Discovering Drupal…

As a web designer I have tended away from content management systems.  Templating is usually such a chore — just learning it for one CMS is a chore.  Since no one CMS has ever really captured my loyalty, I have looked upon learning the ins-and-outs of any CMS template system as quite onerous.   After all, if I’m not 100% happy with the CMS, why memorize what I can google?

Lately, however, I’ve spent enough time programming at work that the idea of writing my own content management system (which I’ve started, of course) has gotten less attractive.  My standards for usability and flexibility are too high.  It’s still a good programming project to undertake as a learning experience, of course, but I would never be fully satisfied with my own work.  I’m not even satisfied with many content management systems with years of work put in by dozens of developers!

If you asked me what the biggest 3 content management systems were I’d probably say: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla followed by PHPNuke, Expression Engine, and that-one-we-used-at-TCC.  I don’t have numbers on that, it’s based on the production web sites I’ve seen in and what comes up in Google.  Strangely, those first 3 CMS are ones I have never used on my own site!  It’s probably time to take a closer look.

I started by looking at WordPress.  I actually really like WordPress.  I like the backend, I like the features.  But the organization falls flat for me when using WordPress for a site.  I can make a page or a post.  I can categorize the post or tag the post.  It just isn’t robust enough for a really organized site structure, especially if the structure is complicated, though I’ve given some consideration to making more use of custom fields by writing a plugin that suits my preferred information architecture.

Next, I looked at Joomla.  I remember reading an article that said Joomla’s interface was poorly designed in comparison to WordPress and I agree.  I’ve used at least a dozen content management systems and I agree.  I found myself confused about a lot of things.  I played around with it and decided that, though I liked some things about it, I wanted to see some more options.

After that, I looked at TextPattern.  I didn’t give TextPattern as much time as others because my criteria was both a CMS I felt I could use as a web design and web developer and a CMS I felt very non-technical customers could use.  The TextPattern input, though interesting, I felt would have as big a learning curve for customers as a limited HTML tagset.

I’ve started falling in love with the very last one I tried: Drupal.  It’s early in the honeymoon, of course, but the ability to create your own content types and customize the inputs, create custom views and override default views, and create taxonomy sorted into various vocabularies that can either be optional,  required, or typed in…  Well, that is robust.  It can lend itself to a simple site structure or a complex one.  Best of all, the choices Drupal has made just make sense to me personally…it fits the way I think about sites.  It’s pretty darn close to the way I was planning to develop my own content management system!  I don’t remember any of that from the last time I tried Drupal out.

One of the things I don’t like, which is common to almost every CMS and is simply the way the web development world works, is the need for all those plugins.  I really dislike having to look for, install, and update plugins separately for certain functionality.  If it were something really offbeat…but c’est la vie.  You can’t even use a browser these days without wanting a host of plugins…unless you’re using Opera, which I often do.

I also haven’t undertaken that most dreaded of all tasks…templating.  But I hope I’ve found a CMS I can work with on my personal projects.  And it’s one of the most ubiquitous.  I’m pleased, even if I am behind the rest of the pack.