drupal update

a little progress with drupal. I can't say that I've actually been working on this for 2 weeks. More like 2 days max total.

Anyhow, I loaded the drupal zen template which is designed to be css templating. Whew! I might actually be able to have a site that is not a cookie cutter. Funny, I've stumbled across a few drupal sites that are so obviously running it (garland template anyone?)

Secondly, I had a heck of time getting the tinymce (wsywyg editor) for posting, etc. loaded.
D'oh! Should have read the install.txt instead of the forums. (hint it is a 2 pt installation, installing the module for drupal and THEN installing the engine in a sub-sub folder of tinymce).

It's usually the other way around. The forums are the tricks, tips, and explanations/clarifications for the instructions. Oh, well, live and learn. ;-)

My goal is to use drupal for a project management tracker (not as nice as dotproject), a portfolio (definitely not as nice as some of the e portfolio sites... digitalworks looks particularly interesting), a miniblog (wordpress wins hands down, or possibly the pay to play, expression engine, that I love dearly and am going to hate leaving, but I hate the tight licensing agreements even more). So, why would I choose drupal?

Well, it came down to 3 general opensource CMS: Drupal, Joomla, Mambo (Joomla seems to be next-gen Mambo), and Typo3. Typo3, I wasn't sure about at all. Serendipity looks really cool too, although I think maybe more like expression engine which is kind of like amped up blogging software anyway. Joomla/Mambo seems to be a little more bloated than Drupal. Of course, by the time I finish adding modules and templating to Drupal, it will be a much bigger beast. ;-)

If only there were bridges with coppermine (image gallery) and wordpress (sigh!). I understand the concerns of the Drupal community and the whole notion about bridging software... but for some of us who are getting used to pulling in content from wherever, it's hard not to be spoiled by the ease of drop and drag widgets. I think coppermine would be exceedingly hard to work with in Drupal as some of it is just straight up html (tables at that)!

... to make a long story short, Drupal seems to have a shorter learning curve (okay, at least version 5.x and upward!), good reviews, and a possibility of escaping from the cookiecutter... especially if you cheat and use the dev CSS template. ;-)