Well I have spent some time with Joomla and quite honestly found the templates and configuration of blocks etc a nightmare.
Now, I am not dummy, at least I don't think I am but I am not a web developer - I am a systems architect and a B.Sc computer science - so WHY am I having so much trouble getting anything to work well in Drupal.
I was impressed by the ease of defining pages etc aso I decided to port some of my Joomla stuff across and it is proving to be extremely difficult, in particular modules / e-commerce.
It is a pain in the neck to install because I use PHP 5.3 in a Wamp environment for development, this in itself was a nightmare and I have been forced to downgrade my PHP to 5.3, which leads me to another issue - the methods available to upgrade / update / provide compatibility with existing pages is not clear if it is available at all.
I can follow instructions and even doing that I cannot get the Drupal e-commerce to install 'as per the instructions' various boxes that need to be checked become greyed out and unselectable, others result in 'undefined index : condition' or 'undefined condition : Action' errors.
Am I being slow, missing the point or am I just too old and set in my ways to adopt this new methodology, I don';t want to read a gazillion books to get going here, I want to learn as I go and this 'Content Management' architecture is proving more than a little hard to get to grips with.
Can somebody here point me to a source for the basics - treat me like a 10 year old here because I am clearly thick. (and also damn frustrated with the lack of progress)
Comments
Enlighten us a bit more ...
Hi Garfield, I think perhaps you can tell us more on what it is about a CMS and the web objectives that you wish to achieve from it. From there I believe many can help out.
I am a Media buff for e.g. but as far as mind-mapping in understanding Drupal, three core basic areas stand out for me: CCK-, Views-, and Panel-related modules. In them alone there are many things to learn and explore to nicely up a site.
I used a lot of Joomla b4, and as far as online store is concerned VirtueMart was nightmarish buggy for me. I am now using Ubercart module and have dropped the E-Commerce module. Ubercart is very active in development and the commitment from people there is just fantastic.
That said IMHO Drupal is really a "paradise" for hard-core developers.
My intention is to break away
My intention is to break away from the 'rigid' page construction imposed by the likes of Macromedia, we are trying to create an E-Commerce site that is both basic and flexible, what we supply is a large number of unique items so it is hard to have a single page for each, better a simple web description and where available an image - CMS seems perfect for this, allowing flexibility to use differeing templates for different product groups but retaining the same basic 'blocks'.
I figured we could use a very small number of pages to provide coverage for a large number of items. I clearly need to store buyers details, I do however have my own stock management based in SQL and am reluctant to reproduce it in MySQL, plus all the e-commerce plugins I have tested so far just don't seem to fit with the way we manage stock and require another 'X-Ref' database to keep track of things. I basically trade at carnivals and music festivals and all my stock is coded and loaded into specific boxes - I always know what is in each box, the till that we use tells me what has gone based on the stock code, I need this to be easily transferrable into the e-commerce system to remove sold items without too much manual data entry - I bought the technology to reduce the work not increase it.
We are also trying to make sure that the site is produced to W3C standards i.e. no non complaint CSS / HTML / XHTML with minimal or no clientside javascript and definately no 'flash' etc.
Unfortunately I haven't written code in anger for 15 years so I am far from a hard core code junkie.
I basically wanted an easy life but the learning curve is killing me.