Why drupal?

All right! let's start posting something in this blog. I am planning a series of posts about the making of this site. You may not need, nor want to know, but I had a hard and fun time learning to do it, and I think it is worth sharing it. This is the first post of the series, and it is about the platform I chose for my websites.

First, I bit of background. I am a self taught programmer. I learnt to create web sites just for fun a very long time ago, but then I wanted something more challenging and moved on to other things, like providing a site with styles and functionality. So, I spent a good amount of time learning and teaching how to create computer systems for the web. Once, while I was working on a mathematics website, I came with the idea of creating a system that could make it easy for many people to create and modify different kinds of content for the web. I invested some time on that, but I really didn't have the time and energy to work on it.

Nowadays, there are hundreds of such systems, they are known as Content Management Systems, and they are getting better and better. So, it was just natural to use a CMS for my sites. the problem was which one should I use?

To narrow down my choices I started by defining what kind of functions I wanted for my sites. I needed a blog, but almost every CMS can be used for blogs, so that was not an issue. I wanted, however, something that could be used to create other kind of contents, so, the CMS should be capable to go beyond a blog, and as I learnt later, it had to be very flexible, i.e. it had to allow me to easily add functionality or kinds of content. The number of options was still huge, so I added more requirements. It had to be and open source CMS (i.e. modifiable and free), able to run on Linux (my favorite Operative System), preferably written in PHP, able to run multiple sites, multilingual, and very flexible.

Then I tried a handful of CMSs: drupal, typo3, mambo, and joomla. I got very frustrated with the lack of organization and documentation for mambo and joomla (note: that may have changed over time), so I dropped them very soon. Then typo3 looked amazing, it is the most flexible CMS ever, the documentation was neat, and the contributed help was also great. However, after spending months reading and trying, I wasn't still able to create a site that was ready to roll. In the end I found it very hard to keep all the details about using typo3 in my mind, so I tried drupal.

The reason I left drupal till the end was that I knew it is very popular, and I wanted to first give other options a try. I was unsure about the flexibility of drupal, so I compared drupal to typo3, and it turned out drupal is almost as flexible as typo3. So, it was decided.

It turned out that setting up a very basic, but functional site with drupal for the first time doesn't take more than 30 minutes, and you don't need to read pages and pages of documentation to do so.

I first created some sites with drupal 5, and I liked it. Then, when I was about to start my blog, drupal 6 sought light, and I soon jumped to that train (not without some problems).

Drupal's interface is kind of ugly, I like wordpress' interface better, but that doesn't matter since I was looking for the best tool for my purposes, and I know that, since drupal is open source, its interface will be improved and become prettier sooner or latter.

Drupal itself provides a basic, but powerful, set of features. However, it is very easy to add more features by installing contributed modules, which are readily available for an impressive number of functions. Changing the look of a site is also very easy by installing contributed themes.

Moreover, if you can't find what you need, it is possible to write a module or a theme, provided you know how. It is even possible to get funding to do so.

Drupal requires a web server and a database, but don't be scared. Drupal is in fact very easy to set up. Besides, most people would hire hosting services, and most paid hosting providers already offer hosting plans that include a hassle free installation of drupal.

Using drupal is also very easy, and you don't need to learn lots of configuration options to start creating a site. In fact you can learn incrementally as you go.

How come then that it took me three months to set up my sites? well, that is another story and I'll leave it for the next posts of this series.