specials. For now there's not going to be any e-commerce, forums, social networking aspect or anything like that. I don't have a lot of time to work on the projects and I'm trying not to charge them very much for the work.

Is it crazy of me to learn Drupal in order to make a site that has one small client-updated element? Would it be better to just build html pages and try to jam a blog into an i-frame somewhere, so that the clients can update the content when they want? Or is there some third alternative that's better?

Thanks very much, everyone!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

iimitk’s picture

iimitk commented

Yes, Drupal is an extremely powerful and fully-fledged CMS, and this definitely comes at a price. For the type of flat websites you intend to build, timeframe, & budget allowed, I would say Drupal's learning curve alone is an overkill.

Since you said you're more of a designer than a developer, I highly suggest that you take a look at Textpattern, a wonderful mini-CMS that is often called "The Designer CMS". It allows you literally full control over your site's layout through a powerful tagging system. It too has a little learning curve (as does everything), but it will perfectly suit the type of sites you've mentioned. There's also a big repository of community-developed plug-ins and the community itself is active, but development of the CMS itself isn't as active as it should be.

Edit: Well, WordPress is for sure a stronger candidate than Textpattern. I suppose you've already looked at it?
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nevets’s picture

nevets commented

Given I know Drupal I would use Drupal for the projects.

So if I was in your shoes I would consider learning Drupal as a possible investment and think how I might use it down the road. If one is comfortable with Drupal it can speed up the development of small web sites while giving the client more control over the content.

That said, given your month time line Drupal may work but it would depend on how fast you pick things up and how well you take to Drupal.

And as a side note, if you go with Drupal I would implement list sales and specials as content types the client can add/edit/remove and generate a page and/or block with the views modulesthat shows the list.

schadenfreude’s picture

schadenfreude commented

Thanks for the opinions - it kind of confirms what I had been thinking. I will take a look at Wordpress and Textpattern. I haven't worked with Wordpress before, but was thinking it might be a solution for the client-update areas. Do you think I could use it for the whole site?

Maybe I'll keep working on Drupal for my own site for the next time this sort of thing comes up...