The Qwertyrash Blogs

Further to my previous post about my work for a commercial website, I was investigating content management systems. I have been happy with Wordpress; however have found it not ideal for the average person who just wants to update web pages occasionally.

In the looking process I stumbled across Drupal, which has been getting a lot of good press in the last 12 months. I looked at it myself two years ago but didn’t like what I saw. Possibly simply because of the default theme. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but that doesn’t stop us doing do, and I did back then.

Definitely now tho, it has a much nicer default theme and has a nicer admin interface than Wordpress. I found myself immediately comfortable with it.

I also discovered it is very good for developing tradition page based websites. In fact, in its default configuration, its blogging modules (blogging, categories and comments) are turned off.

This suited me and especially for this site I am redeveloping.

Community
Also important, Drupal has a very strong developer community behind it. This is one of WordPress’ greatest strengths, and Drupal’s is excellent too.

Very user friendly
I found Drupal to be very user friendly, more so than WordPress - although like any system, it does have some quirks. For instance, you do have to jump around the admin menus to configure a system; and new modules are off by default for anyone other than the admin user.

Setup is a doddle. The only manual part of the process is you have to create a database (via PHPmyAdmin or similar). (Previous versions you had to edit settings.php)

Easy code
I thought WordPress’ templates were relatively easy as far as coding goes. Drupal makes them look hard!

There’s also a Custom Content Kit (CCK) which lets you create custom fields in the database. The Drupal site says: The Content Construction Kit allows you create and customize fields using a web browser. The 4.7x version of CCK creates custom content types and allows you to add custom fields to them. In Drupal 5.x custom content types can be created in core, and CCK allows you to add custom fields to any content type.

This would have been wonderful for my CrossOSS site. Looks like it might be the first to get the Drupal treatment.
I like Drupal so much, that any future sites I do, it will be my first choice. And if time ever permits, I will port my existing sites to it.

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