Blinking and Flashing

I'm trying out Drupal for the content management system at work. The current website is a complicated mass of Dreamweaver-managed files, with a drop-down menu system statically defined in every file, rather than through any kind of include mechanism.

A database-driven web-based means to manage the content is desparately needed. I considered -- and even started working on -- using WordPress for the new site. The needs are relatively modest, and I'm certainly familiar enough with WordPress that it's a reasonable starting point. But since we're re-engineering the whole site, I think that perhaps this is a good opportunity to evaluate other tools for the job, lest I remain a one-trick pony in the content management world.

Alas, Drupal is more complex than I expected, and it's taking me rather longer than I hoped to get the functionality I desire in place on a test implementation.

[http://www.skippy.net/blog/wp-content/blinkingandflashing.mp3]

I know it's not just that Drupal is (or isn't) complex: it's my own preconceived notions about how things work making my learning curve greater. It's also the frustration that comes from knowing exactly how I'd do something with WordPress, but not knowing where to start to do the same thing in Drupal.

Overall I'm impressed with Drupal, despite the complexity. The taxonomy system is intuitive enough for organizing one's content. I dislike the default "node/" style URLs, though; and I dislike how cumbersome it is to construct meaningful URL aliases. Content editing is easy enough; and there are a few modules for image manipulation that really blow WordPress out of the water.

User management is vastly superior to what WordPress offers. Templating is both easy and hard, depending on what you want to do. Adding stuff to sidebars is accomplished via a menu-driven tool for just that purpose.

I'm going to keep plugging away for a while yet. Thankfully we don't (yet) have a deadline to convert the site, so I've got time to learn as much as I can. Feel free to share links to any howtos or other documents you might have found helpful if you're a Drupal user!

10 Comments

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 02:27am Drew added:

I am also trying to evaluate/learn Drupal for an upcoming project. Being familiar with Wordpress I am running into similar issues.

It seems like a powerful CMS though, clean code, lightweight, and fast. Your swiss army knife CMS. It just has a bit steeper learning curve.

I will post back if I find anything worthwhile.

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 03:03am RoudyBob added:

I too have been hearing about/looking at Drupal. I was reccomended the following site which might also be of interest to you. There are some interesting articles and "how-tos" on Drupal - http://www.lullabot.com/.

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 12:21pm Justin Moore added:

I was in a similar situation a week or so ago when I started working on a new site for my church. The current one is a mess of static html files generated by *gasp* FrontPage. Needless to say, when I was "awarded" the webmaster position recently, I knew all that mess had to go.

My first instinct was to use WP as well, but like you, I thought, "maybe I should at least try to use something else." I spent about an hour playing with TextPattern before deleting it, nuking its DB, and installing WordPress. I've been really impressed with the quality of some of the plugins (and now widgets) that I've found that really round out WP as a CMS.

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 01:47pm skippy added:

Justin: care to share your list of plugins that make WP the CMS you prefer? Either comment here, or make a full post and send along a trackback.

I don't disagree, in general, that WordPress can serve as a content management system. But it has a lot of wrinkles that make me feeling like I'm working around the shortcomings of a decent product, as opposed to really maximizing the use of a great product.

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 03:07pm Joe added:

Yeah, that would be cool. WP as a CMS...

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 06:34pm knotty added:

Hi Skippy,
I too just downloaded Drupal and trying it out. Some things are driving me crazy like overcoming the taxonomy.

Found a module called "sitemenu" at Drupal that helps out a lot to see just what the taxonomy thing is doing.

Also the module: taxonomy_block is helpful in making menus and catagories.

That's about all I can contribute for now.

knotty

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 11:42pm pat added:

tips?

1. You don't need to use taxonomy.
2. The pathauto module.
3. I use the file upload functionality and basic img tags per node to design simple pages.
4. Frontpage module if you want turn off all the front page cruft.
5. Don't customize the base modules if you want to have any hope of upgrading. Don't even thing about it.

Really, druapal is easier than you think. You only need a couple of basic functions to create a new module. Off the top of my head, modulename_menu,modulename_help. The former is for callbacks and the latter gets it to show up under the admin/modules. You can put them under sub-dirs in the module dir.

On Jul 4th, 2006 at 11:44pm pat added:

Darn dell laptop keyboard! thing=think If I even barely touch a key it decides that is what I wanted to press.

On Jul 11th, 2006 at 08:44pm Ian added:

Scott;

IBM has a nice guide about drupal and using it to maintain a website. Drupal does have a learning curve, however, it's really easy to maintain once you've got it figured out. I maintain a drupal site as well, so, if you need pointers or tips, just ask!

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/index.html?ca=drs-

On Jul 11th, 2006 at 09:01pm skippy added:

Thanks everyone for the comments! I've been making moderate progress with my test installation, and I must say that I'm impressed, overall, with Drupal. I'll keep plugging away, and report back as interesting things develop.